THE PURLOINED PHOTO
When you come right down to it, the act of appropriation is a sophisticated kind of filching (a number of contemporary artist have got in trouble for blatant copping someone's copyrighted image). But if used with good sense and honesty, it is a fruitful way to gather a cultural moment without laborious reconstructive methods. The theft is most often justified by the artist who uses it by the immediacy gained: the stolen article instantly conveys the aesthetic aura of its time and place, and perhaps even the fullness -- or meagerness, which can be such a source of irony -- of its emotional temper. A handmade facsimile, no matter how well crafted, tends to reveal its genesis in the artist's hand, showing itself to be a falsehood perhaps worse than an outright lifting of an image. A photograph especially cannot readily be duplicated by hand without giving itself away, if not by some slight flaw in the painterly translation then by the artist's eagerness to tell the world how skillful is his deceit.
In any case, the lifting of ready-made images is a powerful tool with which to build a potent network of crisscrossing cultural strains from multiple sources. It is a way to mine memory through the images of a past time. In Truman Capote's marvelous phrase, it is a way to get in touch with those "ghosts in the sunlight," those long-dead characters that still reverberate in the present. Contemporary art, at the moment at least, has an urgent need for such cultural strains in order to disrupt the complacent flow of contemporary life.
Mostly I use the appropriated photograph -- what I prefer to call the "purloined photo," because "purloined" doesn't shade the truth about what is going on and also because it has a delightful old-fashioned sound in comparison with the high-minded, academic, oh-so-cool "appropriation"-- to push back into another time, gather up its odd or corrupted message and drag it into the present. Obviously, I must give it a new context or it will have no life as a work of my own. I like to dislodge the pull of nostalgia in my '50s pinups or in the even older vintage photographs of nudes I sometimes use by pitting the found image against something contrary, something that will cause an unsettling friction. In this way I attempt to create a convincing conjunction of subject-matter and the formal arrangement, not always an easy task because of the photograph's tendency to establish its own assertive environment. In Memorial To A Happy Man, for example (above, left), I overlaid the doubled nude with a poem by the 17th century poet Robert Herrick--a happy man if there ever was one--so that I might further jumble time and let the ironic clash of Herrick's wit and the dreary eroticism of the photograph form the contemporary voice of the piece.
In any case, the lifting of ready-made images is a powerful tool with which to build a potent network of crisscrossing cultural strains from multiple sources. It is a way to mine memory through the images of a past time. In Truman Capote's marvelous phrase, it is a way to get in touch with those "ghosts in the sunlight," those long-dead characters that still reverberate in the present. Contemporary art, at the moment at least, has an urgent need for such cultural strains in order to disrupt the complacent flow of contemporary life.
Mostly I use the appropriated photograph -- what I prefer to call the "purloined photo," because "purloined" doesn't shade the truth about what is going on and also because it has a delightful old-fashioned sound in comparison with the high-minded, academic, oh-so-cool "appropriation"-- to push back into another time, gather up its odd or corrupted message and drag it into the present. Obviously, I must give it a new context or it will have no life as a work of my own. I like to dislodge the pull of nostalgia in my '50s pinups or in the even older vintage photographs of nudes I sometimes use by pitting the found image against something contrary, something that will cause an unsettling friction. In this way I attempt to create a convincing conjunction of subject-matter and the formal arrangement, not always an easy task because of the photograph's tendency to establish its own assertive environment. In Memorial To A Happy Man, for example (above, left), I overlaid the doubled nude with a poem by the 17th century poet Robert Herrick--a happy man if there ever was one--so that I might further jumble time and let the ironic clash of Herrick's wit and the dreary eroticism of the photograph form the contemporary voice of the piece.
Prices for the smaller archival prints and cut paper pieces are $300 to $600, depending on the complexity of the image. The one work on canvas, Porno Girl, is $900