tion commented that ‘‘this shift in practice entails a
shift in position: the artist becomes a manipulator of
signs more than a producer of art objects, and the
viewer an active reader of messages rather than a
passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer
of the spectacle.’’
However painters such as Julian Schnabel and
David Salle met with strong market support yet
were received coolly by those critics largely
unsympathetic to a ‘‘return to painting’’ often
perceived as uncritical and market-driven. While
Schnabel gained initial renown for applying shat-
tered crockery to the canvas and then covering it
partially by thick layers of pigment, and also made
reference to artists from Caravaggio to Warhol,
others relied strongly on photography. In his
paintings Salle incorporated both his own photo-
graphy and found sources ranging from the art
historical to the pornographic. The New York
East Village painter Mike Bidlo created meticu-
lous copies of the works of Pablo Picasso and
other Modern artists, and by the 1990s he was
also photographing staged tableaux based upon
works such as Edward Manet’sOlympiaand offer-
ing his own direct homages to Duchamp’s early
readymades. Jean-Michel Basquiat also combined
spontaneous and exuberant drawing by hand with
photo-silkscreened elements from borrowed
sources. Jeff Koons embraced his borrowed ima-
gery in the name of a new pseudo-populist aes-
thetic. In his quest to please his collectors, he
oversaw the replication of stuffed animals, liquor
decanters, and posed for photographs using the
idioms of advertising, publicity shots, and hard-
core pornography.
Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter and the Rus-
sian e ́migre ́duo Komar and Melamid responded to
their own specific cultural surroundings. Polke and
Richter, both raised in the former German Demo-
cratic Republic, or East Germany, created works in
the mid 1960s under the heading ‘‘Capitalist Rea-
lism’’ and both experimented extensively with
photography. Polke manipulated and distorted his
photographs technically and incorporated them
into his large, nonsensical paintings, while Richter
made exquisitely rendered paintings from family
and found photographs. Komar and Melamid in
their SOTS art appropriated and transformed the
iconography and stylistic effects of Socialist Rea-
lism, yielding aesthetically seductive and critically
incisive results.
The subtle and complex feminist critique evident
in the works of Levine, Lawler, and Sherman was
proclaimed more boldly in the photomontages of
former graphic designer Barbara Kruger, which
displayed such slogans as ‘‘Your Body is a Battle-
ground.’’ ‘‘It’s a Small World (but not if you have
to clean it),’’ and ‘‘Your Gaze Hits the Side of My
Face,’’ presented as bold white typographic state-
ments set into red banners laid over large-scale
appropriated images. Jenny Holzer also used frag-
ments of everyday speech and received knowledge
in her textual works, most characteristically dis-
played using moving LED display signs. Other
contemporary artists such as the American media
artists Dennis Adams and Hans Haacke, the Chi-
lean social activist photographer Alfredo Jaar, and
Polish-Canadian public art innovator Krzysztof
Wodiczko recontextualized documentary images
within gallery installations, light boxes, and slide
projections in order to offer pointed political com-
mentary particularly during the Reagan era of the
mid-1980s.
Appropriation became a characteristic artistic
style of the 1980s, but perhaps as with its con-
temporaneous movements graffiti and neo-expres-
sionism, its power and influence seemed to
initially diminish after a period of overexposure.
However in a more positive sense appropriation
today has become merely one of a range of Post-
modernist tools still actively used by contempor-
ary artists in the context of multidisciplinary
works. The general ubiquity of technology in the
early twenty-first century, and the widespread use
of digital replication and repetition in music,
advertising, and film, almost ensures the likeli-
hood that the strategy of incorporating borrowed
images will continue unabated in the contempo-
rary art world.
MARTINPatrick
Seealso:Conceptual Photography; Feminist Photo-
graphy; History of Photography: 6: the 1980s;
Krauss, Rosalind; Kruger, Barbara; Modernism;
Postmodernism; Prince, Richard; Rauschenberg,
Robert; Representation; Sherman, Cindy; Solo-
mon-Godeau, AbigailFurther Reading
Baudrillard, Jean.Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Bolton, Richard, ed.The Contest of Meaning: Critical His-
tories of Photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 1989.
Crimp, Douglas.On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts: MIT Press, 1993.
Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and
Sculpture, Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art/MIT
Press, 1986.
Foster, Hal.Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics.
Seattle: Bay Press, 1985.APPROPRIATION