Elaine Frances Sturtevant, (née Horan; August 23, 1924 – May 7, 2014), also known simply as "Sturtevant", was an American artist. She achieved recognition for her carefully inexact repetitions of other artists' works that prefigured appropriation.
Sturtevant made the first years of her life working in New York where she began in 1965 to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original.[2] Sturtevant thus turns the concept of originality on its head. All of her works are copies of the works of other artists; none is an original. She initially focused on works by such American artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol.[3] Sturtevant copied Warhol's silkscreens so often that Warhol himself, when bombarded with questions about his working practice, once said, "I don't know. Ask Elaine."[4] Indeed, Sturtevant's mastery of copying other artist's work was so great that in 1965 a Jasper Johns flag painting that formed part of Robert Rauschenberg's combine “Short Circuit” was stolen, so Rauschenberg commissioned Sturtevant to paint a reproduction of Johns’s flag.[5] In the late 1960s, Sturtevant concentrated on replicating works by Joseph Beuys and Duchamp.
Since the early 1980s, she has focused on the next generation of artists, including Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She mastered painting, sculpture, photography and film in order to produce a full range of copies of the works of her chosen artists. In most cases, her decision to start copying an artist happened before those artists achieved broader recognition. Nearly all of the artists she chose to copy are today considered iconic for their time or style. This has given rise to discussions amongst art critics on how it had been possible for Sturtevant to identify those artists at such an early stage.
In 1991, Sturtevant presented an entire show consisting of her repetition of Warhol’s ‘Flowers’ series.
Her later works mainly focus on reproductions in the digital age. Sturtevant commented on her work at her 2012 retrospective Sturtevant: Image over Image at the Moderna Museet: "What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine - that's the way to go."[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Sturtevant
◇ Mike Bidlo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael "Mike" Bidlo (born 20 October 1953) is an American painter, sculptor and performance artist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Bidlo
◇ Sherrie Levine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sherrie Levine (born April 17, 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania) is an American photographer and appropriation artist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherrie_Levine
◇ Richard Prince - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Prince (born 1949[1]) is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975. His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a "rephotograph" of a photograph taken originally by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first "rephotograph" to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Prince
◇ Louise Lawler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer. From the late 1970s onwards, Lawler's work has focused on the presentation and marketing of artwork. Much of this work consists of photographs of other peoples' artwork and the context in which it is viewed. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculpture in a gallery being viewed by spectators. Along with artists like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, Lawler is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.[1] Louise Lawler lives in Brooklyn, New York.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Lawler
◇ Barbara Kruger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an North American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions―in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Kruger
◇ Appropriation (art) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the early twentieth century Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque appropriated objects from a non-art context into their work. In 1912, Picasso pasted a piece of oil cloth onto the canvas. Subsequent compositions, such as Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Bottle (1913) in which Picasso used newspaper clippings to create forms, became categorized as synthetic cubism. The two artists incorporated aspects of the "real world" into their canvases, opening up discussion of signification and artistic representation.
Marcel Duchamp is credited with introducing the concept of the ready-made, in which “industrially produced utilitarian objects…achieve the status of art merely through the process of selection and presentation.”[3] Duchamp explored this notion as early as 1913 when he mounted a stool with a bicycle wheel and again in 1915 when he purchased a snow shovel and humorously inscribed it “in advance of the broken arm, Marcel Duchamp.”[4][5] In 1917, Duchamp formally submitted a readymade into the Society of Independent Artists exhibition under the pseudonym, R. Mutt.[6] Entitled Fountain, it consisted of a porcelain urinal that was propped atop a pedestal and signed "R. Mutt 1917". The work posed a direct challenge to traditional perceptions of fine art, ownership, originality and plagiarism, and was subsequently rejected by the exhibition committee.[7] Duchamp publicly defended Fountain, claiming “whether Mr.Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view-- and created a new thought for that object.”[7]
◇ Appropriation (music) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In music, appropriation is the use of borrowed elements (aspects or techniques) in the creation of a new piece, and is an example of cultural appropriation.
Appropriation may be thought of as one of the placement of elements in new context, as for Gino Stefani who "makes appropriation the chief criterion for his 'popular' definition of melody (Stefani 1987a). Melody, he argues, is music 'at hand'; it is that dimension which the common musical competence extracts (often with little respect for the integrity of the source), appropriates and uses for a variety of purposes: singing, whistling, dancing, and so on." (Middleton, p. 96) Thus elements may be placed in a different form, placed with new elements, or varied.
Thus musical genres may be distinguished by both elements and context. "János Maróthy defines the 'folkloric' itself in terms of appropriation: the making, from whatever materials, of 'a music [or other folk art] of your own' (Maróthy 1981)." (Middleton, p. 139)
