Appropriation is a technique used in art and is often defined as, “the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them”. The image to the right is an example of the use of appropriation. The Composition with Fruit, Guitar and Glass. Made in 1912 by Pablo Picasso. This technique has been used throughout art history and has made a significant impact in literary, visual, musical and performing arts. Throughout this reading, appropriation is used in the digital age. Many people would argue that this changes the true definition of art and they would question if this is really art anymore. I think the reading really brought to life how today’s society is and how it is affecting everything around us. Especially something that has been around for centuries, like art. For example, Social media. It is a huge issue today. It takes away from what use to be cherished back then. Whether it was art works, or nature around
us. In the past it was about living in the moment. But now, people’s lives are “fake”. This reading ties into the previous reading, Zombie Manifesto. We basically live in a society where we are Zombies. We are not really living life. For example, Facebook. Your life on Facebook shows only the good things that happen and you don’t see the hardships. We rely way too much on our phones. Our lives revolve around it. Everything we do is a representation of something. Sort of like a spectacle. This can be defined as, “Images produced by and for capitalist project.t image put out there that alienates people’s actions and respons
e”. A spectacle doesn’t capture reality. You are able to put up representations at will. Again, Facebook. It is not real life because no one sees the struggles that you may be going through. It is just a digital representation. All you are able to see is the “perfect” life. There is a diversion between the idea of concrete visibility. How it diverts from the spectacle, brought up as a style of art. Cindy Sherman used images and film and reproduced the piece also including herself. This was appropriation but also determinant. She makes a point about how society is undermining women. This image is related to the 
idea of “high art”, Post Modern. Bill Viola-Silent Mountain (2001). It ,”exemplifies a ‘truly creative’ engagement with digital technology that reworks perception and ushers in a new age of image-making, thereby reconfiguring the ‘correlation of the human with the technical’ and exploiting ‘the potential of information to enlarge the scope of the human grasp over the material world”.
https://vmi.instructure.com/courses/1391/files/53902/download?wrap
http://arthistory.about.com/od/glossary_a/a/a_appropriation.htm
http://nypost.com/2014/10/10/walking-dead-makes-confident-return-with-season-5-premiere/
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/photography/Cindy-Sherman.html
man flesh. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from
Haitian folklore where a zombie is a dead body animated by magic. Modern depictions of zombies do not necessarily involve magic but invoke other methods such as a virus”. Zombies are the face of Capitalism. They mock our mortality. “The zombies embody the classic Marxist critiques of capitalism. The heartless creatures mindlessly devour resources (i.e. human brains) in the same way that capitalism pursues profit for its own sake”. Capitalisms main goal is to dominate. Always unsatisfied needing to expand, needing more in order to sustain itself. This relates to art in a sense that a lot of the works today are meaningless and empty. They are created just for fame with no real purpose or underlying meaning to it. It all leads to society and how much it has changed. When todays art works are viewed there is a sense of mindless to it. In todays society, it is all about fame and wealth. Greed is consuming the world. Most individuals are never really satisfied with what they have. They always want more and more until there’s nothing left. Exactly like both Capitalism and Zombies. “Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed…” Karl Marx 
em. Because of Elisson, people just noticed something that has been there all along. It really makes you take a step back and look at things differently. The Weather Project was another one of his creations. Eliasson used the open space of the gallery’s Turbine Hall. He used humidifiers to create mist while having a huge “circular disk made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light”. The walls were covered with mirrors, “which allowed the visitors to see themselves as tiny black shadows against a mass of orange light. Many visitors responded to this exhibition by lying on their backs and waving their hands and legs”. This is exactly the reaction Eliasson wanted to get from his viewers. “The Weather project is a work about an audience living in a counterfeit environment, mesmerized by dematerialization, tricked by the duplicated space, and subject to its own perception. Once the clouds dissipate the mirrors reflect the image of the viewers beneath caught in the act of seeing”. Eliasson’s art focused on “perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self”. These are the main ideas that drove his works and made them what they are today.
