Appropriate Appropriation

7/27/2019 Appropriate Appropriation

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Appropriate Appropriation: a comparison of the reuse of images across the terms

postmodern, post-communist, and postproduction

Annie DellAria

The Graduate Center, CUNY

The trajectory of appropriative gestures in the history of artistic practice has been scrutinized by

artists, critics, and scholars for centuries. The term appropriation stems from a notion of

ownership and often connotes an unethical co-optation that mirrors dominant power

relationships. Appropriation has a long history in art, especially in relation to power and spheres

of influence. Our knowledge of Classical Greek sculpture, for example, exists largely through

Roman appropriations copies made in order to document, preserve, and evoke a culture they

hoped to emulate, or at least appear to emulate. In the United States, many white Americans

would play Indian to participate in an exotic othered fantasy and create mythic national

identities (Deloria 1999). In the Middle Ages, a perfectly copied icon was considered as sacred

as the original. Though appropriation existed in art for centuries and continues to exist to this

day, in the last thirty years the term has been weighed down by connotation with New York-

based appropriation art that dominated art and criticism for much of the 1980s. In recent years,

scholarly and critical writings attempt to both define recent work in opposition to appropriation

art and historicize the turn to criticality in the 80s and the manifestations of appropriation in

different contexts.1

What came to be called appropriation art centred on the primarily photographic appropriations

of artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and others. These artists,

fathered by Duchamps readymade and taking a cue from the Situationist dtournement, staged

pictures from imagery appropriated from the simulacra of late capitalist visual culture.


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Curator/critic Douglas Crimp first theorized these emergent practices in 1977 with the

deliberately ambiguously titled exhibition Picturesat Artists Space in New York. Though this

show featured only five artists Tony Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo,

and Philip Smith the aftershock was felt for years in the Western art world. Some of the artists

from the original show and many others who were later written into the group (such as Cindy

Sherman and Barbara Kruger) were officially canonized in summer 2009 with the Metropolitan

Museum of Arts large-scale show, The Pictures Generation,1974-1984 (Eklund 2009). Taking

this moment (late 70s to mid 80s in New York) as a point of departure, this paper examines the

trajectory of critical writing around appropriation in art from Crimps show to the present

through an analysis of three moments that consider how the terms postmodernism, post-

communism, and postproduction relate to the recycling of imagery in contemporary art at diverse

historical moments and geopolitical locations. These three terms, though referring to cultural,

ideological, or purely artistic phenomena (respectively), all share the notion of being post,

directing the meaning of their reuse of material away from prior associations. While the

distinctions have been written about and argued over at length, the similarities are perhaps what

are most insightful and conducive to a comprehensive understanding of how art and its criticism

relate in different moments. In this paper, I argue that the change in terms over appropriation is

largely a critical one, and less a distinction inherent in much of the work something made

apparent through both a critical analysis of appropriation art and a comparative look at work

from these later moments.

In the essay written to accompany Pictures, Douglas Crimp wrote:

Those processes of quotation, excerptation, framing and staging that constitute thestrategies of the work I have been discussing necessitate uncovering strata of


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representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but ofstructures of signification: underneath each picture is always another picture (Crimp

1979, p.87).

The structures of signification refers to something quite ambiguous here, but later applications

of poststructuralist theory linked this directly to an artistic imperative for cultural critique.

Crimps essay discusses Michael Frieds critique of minimalism and substitutes Frieds

presentness (which was applied negatively towards an art that was verging dangerously close to

theatre) with what Crimp calls presence a term unpacked vis a vis Walter Benjamins aura

more completely in a laterOctoberessay, The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism from

1980, in reference to the Hitchcockian dimension of strangeness in works such as Richard

Princes rephotographed photographs (Crimp 1980).2

He writes, in our time, the aura has

become only a presence, which is to say, a ghost (Crimp 1980, p.100). When the text from the

original show in 1977 was reprinted in Octoberin 1979, Philip Smith was dropped from the

group in favor of Cindy Sherman, and nearly all the work reproduced or discussed in October

dates from 1978 or 79, suggesting an impulse to rewrite the original group of artists and place

appropriation art more directly in the realms of photography and critique.

