WITH reference TO discourse: Appropriation Art

A reminder of its deconstructive potential.

Appropriation Art by Doctor Your, Small section of a photograph, within copyright laws *appropriated* from Thomas Zeising, photographer, by the model and fashion designer Doctor Your, following some ideas about Franz Kafka's narration „In der Straßenbahn“.

Approximately one and a half year ago, Pascal Unbehaun explained in the Internet-based art magazine arts-on.com, that and why reference as explicative term of art equated terms such as author, technology, topic, etc.. The way of referring to the world within the "white cube" of galleries and museums of contemporary art became such an essential part of contemporary works, that the question of the relationship between work and the world - the dependence on the institutional framework of the White Cube – didn't issue itself anymore. The contemporary art had virtually developed its own tissues, which floated freely in the world flottieren and didn't anylonger allow the question what it was - in comparison to the world beyond the White Cube:

„Art is leaving the game grid, moving in its own complement. But, using some more terminology of set theory, doesn't art have to be a subset of the real world to differ from it and to look at it from a distance? If we remove the protective shell of the white cube it would appear to us as if we couldn't tell art from the real world anymore. As a consequence, would art die a heat death? I won't speculate on how art will develop in the future. Right now, this art can be seen as referring to art – the concept of the 'reference' is crucial to it. In addition to that I think that the connection to the protective shell mentioned above is not coincidental – the question of what has to be protected at all has become obsolete.“

Reference is not only developed as a differentiable term by Unbehaun, but also in its content as a reference from art to art, and nevertheless the used definitions of the canon of knowledge and philosophy are already sufficient before anything can be specified, using the example of art and along to its concept to draw the foundations of the concept Appropriation to an emerging deconstruction.

„Brockhaus defines the reference as 'a relation between linguistic signs and objects outside of language'. It is difficult to give a solid definition since words like 'link' and 'relation' have to be used which are almost synonyms. Apparently, the reference is a most elementary, if not axiomatic, idea.“

„ Reference“ derives from (re-)ferre, lat. to carry sth. (back), to retrieve sth. Derrida's idea of the 'différance' originates there, too: dis-ferre, to carry apart. In german, the 'Referendar' (junior lawyer) is the one to get the files from the archive.“

Thus, it is clear that Derrida is speaking double-minded: „Referieren“ is unsymbolical in its origines - no linguistic act but merely the physically carrying around of books, perhaps mentored by labels with instructions on signatures or titles in accordance to the disc, octav, quart oder folio objects that should be fetched or be beared.

As Derrida dissolves the notion into a prototype of a discourse consisting only of local distortions, importations and distributions, and of publishing as moving and permanent alienation of icons existing thus essentially in this form of permanent change - as such, he leads it back to its more or less mechanical, object-oriented , physico-realistic everyday structures - in which reference no longer has the aspect Brockhaus and Linguistics usually see at its essence: the symbolic-linguistic form. Derrida's note makes much more clear that a lecture could also be to silently move around and show open book pages in a group of people who came together anywhere as a university colloquium or anything else like it. And indeed it is, of course, as such - one reason perhaps why Derrida has always kept unpopular at Universities. „Now, please say something about this,“ „And how should we conceptualize this, please ?" - Such little impatient, urging requests of the professor can probably been foreseen. However, a written formulation, with a proper cover page, table of contents, titles and book titles, etc., well, would be judged at least as "sufficient", depending on the quality of the lugging around – and depending on the discovered objects - perhaps even as "excellent"!

Why should we, thus, accept to be forced to leave words, to argue superfluous or even speculative, and to throw common occasional dirt at the * references* ?

Pure pointing to without the dirt or jewelry of long and accidental words ... More pictures, unframed by appropriation, in the web gallery of Doctor Your http://www.electroniclandscape.com

We see - like Derrida - that a radical positivism of this kind in the sciences doesn't exist strictly speaking. "Reference" in this sense is often - you would say, reasonably - a means to an end, only the pillars of a new wave of texts and discours . Radikalpositivists, who in the Colloquium only "speak" or silently present their references are since long referred into the arts. There, especially in contemporary art, the pure showing without commentaries dominates, and mediators, receptionists or even the artists themselves can wrap in trials to symbolically carry references with them and delay them into arbitrary contexts. The aesthetic and artistic discourses make, from this perspective, only a very dense field, but are not manifestly privileged in comparison to the principle of showing around as the most manifest in the arts.

