Appropriation and Important Postmodern Strategy

Appropriation and Important Postmodern schemeImportant shifts in visual strategies in the arts mark the historic cross-over from the Modern to the postmodernistist paradigm. while this holds equally true in music and literature, it is the evolution of such(prenominal) strategies in the visual arts that this essay concentrates on. While such demarcation can non be pinned down to a specific year or date, it is executable to convincingly chart this shift via an examination of the operateing strategies of three important painters Americans Andy Warhol and David Salle, and Australias Imants Tillers.Postmodern art, by definition, rejects unbending genre confines and, unlike modern art, celebrates the mixing of forms and ideas. As a result of this rejection, postmodernism advertises the use of irony, parody, satire, wag and collage.The use of appropriation in art is a useful strategy for com handsting on or criticising aspects of liveness by recontextualising an image or object of al studyy determined meaning. Giving new meaning to, or edifice upon the meaning of, an existing idea by redefining its context is an effective tool that alters or interferes with the viewing audience original association with an object or idea. This be immediately recognisable as a postmodern approach due to its embrace of contradiction, diversity and the unconventional. This is important as the message trans latterlys easily, giving meaning to a modern day audience.David Salles Tragedy, 1995, is a diptych. The pay off-hand panel is performed in grisaille, a technique predominantly apply to render figures from angiotensin-converting enzyme base colour or monotones, greatly accentuating the mood. In this panel are 2 figures, a smirking female, obliquely behind the primary(prenominal) male figure who sits with hands on knees with the face misrepresented into a grotesque parody of despair.The left panels apparent pastiche is backgrounded by what appears to be a domestic scen e derived from a 1950s advertisement, possibly a direct reference to Richard Hamiltons landmark art transaction besides what is it that obliges todays homes so different, so appealing? (1956), a bunk widely considered as a seminal herald to Pop art. There is in any case a possible death motif in reference to the iciness War and the anxiety of the Atomic age of the post-WW2 West. In the centre is a black and white inject of a neglect blast, surrounded by lemons, with a black glove at the top retributively corner. The explosion could also be representational of death, as well as the black glove being a traditional mourning trope, these funerary motifs all relating back to the tragic tone of the art effect, and the mans expression.Salles work is more about juxtaposition which he uses as a strategy to destabilise the ways in which we traditionally see, and at the equal time reconfigure traditional visual narrative. He leans heavily on a bare(a) strategy of montaging images of the banal and everyday. The effect is jarring and visually disturbing. In this, we can see his indebtedness to the conk out aspects of Pop like Warhol and James Rosenquist.Salle also created another diptych work entitled Comedy (1995) using the same layout, but mirrored with opposite facial expressions on the figures as the man with an exaggerated frown in Tragedy direct smiles in Comedy. The left panel of Comedy is also rendered in grisaille. In the right panel, an advertisement for a bedroom suite is set on its side and like the artists early working is collaged with additional imaginativeness a black and white photograph of a headless female mien chassis, enclosed by a garland of butterflies, and below a theatrically ruffled harlequin collar.The mated titles may refer directly to Salles set and costume designs for ballet and theatre, as well as his elbow grease into directing the 1995 feature film Search and Destroy. The tropes of the frilled glove and harlequin collar i n Salles work of the early nineties hints to his involvement with the performing arts. A cinematic feel can also be identified in Salles juxtapositions of scenes that conjure a cinematic impression in which components are arranged to explicate an alternative meaning that is not, indeed cannot, be seen in the singular images alone. The fact that the images of the man in the suck up are reversed when comparing Comedy and Tragedy also gives the viewer an ironic configuration of the Janus, the tragic and comic faces are referenced, via each other, into a singular idea. The God Janus was the protector of gates and doors, beginnings and endings and dates to Roman times. nevertheless beyond the traditional trope of the Janus, is the fact that he is two-faced.It may be of some interest to comment that, before making it big as an artist Salle worked for a short time in the late 1970s as a paste-up artist forStag magazine, a pornographic publication. It is interesting to note that