Appropriation (art)

Appropriation can be understood as the use of borrowing of elements of another persons work to produce a new piece of work. In the visual arts, appropriating means to borrow, recycle, adopt or sample aspects of another’s work. By doing so we re-invent, what once was, in to something new by variation, interpretation, parody and many other methods.

I decided for my appropriation project to work on a picture by H.R.Giger called future kill. Not being the first artist to appropriate work from someone else, I will be looking at other artists who have done the same. One of Banksy famous pieces of appropriation art is Show Me the Monet.

This was a close copy of Claude Monet, Bridge over a pool of water lilies 1899, except it shows a traffic cone and trolleys dumped in the urban paradise. Another artist, Douglas Gordon used the film psycho and just slowed it down and called it 24 hour psycho. He said that it was not a simply work of appropriation but more of an act of affiliation. He felt that his different take on the familiar classic, allowed people recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, darkness and light, which in its normal context would be over looked.