In 2001, Artists Space re-hung the original show and, according David Rimanelli in his joint

review with Scott Rothkopf inArtforum, a group of recent MFA grads responded more

positively to Philip Smiths figurative handmade imagery than to any of the more well-known

artists in the show (Rimanelli & Rothkopf 2001).3

What struck Rothkopf and his generation as

odd was not only the absence of Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and other big names, but also

the lack of pieces emblematic of the enticingly slick and brainy strain of 80s art that the

exhibition mythically founded (Rimanelli & Rothkopf 2001). Rather than substantiate the myth,


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the rehanging felt more like a glimpse behind the wizards curtain (Rimanelli & Rothkopf 2001)

the exact opposite effect of the canon-creating show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York

seven years later.

In 1982, Hal Foster began to write in favor of a critical appropriation art that treats the public

space, social representation or artistic language in which he or she intervenes as both a target and

a weapon (Foster 1982). In 1984, Foster draws a line in the sand between the two

postmodernisms neoconservative postmodern pastiche as represented by the architects Charles

Moore and Chris Stern and the painter Julian Schnabels neoexpressionist canvases; and a

poststructuralist decentreing of power structures exemplified by the architect Peter Eisenman, the

wholesale photographic appropriations of Sherrie Levine, and a few other usual suspects (Foster

1984, p.146). This opposition, though assigning a criticality to appropriation art generally absent

from Crimps writing from this time, does mirror Crimps 1982 essay Appropriating

Appropriation that favorably compares the full appropriations by Frank Gehry and Sherrie

Levine to those more historicist gestures of Michael Graves and Robert Mapplethorpe (Crimp

2009, p.191). Once more, the emphasis is on wholesale appropriation versus the historicist

quotation:

Levine lays no claim to conventional notions of artistic creativityHerappropriations have only functional value for the particular historical discourses into

which they are inserted. In the case of the [series of re-photographed] Weston nudes,that discourse is the very one in which Mapplethorpes photographs naively

participate (Crimp 2009, p.191).

In many ways, Levine can be read as the archetypal figure of this style of appropriation art or

rather of the critical discourse surrounding appropriation at this moment. Towards the end of the


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paper I will revisit Pictures and see how contemporary practice is more in dialogue with the

original work Pictures than critics tend to believe.

The Anti-Aesthetic, a collection of essays Foster edited in 1983 that has now become required

reading for any student of postmodern art and culture, continues this critical turn and entrenches

the intellectual stance that later writers on contemporary art would come to counter. Images from

Levines many serial sets of re-photographed work, such asPhotograph After Edward Weston

(1980), play a major role for Crimp and Foster, as well as for another scholar, Craig Owens, who

drew a theoretical link between feminism and postmodernism that solidified politics and directed

membership of the Pictures generation (the loose group of American artists that would later

form the 2009 Met exhibition) to include more women (Owens 2002). Levines rephotographed

photographs not only question notions of authorship and originality in the name of Roland

Barthess Death of the Author, but also call to mind the circulation of photographic images and

the canon of photographic history. In a statement from 1982 Levine writes, a picture is but a

space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clasha picture is a tissue

of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture (Levine 2009). The blending and

clashing that occurs in every image is less apparent in her wholesale appropriations of Weston

and Evans, where the tension is more about authorship.

However, the force of certain collisions between images becomes a crucial focus of the slightly

later appropriative gestures occurring in artist collectives from the former-Yugoslavia. Looking

closely at the discussion around appropriation art and criticality in New York circles in the early

80s is a key means to understand the reasons behind the deliberate omission of the term


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appropriation in art criticism to follow. Considering the rhetoric first, then returning to the

work, the remainder of this paper will look at how much (or how little) appropriation strategies

have changed in the 1990s in the west. First, however, we look to the east to understand how the

binaries set up by Foster disappear in a different political and ideological climate.

Appropriated imagery is the foundation of much of the work of the Slovenian collectives that

cropped up in the early 1980s following the death of Josip Broz Tito hero of World War II,

architect of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the dominating figure in the

countrys politics from its inception following the war until his death in May 1980. In

September 1980, a poster with a simple black cross and the word Laibach appeared in Trbovlje,

a moment art historian Alexei Monroe likens to the appearance of the monolith in 2001: A Space

Odyssey foreboding, inscrutable, and powerfully silent. By juxtaposing Kasmir Malevichs

Suprematist cross with the German name for the Slovenian capital during Nazi occupation,