Now one could argue that to think of contemporary artworks as only somewhere distanced objects which are, in a framework of art events and meetings suitably declared , was a failure because of the artist's creativity, who not just deprive their works from the shelf.

But, as Pascal Unbehaun just exactly anchored his reflections on the concept of referential art to contemporary art of the manner described by Derrida as dislocated, next to the general establishment of works of art that has its own design as a minimal pulse of shaping in the sense of the aforementioned "written elaboration", a nearly dominant train of contemporary art has become just to "order", to rearrange already presented objects (or, somewhat extreme, ideas) in a new colloquium. Art, which is explicitely to be understood in this sense, is called "Appropriation Art".

We'll use a defintion in the unavoidable universal encyclopedia Wikipedia although it seems somehow quite academic:

„ Appropriation Art (englisch "appropriation" = Aneignung) is an expression of contemporary artistic creation. It is usually associated with conceptual art, because the understanding of the underlying considerations and theorems are important for their understanding.

In a narrower sense one speaks of Appropriation Art, when artists consciously and strategically consider to copy the works of other artists, while the act of copying itself and the result are understood as an art and not plagiarism or falsification.

In a wider sense Appropriation Art can be any kind of art, which deals with pre-aesthetic employed materials, such as with advertising photography, press photography, archival images, movies, videos, etc. They may be accurate, detailed copies of it but are also often copies with manipulation of size, color, material and the original made medium.

This acquisition is in most Appropriation Art done in critical intention. Without this one can speak of an homage.“ (Wikipedia about *Appropriation Art*, Translation by U.R.)

The fear of saying something wrong or not to expalin concpets sufficiently differentiated gets in these remarks into conflict with the object of analysis and does so rather trivialize the subject. Particularly striking is how the classical force of Appropriation Art of nature within the meaning of the term we *looked at* in Derrida's philosophy, is annulated by the hasty classification as concept art. It also contributes to the trivialization that to meet the cycling and continuing spinning, just with ribbling changing river of trends in the art that in the usual representation of contemporary art the appropriation concept could through a 'progenitor' like the dadaist and surrealist objets trouvés be reduced to a worsening of already known. There should be stressed in this context rather the differences. Because, after all, the kind in which currently appropriation art differs from the classical references from art to art – which the wiki article also subsumed - is that the "appropriation" art refers not competitively.

Individual references to works by artists from colleagues, predecessors and models, are within even the most classical discipline in the arts already practice for centuries, and even by the school education, by the basic craft of the profession and the long tradition of religious, courtly, or individual-market-oriented program actually standard - for example, variations of the "Allegory of Painting", or even artsy handicraft pieces such as representations of mirrors and reflections, make this obvious.

"References" in this sense, fulfill the purpose that you don't supply a less valuable or less cheap factory item, than a competitor would deliver. The path of these references to the Derridian ones, which designate the offensive power of the current Appropriation Art most accurately, leads not just along the theoretical branch but to the classical aspect of contemplation.

The interested in art theory know the vividness of reference from studies of a wellknown philosopher within the analytical philosophy. Usually, analytical philosophy fosters the notion of "reference" at its most logical-semantic rigor - a foundational explication had been done by Frege, who explained reference as an extensional object opposed to the intensional, linguistic implications of a referring linguistic expression – this may be a sketchy explanation of how to understand Frege difference between the heavenly bodies (extension, reference object) and the appearance in the morning or evening sky ( "morning star" and "evening Star" as different intensions for the same object referred to by the word "Venus" (a term for a planet, a word referring to its reference, the planet).

The representative of the logico-aesthetical-turn, however, is neither Frege nor Wittgenstein but Nelson Goodman and his pupil, successor, spiritual heir Catherine Elgin. "Reference" is found in the art, so Goodman, almost taken upside down. It directs not from the language to an object (such as the Brockhaus thinks of reference) but from an object to an expression in any kind of language. The object gives a view and visual 'exemplication' of a linguistic expression, linguistic convention, a linguistic means in its widest sense. Obviously, the linguistic system opens with this vice-referential, referring-back function for objects of such a kind.

But ouh ! But oah ! Disastrous precursors are rapidly in the way. The innocence lambs of ostensional objects and situations [see Herder, About the Origine of Language] also want to stay in this cozy voice stable when the inversions of reference may ! To what extent are the "pattern" of Goodman something better?

Can we now privilege the objects of art, in a genuine privileged conceptual paradox?

