Creative Appropriation

The urban art expression gather two beautiful (but difficult to define) words, art and city. Between the “draw” the city and “draw” in the city, according with times1. Always not pretentious art, more connected with the craft (arts & crafts) of doing things well done not so much to the classical arts, academic conservative fields, galleries and museums, places were it disappears as it is and starts being other thing (for example: Popart2).

The designation “informal graphic appropriation”, reach a broad range of forms and intentions that are expressed in the urban environment (public/ collective space) typical by their mainly visual and non authorized components.

This are for example: not understandable scribbles, signatures (tags) or colorful graffiti pieces, small stickers or big pieces of paper glued to advertise some chimney cleaning, circus billboards or of the next rock mega concert, stencil from the most famous street art artists of the world, to the simple and anonymous love declarations, all competes for visibility, side by side with lots of other “authorized” forms of communication (advertisement, public art, etc...).

In definitive, the “informal graphic appropriation” practice, can be seen as simple search of visibility. Trying to call “the attention” of the city user to something that wants to be communicated in a non authorized form.

In this article (after the due contextualizations), it's given the overview of how in Lisbon the management processes of this phenomenons had been evolving, giving space or retracting in a more or less coordinated way, as a kind of “meta” project (Urban Art Gallery and Lab, project CRONO, among other). In the end there are taken some considerations about the usage of the gathered experience in other contexts (cities, municipalities, neighborhoods, etc...).

This work is a practical reflection about the process of change of Köpi wasteland.While trying to discover the impact of the Berlin Wall today, we ended up discovering a hidden project. We found a place, an old military area, a footprint of the Berlin Wall. This area is defined today as a wasteland, a nowhere. We decided to study the area through a direct exploratory journey into the understanding of this place. Through our lived experience, the wasteland label of this nowhere place was tested through an exploring and questioning methodology. Little by little we discovered that this is not a wasteland. After studying the place it became obvious that the label wasteland is not accurate for it. So the development of a new word was needed. NowHERE is this word. This explains the paradox that wastelands confront in their everyday existence. The main issue with wastelands is not the lack of program as some may argue, but the lack of knowledge about these spaces as Secchi1 points out. What is really happening there?
One of the most important changes throughout this research process was the recognition of this space as a place.
Thus, the present work consists of a documentation of the “project” that is already there, explaining its “uncertain” status as a positive characteristic. Furthermore, reflects about the understanding of a project-place before the conventional developing phase of design of a project for a place, and how to bring these nowHERE qualities to design as a time continuity.

Beginning with the example of Beyoncé's music video for her song "Countdown," which copied movements from Anna Teresa De Keers-maeker's early choreographic work, this article explores the role of plagiarism, reconstruction, and recreation in contemporary dance. With regard to theories of repetition (such as those of Søren Kierkegaard and Giorgio Agamben), a particular focus is placed on the ephemerality and corporeality of movement, arguing for the convergence of copying and repetition in dance. While, due to the restrictions of human anatomy and the responding characteristics of movement, dancing is always already interwoven with the process of copying, it is, however, the inevitable inexactitude of these copies that guarantees the non-iterability of dance, as well as its alteration and innovation.

This study explored the way that sounds and styles borrowed from contemporary popular music and early types of art music can be appropriated for use within original compositions.

Conventions of notated art music composition symbiotically evolved alongside a related musical repertory, yet borrowed source materials often exhibit aural and stylistic characteristics that are external to this. This highlighted an interface problem between the characteristics of borrowed source materials and conventions of the live performance medium to which they were incorporated.

This creative and methodological tension was resolved in unique and varied ways that are demonstrated through a portfolio of compositions.

Euripides’s Medea has been staged a number of times in the new South Africa. This study's purpose is to provide a practical example of a rewritten Medea set in a contemporary Afrikaner community. The political climate and gender views employed in the Euripidean Medea are an- alysed and compared to that of the new text. The themes in the Euripidean Medea are analysed as well as possible themes in the Afrikaner community to provide the new text with contempo- rary social trends in the white Afrikaner community. The style of the Euripidean Medea is an- alysed and adapted in the new play to create a style that can be accommodated in contemporary South African theatre. Appropriating Medea in an Afrikaner community will hopefully provide future theatre-makers with a narrative of the practical process of appropriation from which more universal principles on the practice can be derived as the play has never been fully rewritten in Afrikaans to create an authentic play.

