Creative Appropriation: The Smallest Move Is Often the Hardest
Even when the image may not be recognized as a symbol of defiance, its imagery becomes powerful enough to suggest it. The paintings are titled with snippets from the painting factories’ responses to my request. For me, these paintings became a quiet memorial, and an attempt to reseed this image of strength in the face of threats to humanity, tyranny, and the freedom of information. The paintings raise questions like: Who has authorship over the content of a painting if it is a reproduction? Michael Mandiberg. On Saturday, November 22, MoMA presents the one-day studio course Creative Appropriation with Artist Michael Mandiberg. I learned that under Chinese censorship, this image was virtually unknown, and inaccessible even through a deep Internet search. Our art products will give you total satisfaction. Duchamp Wanted. 1969. Sturtevant. Appropriation is a way to experiment with images and objects by shifting the context around them, and reframe their meaning in the process. An image has a certain meaning, given its place in popular culture, the news, etc., but when it is reworked or remixed in an artwork it takes on a new meaning, challenging the exact nature of how images are produced and disseminated in a commercial context. MoMA’s collection is rich with examples of appropriation—just look at Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel—as is the Sturtevant: Double Trouble exhibition. These paintings trace both the political and cultural repression surrounding this image, as well as the transformation of China into a global factory concerned only with the bottom line. Through these images’ availability on the Internet, I was asking questions about how we interact with and create new value systems for images in the digital realm. Composition without lights. Sixteen years after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, I commissioned artists from Dafen to create paintings of the iconic “Tank Man” image of a student boldly facing a line of armored tanks, an image that became an international symbol of the fight for individual liberty as well as peaceful protest against a repressive government. Some of these moves include framing, repetition, enlargement, translation across mediums, and accumulation. Below, the artist discusses his work and some of the issues around appropriation. We’ll focus on the exhibition Sturtevant: Double Trouble, explore key examples of appropriation and found art from MoMA’s collection, and look at examples of digital appropriation. Michael Mandiberg. You can add the person to painting when you get it. How does the meaning of an image change through the process of its replication? Levine’s 1979 works called into question how these photographs in themselves appropriated a social problem, assigning it an aesthetic value and, in turn, a marketability. Of the dozen requests I sent, most were returned with a price and the universal salutation, “It is a pleasure to do business with you.” A few painters suggested I just leave the man and the lamppost out, often for unclear reasons: political or aesthetic? 2005. 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. Artists working in the painting factories in Dafen primarily create paintings based on photographs or replicas of paintings on commission. Photograph collage, 11 7/16 × 9″ (29 × 22.8 cm). © Estate Sturtevant, Paris
In my 2001 work AfterSherrieLevine.com, I reproduced Sherrie Levine’s reproductions of Walker Evans’s famed photographs of an impoverished American family during the Great Depression. How can the act of recontextualization inform the social and political contexts for which images are deemed appropriate in the public sphere? Much of my work appropriates other images, text, and objects. Levine’s appropriation is also a commentary on male dominance over historical narratives and the art-historical canon. 2001
In 2005, I traveled to China for a research trip to the Dafen Painting Village in Shenzhen. Only one person refused to paint the image.