Monroe argues that the poster for the band Laibach activate[s] a series of associations and

discourses that are difficult to contain once set in motion (Monroe 2005, p.5). The relationship

between the artists use of images and the larger structures that produced those images is

deliberately ambiguous rather than clash and create a dialectical meaning, the images unleash a

new host of possible meanings. IRWIN, an artist collective formed in 1983 that would, along

with Laibach and theatre groups Scipion Nasice, Red Pilot, and Noordung, form the larger

collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) in 1984, used similar strategies to Laibach. Though

they begin their work before the formal dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991, I believe we can

discuss much of their 1980s as post-communist. In defining the post-communist condition,

Boris Groys defines communism as the first post-national utopian model to compete on the


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world stage. When communism fell the historical subject of nation reappeared effectively

returning back from the future to create a historical moment quite distinct from our normal

conception of how history operates (as histories of nations) (Groys 2004, p.168). Following the

death of Tito, central authority in Yugoslavia waned and ethnic nationalism was on the rise

precisely why NSKs allusions to Nazism seem so sobering to us nearly thirty years later

following the ethnic wars and atrocities that broke out among other nations of the former-

Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

IRWINs reuse of materials has often been discussed in ways that deliberately sidestep the term

appropriation, which seems odd given their constant reuse of known imagery, such as the

juxtaposition of the dynamic rural proletarian of Millet and Socialist Realism with a blighted

industrial district inRed Districts Sower(1989) and the layering of a photography of a Nazi

rally, Kasmir Malevichs Suprematist cross, and DelacroixsLiberty Leading the People (1830)

inFreedom Leads the People (1987). Although in formal terms IRWINs icon-like paintings,

with their apparent process, hand-crafted frames, and emphasis on materiality, lack the cool,

slick aesthetic of Levines appropriations, IRWIN does call upon a number of photographic

sources. Similarly, Levine was also interested in the history of avant-garde painting and art in

her re-photographed or re-painted appropriations from art textbooks; one example,After Ilya

Chasnik(1984), references the same Suprematist cross that is so prevalent in IRWINs images

and installations and is also hand-made. Issues of authorship also arise with the collectives of

NSK who disclose, but do not celebrate the identities of individual artists. As J.C. Finley and

Barret Watten put it, the work of IRWIN borrows, it does not appropriate. Images of the past are

reused, not to deconstruct them but to reinvest them with their own meaning (Finley & Watten


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1991). This passage seems to neither look for underlying structures nor search for origins, in

Crimps terms. What it seemingly does is deliberately eschew the term appropriation, perhaps

because by 1991 (the time of their text), this term had become enmeshed in Fosters binary.

Slovenian philosopher Slavojiek, who was very involved in dissident movements of the

1980s,discusses Laibach with a strategy he calls overidentification, suggesting that the ironic

distance Leftist critics uneasily wanted Laibach and NSK to have is actually the prevailing

discourse it is precisely in Laibach and NSKs lack of transparency and unwillingness to

expressly identify as anti- or pro-Fascist where

iek finds their subversive potential (

iek

2002, p.287). The stylistic mixing and political ambiguity critiqued as neoconservative

postmodern pastiche in New York is here employed to completely different ends responding to a

distinct geopolitical phenomenon and a different relationship between mass produced imagery

and ideology under communism. The cool detachment of intellectual distance so cherished in

New York is here seen as a detractor from subversive potential. IRWINs appropriations fall

perpendicularly on the sifter between neoconservative and poststructuralist that was used to

separate good from bad art in New York. In an interview from 2000 with Eda Cufer, IRWIN

member Miran Mohar stated, It is important to stress that our position from the beginning has

not been to operate against existing institutions, or outside these institutions, but to create a

parallel institution (Cufer n.d.). Neither outside, nor inside but parallel; another visualization

of the perpendicular relationship the strategies of IRWIN had to the binaries set up in the West.4

Art theorist Boris Groys, in an essay from the same collection of essays on Eastern European art

since the 1950s (Primary Documents), suggests that IRWIN undermines the Western critical


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imperative much the same way as iek suggests. It is in the juxtaposition of European

modernism and totalitarian imagery, Groys argues, that IRWIN deconstruct[s] the usual

opposition between avant-garde criticism and totalitarian traditionalism in reference to the

specific cultural experience of countries (Groys 2002, p.291). The choice of the terms

criticism and traditionalism in this passage bears particular relevance to the binary set up by

Foster and Crimp with regard to postmodernism though the neoconservative pastiche was

clearly not involved in totalitarian imagery. A distinction that is read as a very real and vital

point of identification for artists working at the moment in the West was simultaneously being

deconstructed in the East. To understand the reasons for this shift, perhaps one must only keep

in mind the particular context of Yugoslavia in the 1980s. With the pending demise of both state

ideology and a confederation of nations within a tenuous ideologically-bound border, criticality

is much less of an issue than to artists working in Reagan-era New York City, where corporate

capitalism is not just on the rise but a seemingly indestructible, invisible affair.