n what is considered art and what is considered craft. “Throughout her work, Reichek uses the textile to help scrutinize alternative cultural perspectives”. Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian artist, made a special cloth named Batik cloth. “Since the mid- 1990s, his work has depicted clothed copulating couples, aliens, ballerinas, and the sails of sla
ve ships all reworked in wax resist cloth”. This cloth was imported but Indonesia did not accept it and soon found its way to West Africa. “Today wax resist cloth is a symbol of national pride associated with independence of the West African nations gained in the late 1950s through the 1970s, but this, too, is a ‘new’ tradition”. Susan Stockwell was a British artist who has a unique way of depicting art. She often used coffee filters, rubber, paper currency. “Materials that allude to the physical excess of our contemporary lives appe
ar in re-creations of maps and dresses that refer to colonial-era expansion and trade.Trayne uses coffee filters to create a life-sized woman’s dress with a pronounced bustle. The filters remind us that the wealth behind the ownership of luxury clothing came directly from the trade of materials such as tea and coffee.” There was a famous piece of work called the Pattern of the World that used paper dressmaking with a pattern of sta
ined tea. “It provided us with yet another version of the scramble for Africa. To adapt the pattern to the wearer’s size, coincide with the tip of the African continent to provide yet another interpretation of the arbitrary madness that went into the creation of he contemporary African map. Stockwell seems to be telling us that skirts can be lengthened and shortened. Continents cannot, and should not”. Textiles can be used in many different ways to depict different meanings. Artists often use textiles to communicate a complicated idea. It can also be used to represent a culture. “The beauty of the textile is often deployed as a visual seduction used to package challenging narratives”.
ing photographed”. Gursky’s art, “largely focused on the industrial and technological possibilities of globalisation, he uses digital manipulation to bend our sense of perception to the outer edge of credibility, creating a world we recognise but also one which is partially imagined and not yet realised”. The way both Gursky and Sekula approached their art work, highlighting the different ways Globalisaion can be understood is what set them apart 
from one another. Some people would agree that the Global justice movement has tested capitalism. Allan Sekula, on the other hand, “focused on the limits of globalisation. Following the deterritorialised flow of capital, he focuses on the wave of industrialisation in the developing world which has relocated old technologies into this new context. Within the two worlds of Globalisation, Sekulachooses to focus on the one inhabited by the poor, the marginalised and the dispossessed”. Gursky’s art depicts a world in a sense that is still to come while Sekula’s work depicts a world that has already passed. “The multitude is in a process of becoming by invoking a world that is not (yet). ‘Another World is Possible'”. With art work, there is always a deeper meaning. The struggles that are conveyed in these pieces of artwork solicits the possibility of a world becoming. It conveys hope among all things.
on today. He believed “social relations are vanishing as communication becomes restricted”. In the reading Bourriaud mentioned how art has changed. He had said art was intended to prepare and announce a future world. But today, it is modeling possible universes. He makes a valid point about the Old Avant Garde versus the New, “The old avant-gardes, Bourriaud tells us, were oriented toward conflict and social struggle; relieved of this dogmatic radical antagonism and macro-focus on the global system, relational-alleviational art “is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences. The new relational avant-gardistes “are not naïve or cynical enough ‘to go about things as if’ the radical and universalist utopia were still on the agenda”. In my opinion, the way society is today has a huge impact on art in many different ways. Today, technology plays a massive part in our lives which takes away from things that use to matter. Art created an “escape” and created a voice for individuals. It was a way to bring people together and to connect on the same level. The way both art and society was, there was one goal and one “dream” of how the future would be. But now, art and society couldn’t be more divergent.
tshine him/her. It is a constant competition between artists. But I will say that art is not like a game in a sense that art has no rules. There are no boundaries for art. For example, ‘Fountain’ by Duchamp. “Fountain is an example of what Duchamp called a ‘ready made’, an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art. It epitomises the assault on convention and good taste for which he and the Dada movement are best known”. The purpose of Relational Aesthetics is to explore art by fabricating moments or encounters. Bourriaud saw artists as, “facilitators rather than makers. He regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world”.
ith the works the artists produced. Appropriation was the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. “Appropriation artists wants the viewer to recognize the images they copy, and they hope that the viewer will bring all of his/her original associations with the image to the artist’s new context, be it a painting, a sculpture, a collage, a combine or an entire installation”.
Burden would do what most people would never dare to do. He would endure pain, which is what most people try to avoid. “Chris Burden’s seemingly outrageous performances were in fact authentically intentioned. His art explores the nature of suffering by setting up extreme situations that he, himself, has to endure. Theoretically, a viewer can interrupt the work at any point, but usually they do not; thus, his work challenges viewers themselves to act – both within the sphere of his art and within the larger context of humanity in general” -the art story.
d dead American soldiers in Vietnam and the general dominance of violence in media imagery”- the art story. 