This essay examines the dominant terms currently in use in studies of Shakespearean rewritings (adaptation and appropriation), reviews their recent critical histories, and considers their theoretical advantages and drawbacks. The essay concludes that at the current moment, both terms are apt and useful and suggests a model for articulating their relationship to one another.

Der Aufsatz widmet sich zunächst dem Forschungsstand zum deutsch-türkischen Kino und identifiziert zwei grundsätzliche Schwierigkeiten: 1. Im gegenwärtigen Forschungsdiskurs herrscht ein repräsentationales Verständnis des filmischen Bildes vor. Dieses Verständnis produziert Kurzschlüsse bezüglich des Verhältnisses filmischer Bilder zur sozialen Wirklichkeit. 2. Das deutsch-türkische Kino ist in der Forschung überwiegend als Genre behandelt worden, ohne dass diese Konzeptualisierung theoretisch problematisiert oder fundiert worden wäre. Von diesen zwei Ansatzpunkten ausgehend wird eine konzeptuelle Perspektive entworfen, welche darauf abzielt, das Verhältnis zwischen Migrationsdiskurs und audiovisueller Medienproduktion theoretisch neu zu justieren. Dieses Vorhaben wird anhand zweier Fluchtlinien entwickelt: die eine ist methodologischer Natur und zielt auf eine detaillierte Analyse filmischer Form mit Blick auf ihre expressive Dimension. Die andere ist theoretischer Natur und begreift filmische Bilder als Aneignungen global zirkulierender Formen und Muster. Diese Dimension audiovisueller Diskursivität ist an den Bildern zu rekonstruieren, bevor man sie als Verhandlungen kultureller Identität lesen kann.

This is the introduction to a book that critically explores discourses and practices of creativity in an era of intensifying glabalization and transnational connectivity.
Full reference: Svasek, M. 2016 Introduction. Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement, in (ed Maruska Svasek and Birgit Meyer) Creativity in Transition. Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Pp 1-32.

The essay examines Piero della Francesca's impact on British visual culture from the early 19th century to the 1960s. It deals with the earliest copies (engravings, tracings, sketches, chromo-lithographs...) as well as with works that sought inspiration from the master's paintings. It dwells on Edward Burne-Jones, and on the artists of the Bloomsbury Group (especially Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell) whose enthusiasm for Piero bordered on cult.

The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly features essays by and about artists, interviews, UMVA Member submissions, poetry, UMVA updates about local chapters and current projects and more. The MAJ is organized around quarterly themes to which we encourage members to submit. The theme for the Fall 2019 issue was "Appropriation."

This research paper examines 21st century Internet and media cultures, with specific focus on remix video, participatory culture, and media literacy.

This paper received First Class Honors at Trinity College, Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

https://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2014-02-08_michel-majerus/

502 W 22 Street
522 W 22 Street
526 W 22 Street
Opening Friday, February 7, 6:00 - 8:00 PM


Press Release
Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Michel Majerus, the next exhibition in his galleries at 502, 522, and 526 West 22nd Street. This will be the most comprehensive exhibition of Majerus’ work in the United States and the first in this country since his death in 2002.

The exhibition includes over twenty-five paintings and multimedia installations by the late Berlin-based artist, whose promising career was cut short by a plane crash at age 35. Majerus samples from popular culture and art history, redeploying canonical styles alongside graphics borrowed from youth subcultures and the commercial mainstream. More than any artist of his time, Majerus exemplifies what art historian Daniel Birnbaum calls “painting in the expanded field,” his prolific oeuvre reflecting the prepackaged newness and hybrid spaces of the Information Age. By incorporating the visual vocabularies of next-generation technologies and 1990s consumer culture, Majerus expands on the appropriation art of the 1980s through his pioneering use of digital methods of production, altering the very space of representation itself.