The impulse for criticality felt in New York in the mid-1980s was soon to fall out of fashion in

the West as well. Following the complete fall of European communism, which in the early

1990s was figured to be the death of ideology and history itself (Fukuyama 1989), and the

meteoric rise of the internet, much of the writing around the use and reuse of images began to

move away from the overt politics read into appropriation art. Both of these crucial events

reshaped both the language and tenor of writings on appropriation in the 1990s, as did the

popularity of theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.5

Rather than criticality, critics favored

openendedness, transversality, and polyvalence, but the differences in the works themselves are,

I think, a bit more ambiguous than many of the critics would suggest. While there is no germinal


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show, such as Pictures, and no monolithic entrance into the public space as with Laibach, a text

that theorizes the changing nature of appropriation is Nicolas BourriaudsPostproduction

(2002). With its title taken from the film editing process, much of the work Bourriaud discusses

is explicitly durational (video art, installations, architectural interventions)6

suggesting a shift

in medium similar to the penchant for photographic appropriation in the reworking of the

Pictures generation (however, the original Pictures show contained many durational pieces, two

of which I will discuss shortly).

To Bourriaud, postproduction likens contemporary artists to DJs sampling, remixing, and

dubbing; and he is clearly not as concerned with the seemingly antiquated ideas of authorship,

ownership, and power relations as the Pictures Generation was. He writes:

While the chaotic proliferation of production led Conceptual artists to thedematerialization of the work of art, it leads postproduction artists toward strategies

of mixing and combing products. Overproduction is no longer seen as aproblem, butas a cultural ecosystem (Bourriaud 2005, p.45).

He locates artistic production not in appropriative selection or theft, but rather in active,

communal, and performative play. The bazaar, he argues, has replaced the luxury shop

nomadic gatherings of mobile artists and patrons have reinvented the art market (Bourriaud

2005, p.28).7

He also states that artists are going beyond what we call the art of appropriation,

which necessarily infers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of constant

activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing (Bourriaud 2005, p.3).

Scottish artist Douglas Gordon is a perfect example of a contemporary artist who adopts the

wholesale appropriative gesture of Levine, but remixes and reprograms it to make a film,

Marshall McLuhans quintessential hot medium, cold as ice and render the narrative


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incompatible with human perception (McLuhan 1964). Like Levine and IRWIN, Gordon also

takes issue with the notion of authorship. Discussing 24 Hour Psycho (1993), he notes:

Im still pretty skeptical about the concept of auteur, and Im happy to remain in the

background of a piece like 24 Hour Psycho where Hitchcock is the dominantfigurewe are creating time readymades, no longer out of daily objects but out ofobjects that are a part of our culture. Take the music industry in general and DJs in

particular. They sample words and riffs and make that something personal by the waythey use them (Assche 2000).

This quote from Gordon is cited (partially) in postproduction, and the analogy to DJs and

sampling predates Bourriauds text. The personal nature of the manipulation of the

appropriated piece is, Katrina M. Brown argues, a key component of Gordons work. She sees a

piece like 24 Hour Psycho as relating to the personal, private and more mutable experience of

watching films at home on a VCR, and she cites Gordon reminiscing how many classic

Hollywood films he saw while lying in bed (Brown 2009). The personal nature of Gordons

hyper slow-down of a classic Hitchcock film can only be convincing to a point. Psycho is

clearly one of the most recognized films in the world, and the manner of projection in a silent

space on a bare movie screen that sits in the middle of the room to allow visitors to walk around

it, seeing what you normally cannot about the film medium suggests that the appropriated film

as a cultural text, the temporality of the medium, and the mode of display play a large role in

both the artists interest and the viewers experience.