They are neither arbitrary nor accidental, but as individual pieces carefully selected or - cheekier - as individual pieces carefully reproduced or doubled, to vividly and singularly exemplify what visual intuition is - what other concepts, which we polished in language training, mean or connote, when they stop to have meaning a.s.o.

So it is actually the currently in the craft of the somehow based success, to relevate an object from the randomly distributed and to declare it to a particularly relevant, individual pieces within the meaning of a work of art, which is what privileges ostensionally used objects, even if reproduced a thousand times or stolen, towards the flock of sheep for the predicate to the quasi-linguistic, referential.

The difference between the bleating sheep and the exemplification, donated by mysterious success? An along the webgallery acquired work of Your Doctor.

Another point is how far one may push the paradox: the copied unique may work, the just-intuitive language-like is difficult. Although at this point we return to Derrida's philosophical colloquium, where all show each other books and keep silent.

Those who exchanged texts, they do - more – or less? Visitors of the documenta won't say they aren't able to read or understand artworks. Quite likely uncertain as the understanding of a philosophical text is the result of an interpretation of a contemporary work of art, whether it has grammatically or language-like semantical rules or not. For a flat rate uncertain, fragmentary or unreconstructable (because "not of God") 'secular' knowledge hasn't to be hold out of this reason.

The book shown is the book that I see. This applies in the context of what I called "showing", which is nevertheless sufficient to speak of knowledge. In essence, how we can not emphasize enough - Derrida's theory is positivism - that is the basic principle of de-construction, as American literature scholars repeatedly make efforts to get out of memory. Such as the logician knows what 'A is true and B is true "means or „„Neither A nor B is true“ is true“, so sure you can see the shown, the literally refered book ahead of your eyes. This also for the work of art. And then the professor's strategies begin, to reduce the pathos and to get groove into the group, to make everything important, to rescue the universities - at least as found in the Koran schools, where authoritarian religion loosely conveys. Anyone is allowed to say something he or she thinks of as important and about everything. Everybody spins discourses, sometimes with less, sometimes with more references, sometimes worse, sometimes better.

Obviously, this approach is quite similar within the art world, only sometimes less witty and imaginative, or too openly and heterogenous organized. Funny enough, the truthness is indifferent of what is meant by the kind of reference that is used - for example, only objects and situations, discourse content, or even advocacy. The unfolding discourse, the referential content of even a stolen work of art, doen't diminish if you equate advocates and facts brutally decategorizing. What is important is simply - as in the classical Frege-Semantics, that tropisms of reference ( „Tropisms“ as linguistically more beautiful variation of the semantical-ontological concept of „trope“, which - not rhetorically – allows a reduced ontological framework, and a reference to be an individual piece of the world to exists with no amount of abstraction - if the appropriation art work is ever interested in the linguistic system of art at all and shows and wants to be understood as referential.

Out of this pulse newer contemporary artworks can be investigated, that are issued by leading institutions such as the documenta, the P.S.1 or the Metropolitan Museum of Art as "appropriation art“, on their exemplificational and linguistical content. It turns out that it is neither accidental nor in the strict sense art immanent.

At the same time this referential way out continues to out look from the quasi-culinary to a further-reaching claim of art, a friendly and social aspect, that continues to distinguish it, how theoretically extreme ever it may become, from sometimes mindless L'art pour l'art. At the same time, nearly nobody would accuse Appropriation Artists to be conventional Social Democrats. A key feature that gives them sufficient asociality to escape this accusation, is just the wonderful individual, often privatist or small, which, in the present international context, undermine the principles of the bourgeois social attitude of entitlement completely.

Let's start with the bed of Slotawa. Our references (concerning this):

Citation about Slotawa's Exhibition appropriated from PS1 by Doctor Your.

„ [...]P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents the first solo New York exhibition of work by Berlin-based conceptual artist Florian Slotawa. Rather than creating new objects from scratch, Florian Slotawa rearranges and recontextualizes what already exists. In his artworks Slotawa assembles and arranges furniture and everyday objects in elaborate compositions that respond to the rooms and spaces in which they are presented.

