"...Every exploration is an appropriation." - Roland Barthes

After All is an art exhibition that opened on the 11^th of May, at Royaat Gallery, Lahore. The curator of the show, Quddus Mirza has grouped around fourteen works by eight artists in this exhibition on the theme of appropriation. I must admit that the theme of the show did motivate me to head all the way to the mall road in the scorching heat on a Saturday afternoon. I was excited to see how these artists have substituted the voices of others for their own.

Appropriation is the legal term for the practice of reworking images from well-known paintings, photographs, etc., as one's own work. Inherent in the process of appropriation is the fact that the new work recontextualizes whatever it borrows to create the new work, in most cases the original 'thing' remains accessible as the original. Of course, appropriation in art is nothing new, art practice has a long tradition of borrowing, adopting and recycling styles and forms from what came before, but what is interesting here is the relationship of authorship between the artist and the art work, although there is no doubt about the fact that appropriation art is, indeed, art, and that those who practice it are the authors of their works, but it does violate the traditional conception of authorship. The term ‘appropriation art’ became a genre in the 80s, especially with Sherrie Lewine’s work which consists of famous Walker Evans photographs, rephotographed by Lewine out of an exhibition catalog, and then presented as her own with no further manipulation of the images. The Estate of Walker Evans saw it as copyright infringement, and acquired Lewine's works to prohibit their sale. Such practice is often termed as neo-conceptual art.

After a long prologue to appropriation, I’ll now return to After All. My first reaction; the space did not suit the number and size of the works displayed. It’s a ridiculously small space for hanging fourteen works, most of which were large, and the works certainly demanded more attention to hanging – a possibly good exhibition sadly marred by the size of the gallery, it was extremely difficult to appreciate the works, some were even hanging in the office among landscape paintings encased in massive gold frames that were certainly not part of the show. However, few of the works did stand out.

Far from undermining the concept of authorship in art, Ayaz Jokhio’s This is not Magritte’s Painting, in fact reaffirmed and strengthened it. Like Lewine, by simply painting a precise copy of Magritte’s This is not a Pipe and claiming it as his own, while openly acknowledging that it is a copy, Jokhio poses a certain kind of challenge to the concept of authorship. This is certainly not a Magritte painting because it is a painting of a Magritte painting. Its very simplicity and multiple ambiguities that are very much intentional work very well for the painting, but it reproduces what the original work by Magritte, titled This is not a Pipe, does. Isn’t recontextualizing a necessary condition for appropriation? Magritte’s This not a Pipe is of course, only a picture of a pipe, a painting, a representation, does not represent a pipe but something else, it isn’t the true pipe but it nevertheless refers to a pipe, but not a pipe to be smoked – opposing and resembling the pipe at the same time. It speaks of separation between linguistic signs and plastic elements, also, it speaks of belief, resemblance and affirmation confronted by denial/negation and disbelief. The work is transformed from visual to text while emphasizing the abstraction of reality.

Amber Hammad’s Mona Lisa and Maryam, challenge ideas of originality, drawing attention to relations between power, gender and creativity, consumerism and commodity value, the social sources and uses of art, and the ways in which context affects the viewing of pictures. Reproduced as a large print, she assumes the central space in history by replacing Mona Lisa with her own image, where as, Maryam refers to the images of the Virgin Mary produced/reproduced in numerous history paintings. Maryam is a photograph of a woman, clad in a burqa, carrying a child with magazines and baby-wipes sitting next to her, while the arch in the background symbolizes the Islamic architecture. Both are an attempt to claim authority over history of art and women, attuned to trace histories, memories and the layers of influences, also blurring the frontiers between truth and falsehood. Hammad’s use of camera takes these instances of enactments/impersonations away from a live occurrence to an evidentiary object questioning the nature of truth/reality in constructed representations while “photography guises the directorial into documentary” (Crimp Douglas).

Imran Channa’s Badshahnama series and Making of the History series, is a collage of images from historical references such as; the most celebrated history of Mughal Kings in Badshahnama, cut and paste to form a pattern of decontextuaized/displaced imagery, reshaping, distorting or perhaps revealing the manipulations/questioning the authenticity of historical references, reducing them to hallucinatory fictions.

            Here's the rub: if artists are going to appropriate, they need to "add to" that which they appropriate. Attitude and intention count for much in this genre. Irony, metaphor, condition, counterpoint, or even artistic flair can make appropriation into reconceptualized art.