Story

januar 21, 2016

Text Maren Serine Andersen

The message Une catastrophe planétaire est certaine d’ici mille ans (A global catastrophe is certain to find place the next thousand years) is quite a straightforward heads-up of challenges that humanity seems to quite blindly strut towards within the limit of a millennium. Reading such a headline might cause immediate feelings of concern. But then again, a moment later a snapchat message or a notification on Facebook probably distracts the attention away from the unpleasant mood and everything is back to normal.

Stephen Hawking, the man behind this warning is likely to be one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein. He further calls us to show caution during these times, to recognize the dangers following our unstoppable progress and learn to control them. Panic is in any case usually useless and Hawking optimistically believes that we can adjust. A bright future is however depending on that we get aware of what truly is important and learn which tendencies should be avoided.

A more vague but still challenging moment outside the dripping bubble of wealth and perfection, in which Western society floods itself, can also be experienced through appropriation art – a bit more abstract form than dramatic headlines. To avoid academic arrogance, a short introduction is appropriate to begin with; In the visual arts, appropriation is when an artist intentionally borrows, copies, and makes alterations of preexisting images and objects. The first artist to successfully demonstrate a form of appropriation was Marcel Duchamp with his piece Fountain. Simply by asking the viewer to consider the object as art he was appropriating it. In this way he devised the concept of the readymade, which basically is that an item is being chosen, signed and repositioned into a gallery context by the artist.

In the world of art there are to be discovered a wide variety of artists within the movement of Appropriation. Some of the very popular artists, like Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, are present in the mainstream. Others, like Richard Prince, are less fond of public attention and live quite isolated but still creates cool stuff like the cover he did for Purple Fashion with a local waitress from the only diner in the area (Watch video below). Then some of them, like Charles Ray, are even so far from the mainstream that they are nearly forgotten.

Appropriating artists have surely stirred the shallow waters of Fashion. Jeff Koons reached out to new admirers through his collab with H&M. Another famous version of the domesticated mammal by Koons is his Puppy, a floral sculpture of a West Highland terrier outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao that actually inspired designer Raf Simons to create floral fashion show stage designs and a giant blue flower hill as fashion show set for Dior.

The artist Cindy Sherman has among many other characters been mimicking super model Jerry Hall and done a series of photographs for Balenciaga where their looks were worn by Sherman posing as various characters: the fashion victim, the aging doyenne and the delirious clubber.

What is mutual for artists within the appropriation art movement is that they manipulate familiar objects to new presentations and open for new readings and meanings. Their bodies of work are generally treating certain grand themes like life, death, passion, sex, consumerism, modern society and its obsessions.

Astrup Fearnley’s exhibition Good Morning America illuminates how an important group of American artists developed a new artistic language in the end of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The exhibition can be experienced for two more days at Astrup Fearnly Museet, and mon Dieu advice you to look for three aerial basketballs as well as that we hope there might be some left of Felix-Gonzales-Torres’ candy.