Appropriation –
a very short introduction
A conversation between David Evans and Ann Lee
David Evans: Your book is in the Very Short Introduction series, launched by Oxford University Press in 1995, and sits comfortably between Apocryphal Gospels, The and Archaeology in an A to Z list of more than 200 titles. It reminds me of others in the series - Steve Edwards on photography, Julian Stallabrass on contemporary art, or Robert Young on postcolonialism, for example – where the author has produced a guide that is concise and accessible, but never simplistic. Could you say something about the difficulties of writing a very short introduction to a tricky topic like appropriation?
Ann Lee: There are difficulties in writing a very short introduction to just about anything, no? I’m awestruck every time I look at the other titles in the series. Free Will? Economics? The Meaning of Life? Now that’s a tricky topic!
Do you know the series’ slogan? Other than “Brilliantly Concise?” It’s “Where’s the gap in your knowledge?” You’re encouraged to take an online quiz to find out at
www.veryshortintroductions.co.uk . Get 2 out of 3 questions right and you’re assured that you don’t have to learn anything more about culture or politics or science or what have you. Yet as an author of a Very Short Introduction, one is contributing to a never-ending project—but is that unfinished task the original mission of Bouvard and Pécuchet or the final endeavor of Flaubert?
Which leads right back to your question about appropriation, handily enough. I felt that the book needed to be written because it’s such an enormous topic, although perhaps it’s more accurate to say appropriation is simultaneously vast and miniscule. The word belongs to so many histories that confusion appears inevitable. And we can’t have that, of course. So this anxiety tends to lead to oversimplification, even within more structured divisions. In art, for example, appropriation has become a blanket term. Take a look at artworks that have been assigned to this category, and it doesn’t take long to see the tremendous degree to which they vary. I don’t mean to imply that the term should be struck from our lexicon, only that we must refuse to mute dissonance for the sake of an artificial—if comforting—clarity.
One of the greatest difficulties I faced was how to give a sense of the enormity of the topic while maintaining the sort of specificity crucial for future studies of appropriation. The case study emerged as the most practical strategy for achieving something approximating this end. The unexpected case study seemed even more promising, though it is likely that some will be frustrated by the lack of attention to figures like Duchamp and Warhol.
Of course, the method produced as many predicaments as it resolved. During the writing process, I sometimes felt like my mind was in disagreement with itself, which you can detect in the book—by no means is it a seamless text. But I don’t think that has to be such a nightmare. It might even engender some productive possibilities.
I'm surprised that you describe the book as something that "sits comfortably," by the way. I'll have to think more about whether that means that the project is a failure or a success.
DE: You offer six chapters, each of around twenty pages. Chapter one offers some preliminaries, reminding the reader that a history of appropriation can be written in a number of ways. A short version could begin with the ‘Pictures generation’, starting out in New York in the late seventies; an intermediate version begins with Duchamp and the readymade in the early 20th Century; and your longer version foregrounds the quotational approach to painting pioneered by Manet in the 19th Century. And then chapter two deals with a very long version in which readers are reminded that taking without authority has always been an integral element of conquest and colonialism. Do you have any further thoughts on the problems of periodizing appropriation?
AL: The argument about periodizing appropriation breaks two ways. On the one hand, the critical term “appropriation” clearly has a history of its own, which can be traced in and through the arguments that emerged around the time of the “Pictures” exhibition (incidentally, the “Pictures Generation” was recently canonized in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). On the other hand, the strategy of appropriation in art clearly has roots that run longer and deeper than 1977. In my book, I offer a sketch of this “long history,” though it’s really only a thumbnail sketch. Since writing the book, it has become clear to me that appropriation has existed throughout the history of human art-making as a major, even a primary, tactic. On a very basic level, appropriation is an excellent means of producing novelty in art; it circumvents entirely the whole hocus-pocus of artistic genius, uniqueness, and authenticity. Rather than ask about the radical newness of appropriation in art, we should be asking why appropriation ever fell from favor as an artistic strategy. What was so attractive about the anti-appropriative concept of artistic novelty based not on plunder and utilization but instead expressivity and inspiration? Why did it dominate the art-making cultures of Western Europe from the high Renaissance forward, and why has its grip on artists faltered so markedly in recent decades?
DE: Chapter two critically engages with what you term a ‘panegyric to appropriation’: Postproduction (New York, 2002) by French critic-curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Indeed, hostility to Bourriaud seems to be a red thread running throughout the book. Why?