On view at 522 West 22nd street are fifteen of Majerus’s paintings made between 1994 and 2002. Large in scale and featuring bold colors that evoke both Minimalism and Pop, their stylistic quotations include excerpts from Warhol and Basquiat, video games and other pop-culture sources. The exhibition continues next door at 526 West 22nd Street with an installation of thirty-six small square paintings spontaneously executed in a variety of media, as well as larger enamel on aluminum paintings, whose sleek, spare surfaces portray familiar characters from the 1995 film Toy Story. Additionally, at 502 West 22nd Street are three examples from Majerus’s Tron series, which combine bright, monochromatic wall paintings with silkscreens on canvas.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hardcover publication with a conversation between Birnbaum and the artist John Kelsey.

Born in Luxembourg, Michel Majerus lived and worked in Berlin. In 1996 the Kunsthalle Basel organized a mid-career museum retrospective. Majerus participated in the Venice Biennale in 1999, where he covered the facade of the main Italian Pavilion with a mural he designed. Since his death, several European museums have organized exhibitions of his work including the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2003), the Tate Liverpool (2004), the Kunsthaus Graz (2005), and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2011).

Michel Majerus will open at the Matthew Marks Gallery at 502, 522, and 526 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) on February 7 and remain on view through April 19, 2014, Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For additional information, please contact Gilles Heno-Coe at
(212) 243-0200 or gilles@matthewmarks.com.

"We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept, and thought moves among abstractions. Our eyes have been reduced to instruments with which to identify and to measure; hence we suffer a paucity of ideas that can be expressed in images and in an incapacity to discover meaning in what we see. Naturally we feel lost in the presence of objects that make sense only to undeluted vision, and we seek refuge in the more familiar medium of words. ... The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened."
Rudolf Arnheim: Art and Visual Perception, 1974, p. 1

This is https://www.academia.edu/9984501/Queen_Elizabeth_I_meets_the_Boojum without text

Related: https://www.academia.edu/10429829/Seeing_Letters_Skulls_and_Faces

2015-04-10: Friendly license for using these comparisons: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)

2015-04-18: Father Time × 3

2016-05-08: Added one image (page 4)

In “Understanding Popular Culture” John Fiske describes the changing development of jeans as part of an ongoing interrelation of “excorporation” and “incorporation” (Fiske 1989). Whereas in the Sixties and Seventies appropriations of work clothes made jeans iconic within and beyond youth subcultures, in the following decades this development was picked up by the clothing industry as part of an economic inclusion that Fiske referred to as incorporation. By producing all kinds of jeans – from washed-out, strass decorated to ripped ones – the appropriation of industrially fabricated jeans by the people wearing them was rendered obsolete: individual appropriation was commodified and incorporated into the system of mass production. Similar processes have been observed in the appropriation of mobile technology as part of material culture (Katz 2006). Ways of customizing mobile phones by painting them, sharing parts of cases, decorating them with stickers have soon been adopted by producers of decorative cases and protective covers for smartphones in particular.
This paper will reevaluate these terms in the context of creative mobile software that allows for a simplified modification of existing digital material. Mid-level prosumer software like Photoshop or Corel Draw have been used for these kinds of formerly time-consuming popular appropriation (Jenkins 2006) throughout the last two decades – ranging from political satire to distortions and embellishment of private photography. This situation has significantly changed with the shift towards portable devices like smartphones and tablets in the last years. A substantial part of popular online culture is produced on mobile devices by means of specialized mobile apps. User-generated content on platforms like 9gag or instagram is thus shaped by an increasing standardization of modifications and effects such as meme-captions or color-filters. This tendency in digital popular culture is strongly linked to the simultaneously emerging mobile apps (e.g. Meme Generator, Vintage Photo Editor, ZombieBooth) that enable such automatized editing of images.
This paper will thus raise the question as how to grasp the shifting role of individual agency in digital participatory culture. What happens if individual appropriation becomes a mainstream practice? Understanding the automatization of digital appropriation practices (e.g. editing a family photo in a vintage style) as a kind of incorporation by web 2.0 business models, we can assess the implications of this for the cultural and commercial nature of “cultural software” (Manovich 2013) and user-generated content. A critical reevaluation of Fiske’s concept of incorporation will contribute to the changing role of material aspects of technology and its significance for the commercial inclusion of popular media practices.

References are among the most important contextual factors of art. This lecture scrutinizes several thematically based conceptual, motivational and compositional connections between various artworks.
Instead of being a systematic overview of cases and literature, it is structured only upon the references that I casually noticed or recalled during 2010 in order to illustrate the frequency, complexity and diversity of references in art and culture.

