Appropriation refers to the act of borrowing or reusing existing elements within a new work. Post-modern appropriation artists, including Barbara Kruger, are keen to deny the notion of ‘originality’.2 They believe that in borrowing existing imagery or elements of imagery, they are re-contextualising or appropriating the original imagery, allowing the viewer to renegotiate the meaning of the original in a different, more relevant, or more current context.
"I'm interested in coupling the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better. To use the device to get people to look at the picture, and then to displace the conventional meaning that an image usually carries with perhaps a number of different readings."
Barbara Kruger, 1987.1
In separating images from the original context of their own media, we allow them to take on new and varied meanings. The process and nature of appropriation has considered by anthropologists as part of the study of cultural change and cross-cultural contact.3
Images and elements of culture that have been appropriated commonly involve famous and recognisable works of art, well known literature, and easily accessible images from the media.
The first artist to successfully demonstrate forms of appropriation within his or her work is widely considered to be Marcel Duchamp. He devised the concept of the ‘readymade’, which essentially involved an item being chosen by the artist, signed by the artist and repositioned into a gallery context.
By asking the viewer to consider the object as art, Duchamp was appropriating it. For Duchamp, the work of the artist was in selecting the object. Whilst the beginnings of appropriation can be located to the beginning of the 20th century through the innovations of Duchamp, it is often said that if the art of the 1980’s could be epitomised by any one technique or practice, it would be appropriation.4