In his exhibition  located in the 2nd floor Mini Kunsthalle, Slotawa creates the twelfth in a series of works he began in 1996, called Besitzarbeiten, or “property works.” Most of the contents from his Berlin apartment, including his washing machine, dining table, wardrobe and kitchen sink, have been transported into the gallery, leaving the apartment absent of key appliances and furniture. Within the exhibition these personal objects are recast within the public realm, as they provide the material for a work of art. Slotawa adds new dimensions to familiar objects, creating a relationship between the artist and the institution of the museum. These possessions are neither altered or damaged, and will be returned to their original location for everyday use after the exhibition.

.[...]

Florian Slotawa (b. 1972, Rosenheim, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. He has had solo exhibitions including Solothurn aussen, Kunstverein Solothurn, Switzerland (2008); One After the Other Arthouse, Austin (2007); Modern Art, London (2006); and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2005). His work has been included in group shows including Made in Germany (2007) at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover; and Of Mice and Men: The 4th Biennial for Contemporary Art (2006) in Berlin.

Organized by Susanne Pfeffer, Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Curatorial Advisor.

The exhibition is supported by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Stuttgart.

 Additional support is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.“

From Slotawas bed to Cindy Sherman's Doll's House:

Citation about „*Pictures Generation* of New York Contemporary Artists Featured in Spring Metrcopolitan Museum Exhibition“ appropriated by Doctor Your and partially translated into German.

„Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons worked at the intersection of personal and collective memory, rummaging through the throwaway products of their youth—from B-movies to dollhouses that served as training manuals for who and how to be—in search of moments that both never existed yet were indelibly stamped in the mind. The image-scavengering of these artists was not restricted to the child's play of popular culture: Louise Lawler stalked the corridors of power in search of hidden treasure, while Sherrie Levine shot over the shoulders of photography's founding fathers not as a dry Duchampian gesture, but in order to create something akin to musical overtones—a buzzing in the space between their "original" and her "copy" that effaced the distance between objective document and subjective desire.“

Thus, Cindy Sherman, although apparently neither actually copyist nor trainee, is more classical concerned - for example in the "History Portraits" - with the normative force of art historical traditions. Comparable are Louise Lawler's photographical studies dealing with art from private collectors, the staging of works of art in their homes, which Lawler has documented in her series. The common aspect of these artists is a conscious reference to requirements in the arts - but we can say that even Dürer has made such references – just let's think of the Allegory of Painting, which for Dürer is not a mere collection of handicraft - symbols as the medieval understood this discipline - but a claim of a quasi-scientific discipline, with the real accuracy and intelligence of their conventions of their design or prove, and proved.

Even in the critical reflections of Sherman and Lawler we find normative functions of art as a discourse of social conventions and symbolism that consolidates, confirms or even undermines. The reference to art in the referential "appropriation art" or "art references" is thus almost never an internal art endeavor.

More towards a correctness of appropriation and immanence in the arts lead the copists' games of the "younger generation", in an entertaining way, that borrow even the role of the medieval's workshop pupil and above all seem to train a gesture of radical subjectivity, as it is with Florian Slotawa.

„The artist Sherrie Levine announced in 1979 with an appropriation of photographs by Walker Evans, from which they photographed and illustrated books under the title" After Walker Evans ", but exhibited under her name. In 2001 Michael Mandiberg repeated this action: He made photographic copies of Sherrie Levine's re-photographs and presented it under the title "After Sherrie Levine "(see Weblinks).

The Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura staged himself in analogy to photographs of Cindy Sherman, in which she finds herself portrayed in various disguises and roles ( "Film Stills"). As Sherman as a woman in her pictures often slips in male roles, Morimura, who is a transvestite, confuses the constitutive confusion of sexual identity even more. "

Appropriation Art, who rearranges and reproduces the works of well known artists, writers and philosophers, include furthermore the kiosks, altars and monuments of Thomas Hirschhorn. For references use this LINK:

http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/45aa0d00-ba16-49db-85d6-2dfa3485361a.aspx

http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/45aa0d00-ba16-49db-85d6-2dfa3485361a.aspx

Significant is that the interview of the Neue Züricher Zeitung introduces "The dream of the book" with the question, "The first time - What shall the professor tell, Mr. Hirschhorn?"

References thus, confused neuro scientist and "hermeneutics" in the deepest sense:). Hirschhorn itself in any case seems to copy the sound of hysterization of Ingeborg Bachmann, but doesn't see himself as an immanent copyists or over-hit, but as a political artist who - we alluded to – wants to act politically with its art kiosks and get people into contemporary art.

