In a blog on MoMA's website called "Creative Appropriation: The Smallest Move is Often the Hardest" by Michael Mandiberg, he explains some of the process that goes into appropriation and says that "The artist's challenge is to marry just the right image with the perfect move that recontextualizes the image and, in turn, changes its meaning." This is a great description of appropriation because, often, I find myself looking for just the right image to use in a piece, but after that I have to decide what object or change I can make that best conveys the message I want to be understood by the viewer. This process can be slightly difficult since there are so many details that can be in a specific work. Mandiberg included these pictures showed reinterpretations of "Tank Man", a painting after the Tiananmen Square massacre, that reveal how different people can interpret a work in different ways (It's almost a "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" type of thing)
Some didn't want to add the man, Mandiberg said, for "unclear reasons" and perhaps "political or aesthetic?" purposes. One of the artists refused to paint it at all. It's interesting to see how different people approach appropriation.
This most applies to your work and investigations. Thank you for documenting its source. What do you think about the work created by Mandiberg? the way he commissioned artists to make his point by presenting each of the completed pieces as a collective, made by other artists, the result of his idea? Clever, and I thought you’d like his methods because of his strategy. How might you think about approaching your work using a different strategy?
ReplyDeleteI think it was a good idea for him to ask other artists to interpret the piece. He did get some differences in the paintings, but they seemed to be pretty similar which is funny because they didn't interpret most of the main shapes differently, just the meaning and color scheme of the painting, with a few details. I think I would take a known work, ask artists to incorporate any idea of their own through appropriation, and then collect the work when they are done to see how many different ways the piece could be interpreted.
ReplyDelete