The act of 'appropriation' reveals the way in which artists effectively adopt a concept or an act from a previous artist or an object or concept from culture and features within their work to 'enrich or erode conventional definitions of what artwork can be'. Just like Richard Prince 'appropriated' (capitalised..) on previous artist's images such as Patrick Cariou, if Prince's work is a copy, which effectively becomes an 'original' because it is now owned and modified by Prince then what happens to the other original? Martin Creed's view on 'appropriation' is far more liberally interpreted, as he appropriates the 'air we breathe and the world around us with frantic enthusiasm' (reference).
In the article written by Jan Verwoert 'Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels so Different' she brings up Robert Longo, an artist who in the 1970s appropriated actors and put them in freeze frame photos where they expressing great potential of movement. Verwoert also cites Cindy Sherman who appropriated the visual language of Hollywood. Appropriation has two historical moments where its definition did not change but was slightly different, beyond the Cold War and World War 2 there was a break in historical continuity and therefore it was a natural progression to return back to the past. Currently "the reason why appropriation remains relevant as a critical (art) practice – is the undiminished if not increased power of capitalist commodity culture to determine the shape of our daily reality" (reference). It is through appropriation that we are able to cut a slice from the multiple layers that control it - essentially to detach it from any of its power relations associated with society - and to place it in a new setting which it acts or performs as something entirely different.
"How would you clarify the status of ownership of something that inhabits different times, that travels through time and repeats itself in unpredictable intervals, like for instance, a recurring style in fashion, a folkloristic symbol that is revived by a new political movement to articulate its revisionist version of a country’s history or a complex of second rate modernist architecture occupied by residents who know nothing of its original designs but still have to find a way of living with the ghosts that haunt the building" -
When I am running in my videos, am I appropriating from Martin Creed's work - or would there be certain qualities of his work which I would have to replicate, surely the replication of the concept of running alone could be appropriation. Furthermore, is it possible to appropriate something that is timeless?
'Things that live throughout time, in any unambiguous sense, pass into anyone's posession' - if I was to create a video of someone running, am I not therefore, owning them? Owning their act, their very movement?
 | |
| oliviaontherun |
 |
| Oliviaontherun |
I am going to cling onto what Jameson says about schizophrenia as it is undeniably relevant to the points I am questioning about time and the confusion of time. Appropriation is the constant jumping back and fourth, where the present holds up a mirror to the past, which then points to the future as the new original and so on.
"Schizophrenia implies a loss of the mental capacity to perceive time as ongoing in a consistent order, which results in the inability to organise experiences in coherent sequences that would allow them to make sense, which in turn generated a heightened sense of the visceral and material presence of the isolated fragments of perception. He writes that “as temporal continuities break down, the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and ‘material’: the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy.”
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Culture’, p. 120.
There is a potential to perceive like a schizophrenic, to be unable to make sense and order of sequences and events resulting in this desire to cling onto the present. Continuity is broken and all sense and order is completely detached. It is possible to remove movement from its context, to place in a new setting, and to forget the order that the context attaches to it, what if time becomes an inconsistent and unsure element to the setting, what if it is completely hijacked and forgotten.
Derrida urges us to 'learn to live with ghosts' to approach them in a way in which we can hear the voices from the past, Verwoert uses the word 'guidance' as appropriation today is the acknowledgement that a death has occurred, but the ghosts of modernity are here to stay.