In 1993, 24 Hour Psycho premiered at both Tramway in Glasgow and Kunst-Werke in (formerly

East) Berlin. KWs director in 93, Klaus Peter Biesenbach, who wrote for the catalog to

Gordons 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, discussed Gordons choice of

Psycho as a classic piece of film history and a household nameeven people in the former and

isolated East Germany would both know the film in detail and have memories of the first time


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they saw it (Brown 2009, p.14). Biesenbach also points out how much ofPsychos plot mirrors

interests of Gordons dual personalities, themes of clean and dirty and of self-control. The

manipulation of the films durational quality, however, which Gordon does in a number of pieces

whose appropriated films are slowed-down, sped-up, or inverted, has a precedent back in the

Pictures show Metro Goldwyn Mayer(1975) by Jack Goldstein. The logo lion that usually

briefly introduces an MGM feature film (meant to signify the following prestige picture) is here

isolated and run on a two-minute loop, repeating the lions roar to the point where the familiar

becomes completely unfamiliar and engaging with a similar strategy to Gordons in both its

manipulation of the medium and quotation of well-known Hollywood material. Gordons piece,

however, would only appear to change if seen at different moments of the day, whereas

Goldsteins two-minute loop could easily be seen in one viewing.

Crimp also discusses another Goldstein piece in the OctoberPictures essay The Jump (1978),

a rotoscoped film of a high dive shot on Super-8 and run on a loop, creating an endless

repetition of repetitions (Crimp 1979, p.79). The Jump was not (like so many of the pieces

discussed in the Octoberversion of Pictures) in the 1977 show, but Crimps affinity for

durational work both in the later writing and in the original show, counter the assumption that the

generation of artists spawned by Pictures was interested merely in appropriations that were

primarily photographic. Similarly, another Pictures Generation work, Dara Birnbaums,

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978), is perhaps the most explicit example of

remixing durational media, though its feminist connotations perhaps date it more clearly as

postmodern than a work from the postproduction era. Nevertheless, the similarities in the work

call the huge distinctions in the criticism and writing into question.


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The formal similarities among these videos and films mirror the rhetorical similarities between

what Jan Verwoert, another contemporary writer who sees recycling of imagery in contemporary

art as acting against appropriation art, calls invocation and Crimps term presence. Jan

Verwoert, in his discussion of why stealing images today feels different in an essay for the Tate

Triennial Catalog in 2006, also mentions temporality (Verwoert 2006). He argues (counter to

Fukuyamas end of history) that in 1989, when the superpowers could no longer hold their

breath and the Wall was blown down, history sprang to life again (Verwoert 2006, p.16).8 By

situating artists using appropriative strategies in the 1990s as living in the midst of multiple

rotating historical axes (rather than the stilted dead language of Jamesons pastiche and the

stalemate in which the postmodernists functioned in the 80s), he uses the term invocation to

discuss how contemporary artists engaging with pre-existing material make active negotiations

between two places in space-time. The ghostlike encounter that occurs from such meetings

sounds (at least rhetorically) similar to the spectral presence of aura Crimp discussed.

Verwoerts essay is so open ended, however, that the reader is left with very little understanding

of what particular practices hes discussing and how they might appear formally whats clearly

stated is that they are notcritical in a 1980s postmodern sense.

Perhaps one artist who could speak for Verwoerts term is Jonathon Monk, a participant in the

2006 Tate Triennial. Monks work is full of quotations and appropriations, but in a way that

mixes homage with humor and the intellectual strategies of Conceptualism with the inclusion

of personal life and ephemera (Stout 2006, p.100). A work like Twelve Angry Women (2005)

appropriates found 1920s drawings of women wholesale, placing a coloured pin in the ear both


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adorning and defacing the original in a gesture recalling Robert Rauschenbergs famous erasure

of a drawing by Willem DeKooning. The invocation of both the original, unknown artist of the

drawings and the classic Hollywood film Twelve Angry Men (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1957) is,

Verwoert would argue, distinct from appropriation art in its whimsical nature, but the

similarities with original Pictures member Troy Brauntuchs re-hanging of Hitlers paintings

(with authorship being suspended until further inspection by the viewer) suggest that the

differences could be mostly rhetorical.

Certainly, Monks reuse of images has little in common with Sherrie Levines rephotographed

famous works, but the indebtedness to the Situationist dtournementsuggests, perhaps, that

contemporary appropriation and mixing has more of a lineage from postmodernism than its

commentators would have. Monks other works, such as the film Sol LeWitt: 100 Cubes

Cantz/Slow slow quick quick slow/front to back to front/on its side (2000), which turns LeWitts

book, 100 Cubes, into an animated film making the cool medium hot and durational is

another example of Monks quotation strategy. The binary set up by Hal Foster begins to melt

away in the writings eclectic mixing can mingle with wholesale appropriation, and in the end,

though authorship is brought into question, the artists re-emerge as the key figure in the work

(rather than the quoted material being foregrounded).

