Contemporary culture built on appropriation – digital technology has made it easier to reuse and manipulate images – photoshop, TV channel-hopping.
AA – emerged in 1980s > ‘clear intimations of transgression and illegality’ (p.109). Objections to claims that appropriation art is an ‘artistic strategy’ – why should it have special status? > Crimp (who supported AA) ‘if all aspects of culture use this new operation, then the operation itself cannot indicate a specific reflection upon the culture’ (Crimp 1982, cited in Lutticken 2005:109)
Graw – AA theory treats the appropriation artist as a ‘fully conscious, detached and critical subject’ (p.110), therefore denying that influence of the appropriated material may affect outcome of the new work. Goes against post-structuralist views on originality and authorship.
Barthesian thefts
c.1980 – Richard Prince (rephotographed contemporary ads), Sherrie Levine (rephotographed well-known photographs) and Louise Lawler (rephotographed works of art). Considered by Crimp and [Hal] Foster to be ‘Barthesian mythologists who ‘steal’ and subvert media myths’ (p.111). Crimp on Levine: ‘Drawn to pictures whose status is that of a cultural myth …[she] steals them away from their usual place in our culture and subverts our mythologies’ (Crimp 1977/79, cited in Lutticken, 2005:111)
Barthes’ ‘Myths’ – discussed in his Mythologies (1957) > bourgeois ideologies of our time – ‘hijacking signs and giving them a saturated surplus meaning’ (p.111). ‘Myth was a second-degree semiotic system grafted onto a first-degree one’ (ibid.) Example of black soldier saluting before the French flag – literal meaning but also second ‘mythical’ meaning – signified greatness of France, its universal principals, different races pledged their allegiance.
Barthes > defined his mythology as a synthesis of semiology and ideology. Historical dimension present in latter. Positioned himself as a mythologist of modern media (p.112)
AA anticipated by Flaubert – ‘Bouvrard et Pecuchet’ > re-writing,copying, appropriating > second-degree writing – quoting and paraphrasing. Turned into a progressive strategy by Barthes > ‘hints at a true mythology in which logos and mythos critcize, transform and liberate each other’ (p.114)
Divine spirit, conquest, imperialism
Marcel Broodthaers – ‘The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present’ exhibition (1972) – ‘direct artistic response to the challenge posed by Mythologies’ (p.114). Eagle – real bird (not imaginary) yet with mythical connotations (Zeus’ pet) > shows how ‘an object can be appropriated by myth and still have same meaning on different levels’ e.g. power, authority, divine spirit, imperialism etc.
Broodthaers then presented photos and slideshows of eagles on various products. Oppitz (an anthropologist) claimed that Broodthaiers weakened the mythical power of eagle by multiplying eagles. [CS note – link here with Benjamin and the art of mechanical reproduction – weakening of the original]
Photographs and readymades
Barthes ‘advocated stealing myths rather than specific images or texts’ (p.116). Image or text (or fragment of one) in new context can make the myth it hosts explicit – more common in visual art than in literature. Camera ‘facilitates the two-dimensional appropriation of objects’ (p.116) > Duchamp’s readymades can be viewed as ‘a radical manifestation of a culture informed by photography’ (p.116)
Barthes – ‘recasts the distinction between first- and second-degree (mythical) semiological systems as the difference between denotation and connotation’ (p.116) > reading of pasta advert in ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (Barthes 1964, cited in Lutticken, 2005:117)) > cliché of ‘Italianness’
Readymades – ‘ordinary objects which serve as their own representation through alteration of context and negation of their original function: in the process they accrue strangely solipsistic surplus meanings’.
Duchamp’s appropriated industrial images – ‘the negated and represented element is already a representation, already a negation of presence’ (p.117).
Broodthaers – also used images as readymades > photography became more dominant in his work – moved further away from the appropriation of images as objects to the appropriation of images through photography/re-photography.
‘Art which aims to reflect on media myths by a conceptual use of photography risks becoming mythified itself’ (p.118) > embodies the myth of ‘critical’ art.