AL: Let me say first that I found Bourriaud’s book incredibly smart and timely. (It’s also dashingly cute—you have to admit the production size is precious.) Bourriaud details an impressive number of artists whose diverse work operates, in some way, on the postproductive credo of “using what we already have”—a green theme for which I’m all in favor, by the way. (Perhaps it’s not just the globalization of information that gave rise postproduction, but also a growing consciousness of recycling!) My kvetch with Bourriaud, which I suppose spilled out into much of my book, was that in this smart, descriptive, precious little book, there was no glimpse of a critical postproduction: ne’er a nod to the imbalance of power risked in acts of appropriation, ne’er a wary eye cast toward the commodification of supposed “world heritage.” In my second chapter I tried to offer reminders of times when “using what we already have” translated as stealing and outright violence for groups of people who had no power to keep the appropriator out; I also wanted to question Bourriaud’s breezy “we” and “our” and other collective assumptions that blur very real differentials of power. Perhaps my book reacted too harshly to Bourriaud, but in that way a reader, the semionaut surfing the publication world on appropriation, can mix my caveats with Bourriaud’s panegyric and piece together a more critical look at postproduction.
DE: Another red thread is – conversely - admiration for the writings of Soviet literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, especially his essay “Discourse in the Novel.” Could you clarify how Bakhtin is relevant to discussions of appropriation art?
AL: Who doesn’t love a chain-smoking Soviet scholar? But in all seriousness, Bakhtin’s heteroglossia helps liberate appropriation from its conventional one-way narrative: an artist, colonizer, (meta-) consumer borrows, remakes, recycles an object or a sign, creating out of it a work that is fully hers. “Discourse in the Novel” proposes that the appropriated, too, has agency; that it can stubbornly defy or quietly elude its colonizer’s intentions; and that, ultimately, not all codes and forms can be seamlessly seized and inhabited. Most importantly, perhaps, Bakhtin suggests that appropriation can never be neutral or ahistorical; indeed, in claiming the discourse or object of another, the artist surrenders any pretense of autonomy.
DE: What’s the train of thought in the third chapter that presents Manet as the first appropriation artist?
AL: First, let us accept that beginnings can serve any number of functions—they can frame or order a topic, they can reveal objections and equally conceal intentions—but often, they are conceits.
Admittedly, they are earnest conceits. When confronted with the task of generating an introduction to appropriation (nota bene: I do not make claims for a history of appropriation, which would be, I believe, an entirely different creature, and no doubt encyclopedic in shape) it became clear that a point of origin, a beginning, would need to be located in order to structure the narrative arc of the text.
Does that sound painfully arbitrary to you? Aren’t all beginnings mundane in shape and essential in function? It was clear that the phenomenon of appropriation operated to varying degrees throughout the modern period—it was a matter of deciding where to intervene. For this beginning would be called on to act as a pedigree for appropriation’s shape shifting shenanigans. So, as you can see, what was needed was a point of departure and an authenticating genealogy—enter Manet.
Why Manet? I haven’t forgotten the question, nor its relevance. Why not begin with eighteenth century models of emulation? The practice of the copy? Typological transmission throughout the early-modern period? Or, for that matter, why not begin with Cubism? With Collage? With Braque and faux bois? Why Manet? Let me answer in this way: because Manet pares down the issue of quotation, he focuses the act of appropriation, and frames it as a calculated artistic gesture. Manet understands what it is to make the act of borrowing styles, figures, compositional schema, and tropes an exposed move. He strips bare the architecture of copying and emulation in order to reveal the underlying art-historical telos as open for revision and critical refashioning. In this sense, Manet denaturalizes the tradition of the copy; he makes borrowing, quotation, repetition a critical strategy—that is, the tremors of appropriation.
In many ways this text accepts, I think, that appropriation exists as a preeminently postmodern strategy (per Douglas Crimp). Yet, the appropriative gesture’s penchant for self-reflexivity, its critical sense of play, emerge in the modern moment. Manet serves, here, as a point of departure precisely because he understands the original model, the beginning, we might say—as embodied by, for example Giorgione or Titian—as a conceit. But, admittedly, they are earnest conceits.
DE: Chapter four deals with the Situationists and their legacy. Could you clarify your basic distinction between Situationist détournement (a hard-working French word whose meanings include corruption, diversion, embezzlement and hijacking, depending on the context) and contemporary culture jamming as practiced by Adbusters or The Yes Men?
