AHIS10003 Chap.12 Appropriation and Re-presentation
Appropriation and Re-presentation
The last artwork week treats appropriation as both a subject and a strategy: two artists take images that already exist, from art history and from the colonial archive, and re-present them so that the framework those images belong to becomes the thing you are looking at. The week is careful that the two use different modes.
One works in photography at 94 by 72 centimetres mounted on aluminium, restages a canonical modernist composition, and confronts modernist mythologies and gender norms through the framework of camp.
The other works in acrylic on linen at 182.5 by 182.5 centimetres and is unusual in this subject because his own published essay is a set reading: he names three binary pairs, describes his work as forming around their collapse, and calls his own output, as an ironic strategy, history paintings.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Appropriation as subject and as strategy, and why the two artists are not doing the same thing
- 02
Titles that announce the quotation they contain
- 03
Three binary pairs: self and other, civilised and savage, sophisticated and primitive
- 04
What the three pairs have in common, and how a hierarchy hides inside taste
- 05
An artist's statement as evidence about intention, not as a verdict on meaning
- 06
The stated method: draw on a paradigm, quote, produce a history painting, expose the system
- 07
Why the genre label is in ironic quotation marks
- 08
Turning the ethnographic gaze around as method rather than as imagery
- 09
The artist's own analogy to Western Desert practice, reported as his
- 10
Camp as a mode of address rather than as a subject
- 11
Photography and aluminium mounting as engagement with a colonial image history
- 12
A square canvas, and a format with no built-in hierarchy of direction
Making the appropriation argument precise
- 1Establish that the source is a paradigm rather than a single picture, so the quotation is recognisable as a convention rather than as a copy.
- 2Explain why the genre claim is ironic: history painting was the most prestigious category of the European academy.
- 1State the purpose the artist's own account gives, which is investigative rather than expressive.
- 1Anchor the conclusion in the object: a square canvas 182.5 centimetres each side, and a title bracketing a pair of opposites inside a phrase from interior decoration.
Key terms
- Appropriation
- Quoting existing images as a strategy for making the system those images belong to visible, distinguished in this week from homage and from copying.
- Re-presentation
- Presenting an existing image again in a new frame so that its original framework becomes the object of attention.
- Camp
- A mode of address using exaggeration, artifice and theatricality knowingly, so the viewer is aware of the performance as a performance.
- Iconographic paradigm
- A whole repertoire of images and conventions, as distinct from a single source picture, which is what this artist describes drawing on.
- Queer aesthetics
- The strand the week carries forward from the previous week's work into its reading of camp and appropriation.
Appropriation and Re-presentation FAQ
Is appropriation the same as copying?
No, and the distinction is the chapter. The artist's own published statement describes drawing on the iconographic paradigm of Australian and, by extension, European art and using quotation to produce what he calls, as an ironic strategy, history paintings. The source is a repertoire rather than a picture, and the purpose is to expose a system of representation rather than to reproduce an image.
Can I cite the artist's intentions here?
More confidently than anywhere else in the subject, because one of the set readings is his own published essay. But an artist's statement is evidence about intention, not a verdict on meaning. Use it to establish what the artist says he is doing, then check it against the object and say what you find.
Why does the week insist the two artists use different modes?
Because appropriation is a word that flattens everything it touches. One artist works in photography, restages a canonical modernist composition and uses camp; the other works in acrylic on linen and quotes a whole national repertoire. Those are different operations with different targets, and treating them as the same move loses the comparison.
How should I handle the artist's comparison to Western Desert practice?
Report it as his own analogy, in his terms and with a citation. He draws a parallel involving subtraction and quotation from a potentially infinite grid of sites of identification, and describes his use of dots as referring both to the dot matrix of photographic reproduction and to relationships between sites.
It is not a general claim about Western Desert painting that a first-year essay is in a position to make, and it is not yours to extend.
Exam move
The most valuable exercise here is to write about an appropriating work without using the words references or inspired by, both of which permit you to avoid naming anything. Force yourself to say what is quoted, from what repertoire, where it sits in the composition, and what the quotation exposes.
Then note the connection worth having for the first essay: this week focuses on one artist's re-appropriation of Margaret Preston, and a Preston is on the list of works you may choose from at the National Gallery of Victoria.
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