After
All is an art exhibition that opened on
the 11th 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.