AL: While both the Situationist tactic of détournement and culture jamming use pre-existing sources to disrupt the existing order of the spectacle, the basic distinction between the two is the degree of trust in the criticality of this gesture and an awareness of the possible re-assimilation of these acts of appropriation into the spectacle. In the 1990s, groups such as Adbusters and The Yes Men appropriated the language of commodity culture and mainstream media outlets by way of performances and visual language that employed pun and parody – an efficacious and attention-grabbing form of interference which, while effectively exposing the frills of spectacle culture, remained vulnerable to re-appropriation by the very mechanisms of the spectacle that culture jamming sought to subvert. The Situationists, by contrast, remained always aware of the re-assimilating powers of the all-consuming spectacle. They distanced themselves from avant-garde movements that claimed to critically transcend originality and authorship and instead used references to ‘original’ sources only to show the inertia of images and objects wholesale. This led to Debord’s eventual rejection of art as a means to his revolutionary ends.
DE: Chapter five returns to New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the term appropriation began to pervade writing on contemporary art. In what way is this chapter a revisionist history?
AL: What does it mean to re-tell the “history” of appropriation art in the 1970s and 1980s? The art of that period already imagined itself in terms of a historical narrative, posed in terms of a historical break, a rupture. It took itself to instantiate the divide between something called “modernism” and “postmodernism.” Sherrie Levine’s work, for example, consisted in that period in a retrospective look at the work of modernist masters. This retrospective look was at the same time a launching into the future. It is an exact copying that performatively puts a history into play. It inserts a difference, defined on a temporal axis: this “postmodernism,” a photograph by Sherrie Levine, exactly resembles that modernism, a photograph by Walker Evans. But in this resembling, it testifies to the movement of history, it is that movement, it creates or instantiates it. To something, an image, that appears spatially identical it adds a temporal dimension.
This work of “historiography,” then, seems to be inherent to the work of “appropriation.” In this chapter, I do not so much seek to overturn the self-narration of the art and criticism of the period as to sound out its mode of operation. I do this in terms of the linguistic category of “irony,” which installs a temporal axis along which lies the distinction between an utterance, or an image, and its (ironic) reiteration. At the same time, I ask if there are certain things that our retrospective look now at a moment itself defined by an activity of retrospection (the re-iteration of pre-existing images) changes in the way that activity appears to us, the narrative of history it sets in motion. The history that appropriation art narrates is a history that comes into focus through photography — and the critical rubric of “representation” — which emphasizes structures of signification, not the materiality of objects. So in this chapter, I turn to Haim Steinbach, whose work failed to impress Douglas Crimp or Craig Owens, for instance. I ask why that work could not appear important in terms of the narrative they were busy crafting in conjunction with the artists they did write about. At the same time, I wanted to point out that appropriation took many forms, beyond what is normally included within the term “appropriation art.” It is a matter of asking how any given narration creates and delimits the terms which make its narrative plausible. We can only do this in hindsight. So yes, to that extent it is a revisionist history, but not one that contradicts the existing narratives, rather one that explores them from within — within the art they produced and explained — as well as from within their silences.
DE: In your concluding chapter you seek to identify new directions for appropriation art in the recent work of figures like Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, or Andrea Fraser. What is their significance?
AL: Very simply put, these artists all engage in appropriation under the banner of performance; and their performances take the art museum (or the “art institution”) as a necessary site of struggle. This seemed to me a vital strand of contemporary appropriation art, but since it’s not premised upon picture-making, its status as appropriation is easy to miss. Also, the practices of these artists set a crucial precedent for many of the most audacious performance-appropriators of the present-day: the Yes Men, for example. At the University of California, Berkeley, where I’m currently based, a group of students recently founded a performance group to protest – or, in their own official, appropriated discourse, to support – the recent round of budget cuts and fee hikes. Their official name is UCMeP – UC Movement for Efficient Privatization. They’re the direct inheritors of Fusco, Gomez-Peña, and Fraser.
DE: There are a lot of Ann Lees out there, including the 18th Century Shaker, the Europop star who had a big hit with ‘2 Times’ in 1998, and the Manga character whose copyright was bought by artists Philippe Pareno and Pierre Huyghe in 1999. Do people get confused about your identity?
AL: Questioning identity is so 20th century.
DE: Hocus-pocus. Practical jokes. Tom-foolery. Whatever you call it, the historic avant-gardes enjoyed a good hoax. Do you?
AL: Credo Quia Absurdum.