super sexualised and fetish images making a regular appearance in his kit and caboodle of the 1980s. InTragedythe briny figure is haloed by a biomorphic shape, at once visceral and phallic. If this motif is indeed phallic, along with the bomb blast possibly symbolising a premature explosion, Tragedy may well portray a failure of male potency. Taking this reading,Comedy must surely read as the opposite the main male figure beams, proud and confident as opposite a bio-morphically enclosed female mannequin in a flowing gown stands without a head. The fact the female mannequin is headless is also interesting, being without identity, the female strictly objectified.The porn aesthetic is genuinely interesting though. While porn does not read compositionally the same as any other figurative traditions, porns narratives run to succinct, highly predictable paradigms. Pasting-up, now a dead skill as all such work is now done on a com consecrateer, was physically very much like a collage. Pasting- up is a compositional exercise where images and/or text are literally separate physical items pasted into position on a plug-in for photo reproduction prior to final printing. So we could argue that some of Salles visual sensibility the pass figures and images, the outlines of figures and objects cast over earlier images and grounds could have derived from his work for a porn publication.Salle was raised on the mythology of the victimize expressionists. Accordingly, the scale of his work is newfangled York School-size his 1995 diptych Tragedy is over 3.5 metres in length. Salle also defers to the Abstract Expressionist myth of all-over composition, the famous domain of Jackson Pollock. But rather than the frenetic, energetic marks of Pollocks famous Poured Period, Salle crams his canvasses in full of eclectic figures and objects, often dissimilar and jarring, often take careingly disconnected and layered. It is an ironic homage to the macho painters of the New York School.Sa lle is widely considered one of the early blatantly postmodern painters by virtue of his subversion of the recognisable, and by distorting the beaten(prenominal) via awkward juxtapositions and unlikely compositional decisions. He drew from such widely artistic traditions as Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Realism and Cubism as well as images from popular culture. Although much of his work seems highly symbolic, Salles movies seem not to contain a specific message, but rather leave space for the viewer to interact, to read into, the work. It is this interaction that brings the work to meaningful completion. This active engagement of the viewer is also a prime postmodern strategy.Imant Tillers use of quotation and appropriation has seen him classified as one of the early postmodern painters. His approach has a clearly figure of speechl element, despite appropriating imagery from both unknown and famous artists alike. Tillers 1985 work The Nine Shots is a an abstract fi gure who appears to be laying sprawled on his back, with nine target shapes all about him. Instantly, one can see the direct influence of Indigenous art influence on this piece. Tillers notably recontextualises the poster Indigenous motif for camp site or resting place to represent bullet holes.The main indigene image Tillers has appropriated in The Nine Shots was Michael Nelson Tjagamarras Five dreamings, 1982. This appropriation lead to some considerable controversy, with allegations that appropriating primaeval imagery without permission impinged upon the moral privileges of the artist. The offence being exacerbatedby the indissolubility of Aboriginal art from its environment. Tillers seemingly questioned identity effected by and arising from locality by displaying appropriated cultural imagery with other images from different contexts.Over the next decade Tillers relationship with aboriginal art developed, even to the point of gaining a personal friendship with Tjagamarra whose work he incorporated without permission, the two even collaborating together in Nature Speaks Y (Possum Dreaming) in 2001 using Aboriginal Walibri motifs. Walibri icons subsequently appearing as common elements in Tillers later work as a result.Tillers appropriation of aboriginal signs seems now to be more an appreciation of their artistic power. Although there has been no change in Tillers practice of appropriating Aboriginal art in his own work without permission, it could be deduced that the moral dilemma environ the re-using of sacred Aboriginal artworks has become less controversial, its treatment becoming more alike non-aboriginal art.While appropriating, building upon, borrowing from and being influenced by others art is now a mainstay of postmodern art, it is never liberation to be without hazard as art is not confined to particular types of objects. Aboriginal art it is a device of selfdom, a title deed to the land, a cypher of ancestral presence.It is the situatio n that