“Duchamp taught us many things, one of which is that an artist enters into a relationship with language as soon as he or she nominates an art work as such. This is especially the case with contemporary appropriation-based practices, in which the act of repurposing materials presupposes a discursive engagement with them. The ontological status of an appropriated object, image or text, now operating as “Art,” is already given over to the discursive. The relationships between authorship and ownership, craft labor and intellectual labor, artistic autonomy and social agency—these are just some of the threads that are bound up with every appropriating magazine cutout, flatbed scan, or screen capture.”
— From a comprehensive recent essay on appropriation by Nate Harrison “What is Transformative?” in The Enemy Reader
Images (in order) by Sigmar Polke Familie I (1964); John Stezaker Love IX (2006); Sigmar Polke Girlfriends (1965/6); Paul Schiek O’Shields, from Dead Men Don’t Look Like Me (2012); Paul Schiek Underwood from Dead Men DOn’t Look Like Me (2012); John Stezaker Betrayal XVIII (2012)
