Agitprop
“Agitprop . . . refers to the term for agitation and propaganda historically associated with the dissemination of communist ideas” (16). Evans associates the “French film directors Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin (known as the Dziga Vertov group) and the Cuban Santiago Alvarez” (16) with communist agitprop. “This section uses the term agitprop expansively to also embrace work that has no explicitly communist agenda. Two texts [in this section] relate to the mass movement that emerged in the U.S. in the late 1960s in opposition to the war in Vietnam” (17)—Godard and Gorin’s Inquest on an Image (1972) and Susan Stoops’ Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home (1967-2004) (2007).
Martha Rosler, Gladiators (2004), Photomontage.
The Situationist Legacy“The situationist International (1957-1972) was a neo-Marxist organization, committed to a revolutionary politics that it assumed to be absent in the postwar French Communist Party. The Situationist Legacy thus overlaps with Agitprop, but the decision was made to have a separate section because of the pervasiveness of Situationist ideas in contemporary art” (17). Appropriation art themes: film (Guy Debord), hijacking (Johan Grimonprez): “the history of aeroplane hijacking (détournement d’un avion) [and] . . . the hijacking or détournement of television news footage” (17).
Simulation
“The title Simulation acknowledges the influence of Jean Baudrillard in 1980s New York” (18). This section includes “an extract from [Douglas] Crimp’s catalogue essay for ‘Pictures’ (1977); [Jean] Baudrillard on ‘the desert of the real’ (1981); Sherrie Levine’s ‘Statement’ (1982) that re-works Barthes famous declaration about the death of the author and the birth of the reader; a conversation between [Richard] Prince and [Peter] Halley that signals the shared concerns of artists associated with Metro Pictures and Sonnabend gallery, respectively (1984); and catalogue essays from Endgame (1986)” (18).
An art whose strategies are thus grounded in the literal temporality and presence of theater has been the crucial formulating experiences for a group of artists currently beginning to exhibit in New York. The extent to which this experience fully pervades their work is not, however, immediately apparent, for its theatrical dimensions have been transformed and, quite unexpectedly, reinvested in the pictorial image. If many of these artists can be said to have been apprenticed in the field of performance as it is issued from Minimalism, they have nevertheless begun to reverse its priorities, making of the literal situation and duration of the performed event a tableau whose presence and temporality are utterly psychologized; performance becomes just one of a number of ways of ‘staging’ a picture. Thus the performances of Jack Goldstein do not, as had usually been the case, involve the artist’s performing the work, but rather the presentation of an even in such a manner and at such a distance that it is apprehended as representation – representation not, however conceived as the re-presentation of that which is prior, but as the unavoidable condition of intelligibility of even that which is present. (Crimp, Pictures, 1979).Feminist Critique
“The Feminist Critique section focuses on two ideas that first emerged during the 1970s: that visual culture is one of the principal sites where gender relations are produced and reproduced; and that mainstream accounts of the modern author or artist inevitably foreground men of genius. Both ideas have informed a range of appropriationist strategies to unfix the fixed. Frequently this work has involved dealing with media stereotypes, and the 1982 statement by Barbara Kruger draws attention to the danger of parodic intent being overwhelmed by the power of cliché” (18).
Postcolonialism
“Appropriation was integral to colonialism. Not surprisingly, therefore, a major theme in the texts represented in the Postcolonialism section is the re-taking of that which was possessed without authority” (19). Appropriation art themes: “reproductions of postcards from colonial Algeria . . . depicting Algerian women in various alluring poses, veiled and unveiled, where were mass produced to be sent to metropolitan France;” “the importance of return;” Kobena Mercer’s “collage-based worked . . . marked by the ‘cross-cultural dynamics of a Creole aesthetic of migration and translation’;” an essay by Okwui Enwezor’s in which he writes about how the “Creole experience is presented as a paradigm for a global culture based on complex mixing and hybridization” (20); and Robert Fisk’s description of the “occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979 . . . when the Muslim revolutionaries erected a large painting based on Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of US marines taking Iwo Jima” (20).
Postcommunism
“In 1991, East German poet and playwright Heiner Mueller introduced a conference on John Heartfield and photomontage that was one of the last events organized by the East German Academy of the Arts before it was forcibly merged with its Western counterpart. Mueller’s remarks had a valedictory quality that forms a background to the Postcommunism section” (20). A “major motif in recent postcommunist art [is] a subjective appropriation of the official culture imposed by the former Soviet Union at home and abroad” (20).
Postproduction
“The term Postproduction, within the media, describes various forms of editing that convert raw footage into a finished product. Within contemporary art, the term signals the ideas of critic-curator Nicolas Bourriaud. His Postproduction: culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world (2002) is an account of art in the 1990s that seeks to foreground new types of appropriation” (20).
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