Aboriginal righteousness reserves rights to produce these sacred works to a limited group of artists and the infraction of these rights in the wildcat borrowing of such art can be seen as a type of sacrilege that affects the stem of the artists society.While widely recognised as the chief proponent of the Pop idiom, specific early works by Andy Warhol can retrospectively demonstrate the decline of the Modernist period. Warhols rejection of the machismo of the New York School is a classic Oedipal strategy. The silk hat of the Abstract Expressionists had traded heavily on the supposed Jungian content of their work, whereby meaning was derived from the positive physical laying down of paint on canvas. Most notable of these, of course, was Jackson Pollock who was on the record in interview touting his Jungian pedigree. By implication also, this Jungian ideal cashed out on the inexplicit value of originality. To witness the extent to which adoration of the authentic mark of the artist extended, one only acquire examine the huge, stark calligraphic works of Franz Klein.But Warhol was notable in his total rejection of these ideas. His foppish, effeminate persona stood starkly at odds with the Abstract Expressionists who, we must remember, were still practising in the years of Warhols emergence in the early 1960s. In place of the Abstract Expressionists tortured surfaces were Warhols radically underworked monochrome renditions of newspaper advertisements and newspaper headlines as in$199 Television, 1961.Warhols Campbells soup can, along with images of CocaCola bottles and Marilyn Monroe became the Pop Art movements representing motifs. The soup can being a satirical comment on Americas consumerism. By using the familiar image of Marilyn Monroes face he has turned it purely into an icon of pop culture, and no longer a person with depth and character. Her depiction is now just a shallow symbol of fame and beauty.Warhols signature use of the serigraph co mpleted his rejection of the New York style of painting of the late 1940s and 1950s. The silkscreen stood as a reproducible artwork, and the mechanic nature of this production put the artists hand at one remove from the finished product, especially given Warhol employed assistants to make the actual work while he stood as supervisor, and oversaw production.In 1964 Warhol was one of ten artists commissioned to produce work for the World Trade Fair to be held in New York. Warhols contribution, Most treasured Men, 1964 featured silkscreen portraits taken from FBI mugshots. This mural-sized work was installed on the outside wall of the Circarama, a one hundred foot philippic cinema in which a 360-degree view of New York was projected. Within days of its installation, however, the Circaramas architect, Philip Johnson, had asked Warhol to remove Most Wanted Men, saying the New York State governor thought it would offend the many Italians among his constituents, given all the men depicte d were Italian.Given twenty-four hours to supercede or remove the work, Warhol had his assistants scale ladders and cover the portraits with industrial cash paint. The strategy is intriguing. Beginning with the idea of appropriating photographs, photo-silkscreening them to find the appropriate scale, and then, after the order that it be removed, Warhol chooses not to replace the work, but complete it with the metaphoric mirroring of the silver paint-out of the original image.In real terms then, the interference or censoring offered by the Trade Fair organisers and associated politicians, did not necessarily result in a failure of this work. In the same way that many postmodern artists position their viewers to interact with a work in order to complete it, or find meaning, so Warhol played with the critical interference he was offered in a way that served the work and, perhaps more importantly, appended Most Wanted Men with a complex narrative that sited the artist as theenfant ter rible or provocateur who, in completing the work with a crude, industrial silver skin, metaphorically throws an unacknowledged and (given the ambiguity of its title, homoerotic) Narcissistic impulse back in the faces of the authorities.So whether the artists intent is purely representing a personal side of themselves to an audience, or to provoke controversy and doubting from the public, the use of appropriation is a useful strategy of postmodernity as it requires the participation of audience thought to make a work complete.This would seem very unconventional to Modern art, but thats what makes appropriation or recontextualization such a powerful postmodern tool. Salles personal love of the theatrical, Tillers questioning of sacred aboriginal art or Warhols parodic use of popular and commercial products As can be seen from these well known artists and artworks of the postmodern era, building upon or giving new meaning to an image or object is a very good way of producing art with a message behind it.