Parakino: Blanca De La Torre Garcia - Some Politics Of Appropriation

15 May 2009, at. 6 p.m.
Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Łaźnia
ul. Jaskółcza 1, 80-767 Gdańsk - Poland

The term appropriation art came into common use in the 1980s with artists such as Sherrie Levine, who addressed the act of appropriating itself as a theme in art. Challenging ideas of originality, drawing attention to relations between power, gender and creativity, the social sources and uses of art, Levine plays with the theme of "almost same".

Aspects of appropriation appear in all areas of visual art history if one considers the basic act of making art as the borrowing of images or concepts from the surrounding world and re-interpreting them as art.
Some even might classify Leonardo da Vinci as an appropriation artist, because he used recombinant methods of appropriation, borrowing from sources as diverse as biology, mathematics, engineering and art, and then synthesizing them into inventions and artworks. Duchamp also went so far as to use existing art in his work, appropriating an apparent copy of the Mona Lisa into his piece, L.H.O.O.Q. What would our culture be without borrowing, adaptation and derivatives? In the area of visual art, such a question has taken on additional relevance given the extent to which appropriation and the recycling of pre-existing materials have become crucial factors in contemporary practice.

The following artists utilize methods of pseudoappropriation taking some classic subjects in the History of Art and using them as starting point of their videos, establishing an iconographic bridge between video and history of art, in an attempt to mixtify and enhance both traditions.  In order to illustrate this point, artist Evaristo Benítez in D Apres Courbet tells a story using a succession of gripping abstract images and Andreas Berzotti Death of Arts  reinterpretes Hitchcock s psycho s death as some kind of Arthur Danto s death of Art. While Luis Bezeta creates a moving painting in Moviecuadro, Julia Oschatz evokes the XIX  century romantic experience of the Sublime (Between Caspar, David and Friedrich). Antonia Fritche (Bump), films with a mobilephone a very impressionist aesthetic valued with the choice of a full screen, enlarging pixelisation and so picture decomposition. In her videos, Sabine Gross refers to popular works of art history, such as The Scream, by Edvard Munch, or Happy Tears, by Roy Lichtenstein. Through computer animations, Gross amplifies the intense emotional quality inherent to these pictures, allowing such very distinct aspects to dissociate themselves from their source and become independent. Andreas Sachsenmaier s L Ultima cena shows an apparent image of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci where female figures are sitting and standing at a long table, all well-known prototypes, which we can see daily in the media. Inspired by a painting by Jan Vermeer, in Mariana Vassileva s video The Milkmaid the motif becomes transformed, not only into our present but also into a virtual spaceless and timeless sphere. As she remains motionless and only the milk flows one could say that in this work, photography, video and sculpture unite in one medium. In Where to Sleep, Goya, Eugenio Ampudia spends the night sleeping inside the Prado Museum and under The Executions Of The Rebels of the 3rd of May by Francisco de Goya, raising questions regarding the construction of the social space and the struggle against conventions. Cristina Lucas (Talk), strikes and questions Michelangelo s sculpture Moses, as, according to the legend,  its creator did when it finished, and Lucas tries to find the truth about it.

Have these pieces some aura of the originals? Is to carve tombstones for the past the only way left to be original?
All the works could be seen as as a head-on confrontation with the anxiety of influence, and this creates the possibility of an allegorical reading of the work.

Together, these videos restate the history of art on an original point of view, miming moving image and enigmatic art history stereotypes with a strange blend of camp and genuine feeling. In creating such compilation, I try to pay homage to classics of Art History while at the same time asserting that there is some threadline that has been continued  along history, and not necessary a breaking point, a before and an after marked by the born of Video Art.
Therefore, the margins, the sites, the question of concept versus the whole panorama or the medium of video have to be reevaluated and brought into a different kind of discourse.

http://laznia.pl
http://video-art.pl/
http://postvideoart.wordpress.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/video-art