The penchant for open-endedness and free play praised by Bourriaud and Verwoert is seductive

in its all-inclusiveness and attempt to reckon with a more global worldbut much of the work

remains solidly of within a western system of appropriation, constantly referring back to itself

and reifying the dominance of western art forms on the market and in the public space.


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Contemporary remixing and invocation is set apart from the binary set up by Hal Foster at the

height of 80s appropriation art, but in manner that lacks the subversive ambiguity of NSK and

other work coming from different ideological hemispheres. Notions of sharing and the global

bizarre are at odds not only with the critical position of much of postmodern appropriation as

engaged with issues of ownership or the triumph of the market in the 80s, but also with the flirt

with ideological totalitarian imagery in the post-communist tradition as expressed in NSK. What

ties observers of NSK and of contemporary art together is the aversion they both feel towards the

term appropriation. As the term has come to be read as implying an overtly critical position

within the very system in which the work exists, many would find such a position that places the

work in a fight it could never win renders it inherently powerless. As a closer look at Pictures

shows, however, not all of the original canon of appropriation art could be easily sifted into the

bad pastiche of Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, or Michael Graves and the good criticality of

Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and others.

Fluid connections occur between the moments discussed in this paper in a manner that questions

the rhetorical changes. Boris Groys writes on the shifting nature of the discourse on art in the

essay Critical Reflections inArt Power:

The relationship between image and text has changed. Before it seemed important toprovide a good commentary for a work. Today it seems important to provide a good

illustration for a textThus a gradual erasure of the line between artists and art criticcompletes itself, while the traditional distinction between artist and curator, and critic

and curator, tends toward disappearance. Only the new, artificial dividing lines incultural politics are important, those that are drawn in each individual case, with

intention and strategy (Groys 2008, p.118).

Keeping this quote in mind, the anxieties over the term appropriation seem to exist more in the

criticism of art than in the art itself. The old push-pull between art movements and their


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predecessors discussed in the history of art in the West is now played out in the theoretical texts

rather than works of art. This is not to vilify critics, as artists today are often as well-versed

theoretically and as widely published as many critics (Groys 2008, p.118). However, to look at

writings and work separately and discreetly and to question the conclusions and distinctions

made by critics should, I believe, act as a key method for art historians of contemporary art.

1

One of the earliest attempts to look at what has changed since the 1980s is Welchman's book

from 2001. This volume is a collection of essays, very loosely tied together by the theme ofappropriation and lacking an overarching theory, which is the basis for most of the literature

discussed in this paper (Welchman 2001). For a very useful reader on the changing rhetoricaround appropriation, see David Evans' recent reader (Evans 2009).2

As evidenced by the title, by 1980 both a specific medium (photography) and philosophy(postmodernism) attached themselves to appropriation art and made selections according to thier

criteria.3

The joint review was meant to represent the opinion of two generations Rimanellis and

Rothkopfs but both were too young to have been aware of the original show when it firsthappened; the former was only in junior high at the shows original hanging and the latter was

born after Pictures.4

Another potentially rich nugget of information for this metaphor could be the possible

connection between IRWIN and Jeff Koons an artist who Foster and others despised for hisparticipation in the market and non-photographic appropriations (though his strategy was, in

some ways, nearly identical).5

I think there could be an interesting study relating the availability translations of continental

theory to writings around art. If we look at Foster, et al., much of their moment comes on theheels of the first translations of Foucault, Barthes, Frankfurt School thinkers, and others. This is

mentioned in Wallis's introduction toArt after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Wallis1985, p.xiii).6

The exception is Maurizio Cattelans Untitled(1993) whose indexical Zorro-style Z slashesnecessarily imply the same temporal relationship between artist and material.7 Whats missing from this unabashed praise for the multinational bazaar of internationalexchange is the ability or inability of artists and viewers to afford or be able to travel and

participate at the international exchange. Discussed in (Wu 2009)8

To my mind the three bad wolves allusion (blowing down walls with breath) in this sentence

echoes the child-like exuberance for sharing in Bourriauds text.


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Evans, D. ed., 2009.Appropriation, Cambridge: MIT Press.

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