En découvrant Utopia, l'anglais Thomas More a réussi à rendre vraisemblable et désirable une organisation sociale jusqu'alors impensable. Il ne s'agissait pourtant pas dans son esprit d'un eu-topos, d'un pays heureux, mais plutôt d'une Utopia , d'un « pays de nulle part » tant il jugeait improbable l'existence d'un État si parfait (Servier, 1967). C'est toute l'ambiguïté et tout l'intérêt de cette notion réappropriée et détournée par de nombreux auteurs et chercheurs. L'utopie ne s'offre pas si facilement à l'interprétation et oscille entre la critique de l'existant et la mise en détails de son envers positif : un « monde parfait situé sur une frontière entre réel et irréel ». C'est sans doute ce qui explique la nouvelle fortune du mot dans les colloques, publications et conversation comme clé de lecture des mondes contemporains. La réflexion qui s'engage ici sur « les nouvelles utopies du faire et du commun dans l'espace public » s'inscrit dans une pensée en mouvement, en résonance avec le poète Edouard Glissant. Elle correspond à une envie de contrepied et un besoin d'entre-deux fécond, en réaction aux approches habituelles de l'utopie cristallisées autour de deux figures caricaturales : celle positive du projet d'une nouvelle société plus juste, plus fraternelle, plus généreuse et libératrice ou celle négative du projet contraignant, totalitaire, irréfléchi, inconséquent et peu sérieux (Paquot, 2007).
En s’inscrivant dans le monde réel, ces expérimentations in vivo, ces occupations, pratiques alternatives et luttes politiques localiséesmanifestations échappent aux qualificatifs de rêverie. Dans l’éprouver, le bricolage et la débrouille, elles échappent à la tentation totalitaire et au fantasme d’un homme parfait. Elles ont lieu. Elles sont autant de « lucioles », appelant à la résistance des lueurs des contre-pouvoirs face aux lumières puissantes du pouvoir. En expérimentant une utopie concrète, ces militants composent une nouvelle grammaire du vivre ensemble. Il n’est plus seulement question d’occuper, mais « d’être le territoire » . Elles sont autant « d’utopies du commun et du faire » qui permettent à celles et ceux qui y participent d’exister, c’est-à-dire à « avoir sa tenue hors de soi, dans l’ouverture » et aux autres d’imaginer un sens, une voie. Utopiste debout.

The aim of this article is to highlight the strategies of defamiliarisation of Canadian English adopted by the contemporary Métis writer, Maria Campbell, in her story ‘Jacob’ (1995). Campbell appropriates and re-maps Canadian English into an ‘alterNative’ variety that can translate the memories of her nation while retaining traces of the colonial trauma: ‘Village English’, as the writer de nes this new code, constitutes an example of the creative transformation of Canadian English and shows its ability to ‘carry’ the weight of Indigenous cultural memory.

A failed plagiarism becomes a solo internet dérive. Beginning with a pdf of McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto, the artist records his drift through internet vectors. The text serves as a partial cognitive map of content and capital as well as history of collective creation and commodification stretching from the 15th century to the present day.

This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study that looks at how creativity plays a role in the repair and reuse of objects in the home. We are interested in a particular form of creativity that manifests in the everyday – what John Dewey [8] describes as a constant doing and undergoing, as we actively adjust to everyday situations. The goal of this study is to show evidence of repair as not only an act of restoration, but also as an act of creativity that entails the repurposing and resourcing of objects. This study is part of a larger research initiative known as the Everyday Design, where it is believed that everyone is a designer and that design is an ongoing activity that includes the repair, modification, and appropriation of design objects and systems. Furthermore, this study serves as baseline research for future investigations in how to inform the design of technologies whose lifecycle can be extended for various contexts of use through repair.

Reference spadaju među najznačajnije kontekstualne činioce umetničkog delovanja. Ovo predavanje razmatra nekoliko tematski grupisanih konceptualnih, motivskih i kompozicionih veza između različitih umetničkih dela.
Umesto sistematskog pregleda repro-materijala i literature, predavanje sam zasnovao samo na primerima koje sam zapazio tokom letnjeg semestra 2010 nekoliko meseci da bih ilustrovao učestalost, složenost i višeznačnost referiranja u umetnosti i kulturi.