Decodings
Situationists International – ‘the re-representation of images in an artistic context would only mean their integration into an art world that is itself part of spectacle’ (p.119) so SI détournement (= subverting elements of popular culture) had to go further > demands for ‘the negation of art itself as one prerequisite for an end to the spectacle’ (p.119)
Debord’s spectacle = representation > the spectacle of commodities – ‘Duchamps’ appropriated images but [and] all his readymades would be representations, or at least elements within the spectacle as the hieroglyphic transcription of social relations’ (p.119) >> Marx – commodity fetishism.
De Brosses – posited that ‘fetishism was the most original and primitive form of myth’ (p.120) > commodity fetishm is therefore defined by Marx as ‘a creature of myth’. Myth and capitalism > Debord and Raoul Vaneigem >> the spectacle is a representation of myth.
Debordian view – ‘The destruction of spectacular myth and its fetishist illusions cannot be achieved by a mere artistic appropriation of commodity-images’ (p.121) > ’Situationist détournement is the proper way of appropriating spectacular myth’ (p.121)
Sameness and repetition
Debord and Deleuze – concentrated on the temporal dimension of myth, drawing from work of modern mythologists such as Eliade. Mythic time – ‘cyclic repetition of archetypal events in a remote, aboriginal past’ (p.121) > Debord – pseudo-cyclic time of the spectacle.
Deleuze ‘identifies representation with the copying of models, and hence with mythical repetition; in this respect mass culture as a culture of cliches remains in thrall to myth. Art can appropriate these representations and turn them into something else’ (p.122) > Pop art starts in the artificial and then can turn into the simulacrum.
Warhol – emphasised the second-degree nature of his images > often repeated into grids ‘to empty out the image’. Strong fetishist and believer in mythical commodity – ‘his repetitions reinforce the images of the spectacle, and bring them into question precisely by doing so’ (p.122)
Inside myth
Warhol – started to be aware of copyright problems so started to take his own photographs – 1981 Myths portfolio.
Louise Lawler – makes numerous photographs of works by Warhol > appropriation of appropriation
Pop – omitted from discussion of AA – why? Is its ‘embrace of the commodification of art [was] too uncomfortably close to home?’ (p.124)
Defenders of ‘critical’ art – both Pop and Situationism undermined art – Pop ‘for’ the spectacle, Situationism against it. Pop’ collapsed the difference between artistic and other commodities’, Situationism ‘demanded the abolition of both artistic and other commodities’ (p.124) >> ‘Both can serve as a corrective for the tendency to idealise art as inherently critical’ (p.124)
Crimp – ‘doubted that critical reflection on culture could use a procedure that is an important part of the same culture’ i.e. appropriation (p.124) Appropriations can end up reinforcing myths. Second-degree mythology can also become its own myth – the myth of appropriation.
Criticality – ‘Criticality’ is only to a limited extent a result of the artist’s subjective intentions. Nor is it a stable attribute of any image or text. Rather, it is something that results from the use of a text or image by an artist or critic, or other viewers.’ (p.125, author’s italics)
My thoughts
Lütticken’s essay takes a completely different angle on appropriation than my other readings so far. Although easy to read I found it quite difficult to digest, hence a number of readings and these fairly detailed notes. One of my initial issues was to convince my brain to retain the meaning here (and as used by Barthes) of the word ‘myth’ to refer to a dominant ideology of our time rather than a folklore legend. I was also glad that I had read about the ideas of Benjamin, Debord and the Situationists before tackling this essay as having some knowledge of these helped my comprehension immeasurably.
I find the concept of appropriation of appropriation interesting – with the passing of time there is always the possibility that, through the receipt of additional mythical connotations, an appropriated image may end up losing its original individuality, its own message. Hence the work of artists such as Louise Lawler (appropriating the appropriated work of Andy Warhol) and Michael Mandiberg (appropriating the appropriated work of Walker Evans) are important in keeping the intentions of edginess, the subversiveness that characterises so much of appropriation art works at their inception.
Bibliography
Lütticken, S. (2005) ‘The Feathers of the Eagle’. In: New Left Review 36 November-December 2005. [online]. At: http://dspace.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/handle/1871/21431/182536.pdf?sequence=2 (accessed on 08 March 2016)
Understanding Visual Culture 