A renovation project, that copies and shifts an existing, albeit moribund culture example, is the presentation of the Finnish producers Kling & Bang Gallery on the English Frieze Art Fair of the cult Bar Sirkus of Reykjavik as a rebuilding:

Frieze Projects 2008

Kling & Bang

Sirkus, a bar in the scruffy downtown area of Reykjavik, was demolished this spring after serving for nine years as a living landmark and the hub of the city's alternative arts scene. Kling & Bang, a gallery run by eight enthusiastic artists, not only helped the owner save the bar's façade and interior, but also resolved to bring it to the UK and re-erect it at Frieze Art Fair. In an echo of the travelling circus invoked by the bar's name, this place of celebration and creation moved town for a few short days. Kling & Bang, a gallery run by eight enthusiastic artists, not only helped the owner save the bar's façade and interior, but also resolved to bring it to the UK and re-erect it at Frieze Art Fair. In an echo of the traveling circus invoked by the bar's name, this place of celebration and creation moved town for a few short days.

Source:

http://www.friezefoundation.org/commissions/detail/kling_bang/

Appropriation by Doctor Your

Obviously, the rebuilt is appropriation in its purest sense. It is also - against of the mistrust into the theoreticity of the work caused in the habit that noselifted Central Europeans first think about the Finnish as culture of alcoholism and Kaurismäkian kidding – it is an object of appropriation, though we would most likely deny language-likeness to it. That is - however - perhaps incorrect. If we compare the process of rebuilding at the trade fair with the dumb-showing of library books without comments, we see: both acts are linguistically, with the singular exemplificatory characteristic of linguistic exemplification that makes the active object possible (although once or in addition object-of ostension), as they show objects as references, which in a way store language and discourses. Of course, in the case of a book this is more undisputed. In the case of Sirkus it is nevertheless similar.

Consider Augustine and Wittgenstein's first reflections in the Philosophical Investigations: The Augustinian language picture summarizes language as a tool in order to express wishes. Simple Wittgenstein interpretations see Augustinus' language picture as the one that Wittgenstein especially rejected in the PUs. This already enforces a position which differs sharply the late from the early Wittgenstein. Differentiated, it is especially not the individual wishes that constitute the language - as the children's crying. Let's pray it repeatedly: At first the approach of mother's breast gives the child the constitutive certainty that the crying around is suitable as a linguistic tool to get satisfied. We know from animals that the connex of linguistic signs, arbitrary action and pleasure are not necessarily motivated in the personal situation – animals are capable to learn nearly any nonsense they can manage physically (like mathematician, you may frolic). Sirkus, a pub for artists and the art scene in Reykjavic, is of course suspected to have reversed these principles of linguistic constitution, the "profit system". Thus, to have been a pure pleasure dome of babbling and silent self-reference. As such, this location of symbolic projection can be judged as almost like a fiction book - at least for art discourse - and particularly a real place of its constitution. Sirkus was a kind of mother's breast for the art scene of Reykjavic. The presentation says no more than "This is something there" - or "something is not supported – it doesn't exist no more." Within the Colloquium thus, the poignant beautiful or intelligent, disregarded book, wherein whose presentation the pathos of silence increases up to unbearablility - in line with the private language argument in the classical interpretation you can say that indeed the pathos becomes unbearable, if a saving "answer" within the meaning of the mother's breast is not possible - because they are not cognitively or linguistically available or accessible. The showing around of Sirkus at Frieze in this sense, a representation of a dead breast....This principle is constitutive for principles of exemplification especially in the religious field, too, although this likes and doesn't hesitate to - especially in the Catholic, liturgical practice – reject "answers" as inadequate or inferior (nearly always as "vain" - also including art contributions). In such cases, language-likeness, including the possibility of an exemplificational reference into an existing discourse involved, is innocently (Reykjavic) or specifically refused (religion). This type of Exemplifikation, even if it doesn't retire on mere descriptiveness, is not linguistical. Perhaps this kind of direct presentation of the appropriation - that is, the context does not shift theoretically, inclusive pathetic, - not even referential. Since the pub is really newborn, not merely by reference as a copy, but missing the principle of the mother's breast and the answer or the success of discourse. It could be talk better of a selfreferential, self-ostensive gesture - like a sheep that suddenly, while you are still pointing to it, begins to babble: Look at me, I'm not good, my feet are frozen on the lawn, can you please do something about it, rather than debating on art and language. Well, perhaps, but not in summer ... or maybe in Finland.

Dr. Ulrike Ritter