Operating without a license.(Book review)

Appropriation

Edited by David Evans

Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2009

240 pp./$24.95 (sb)

Appropriation (2009) is the latest addition to the series "Documents of Contemporary Art" published as a joint effort of the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. 1 his particular anthology is compiled and edited by David Evans, a scholar who has published extensively on photography and photomontage, including research on the Situationist uses of photography and a significant catalogue raisonne of the German montage artist John Heartfield. Evans's background lends itself perfectly to this first compendium on the prevalent and often incongruent practices of appropriation art throughout the twentieth century to the present day.

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Beginning by marking the episteme of appropriation art in New York in the late 1970s, Appropriation investigates how multivalent and layered the act of appropriation is in contemporary art, or to quote Evans quoting Richard Prince, what it means to "operate without a license." Tracing this history through theoretical progenitors such as Roland Bart lies. Jean Baudrillard. and Walter Benjamin, and going back to methodological precursors such as Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Duchamp, the book reads like a who's who of visual culture, making connections as disparate and yet uncanny as that between the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann's revolutionary photomontages of the 1920s and the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles's subversive insertion of" messages on banknotes and Coca Cola bottles then placed back into circulation in the 1970s. Noting the political as well as the aesthetic dimensions of copy culture, Appropriation crosses wide time frames with convincing stealth, illuminating practices in a wide range of" mediums in continuous conversation with the evolution of" mass media.

Comprised of' key writings addressing major issues related to the particular theme of appropriation in contemporary art theory and practice, Evans's collection of documents demonstrates how the judgment seat of" photography, veritably technological reproduction, overturned the question of originality. Yet this is not without equivocation. Despite the seeming irrelevance of locating "the original" following the widespread availability and abilities of" technological reproduction, debates nevertheless seem to persistently return to the role of the artist, the sensibility of the critic, and to the insight of the historian, in order to repeatedly unpack originality's impossibility.

Several artists mentioned in this volume have "treat[ed] the past itself as malleable raw material" (12), from Andy Warhol to Glenn Ligon, from Martha Rosier to Keith Piper. These practices are representative of continuous contests over history. Naming the ready-made, collage, and montage as the transformative contributions of the historical avant-gardes, without which the very concept of contemporary art would not be possible, authors like Elisabeth Sussman and Benjamin Buchloh mark the recurring tendencies of artistic production. Evans judiciously divides contemporary practice into seven sub-categories: Agitprop, The Situationist Legacy, Simulation, Feminist Critique, Postcolonialism, Postcommunism, and Postproduction. Each section overlaps with others, yet individually provide helpful ways of thinking through differences between uses and historical periods. Like the subject they address, each is a kind of repetition with a difference, building on unwieldy precedents.

Call it stealing or call it pastiche, replicating and recombining often offer parody and political incision, though as methodologies they are not necessarily subversive. There are moments when appropriation risks the affirmation of the status quo without criticism, without intervention. Appropriation as a constitutive method can cut both ways. Sections such as post-colonialism and post-communism include the writings of Boris Groys [Ed. note: See review in this issue of Groys's latest book], Okwui Enwezor, and others to offer a vision of how appropriation casts a net well beyond Western Europe and North America and how the slakes involved in "stealing" representations change dramatically depending on the context. John C. Welchman shrewdly brings Pierre Bourdieu into the mix, and his conviction that violence is always inhered in the art of appropriation, stating that "the modern art system in general, gestures of taking, quoting, citing and the act of relocating that which is appropriated within the highly controlled context of an art world is clearly predicated on the power and prestige of a self-affirming cultural nexus." (1) Yet there is also the possibility that unauthorized re-deployment can be mobilized in the service of dismantling the problematic idea of any singular "mass culture."

Some argue that appropriation is the mode of contemporary art par excellence. The fragments on Postproduction bring in a mix of artists including Angela Bulloch. Douglas Gordon, Mike Kelley, Idris Khan, and Steve McQueen and discuss the subversive potentials of re-mixing, which contract the chasm between production and consumption and vice-versa. Using deejaying as an analogy, Nicolas Bourriaud describes polemically how the "art of the twentieth century is an art of" montage (the succession of images: and detourage the superimposition of image)." (2)

As such, Appropriation is the kind of anthology that could be endless encompassing adaptation as much as simulation, and as such the replicas could go on and on. But Evans is wise to demarcate the territory at the outset by first setting the boundaries of what he counts as relevant to defining appropriation on the one hand, and what the parameters are for analyzing the topic without becoming obtuse on the other.

Ultimately heterogeneous blending functions here as a model, which is also the operative principle of the "Documents on Contemporary Art" series, offering pieces of the puzzle but generously leaving the discourse open to the readers' contemplation. Appropriation provides a useful compendium of authors, artists, and texts, introducing artistic practices and theories that would be vital reading for anyone attentive to contemporary art, particularly if one considers "contemporary art" as a concept rather than a singular historic moment.

NOTES (1.) John C. Wetchman, "Global Nets: Appropriation and Postmodernity" (2001); reprinted in Earns, 139. (2.) Nicolas Bourriaud. "Decaying and Contemporary Art" (2007); 164 in Evans, extract from Postproduction, trans. Janine Herman (New York Lukas & Steinberg), 2002; first published in English. French edition published by Les Presses du reel, 2004.

HEATHER DIACK is an art historian, critic, and curator who teaches at the University of Toronto.

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