Appropriation

About

Appropriation takes an image, object or artwork made by someone else and puts it forward again, with little or no alteration, so that the act of taking carries the meaning. Quotation is old, but modernism sharpened it. Joseph Cornell recut a Hollywood feature into Rose Hobart (1936), and Pop artists lifted soup labels and comic panels straight from supermarket shelves and newsstands.

In the late 1970s and 1980s the Pictures Generation turned borrowing into a critique of originality itself. Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans's Depression-era pictures for After Walker Evans (1981), and Richard Prince cropped cowboys out of cigarette advertisements. Elaine Sturtevant had been remaking works by Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns since the mid-1960s, while Richard Pettibone painted exact miniature versions of his contemporaries' works. John Stezaker splices old film stills with postcards. Such work raises lasting questions about authorship, copyright and what makes an image new.