Topic

After one lesson with Lisa I was really intrigued with this quote :

Sherrie Levine, “Statement,” 1982

“The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and crash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Péchuchet [characters in a Flaubert novel], we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.  Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting’s meaning lies not in its origins, but in its destination. The birth of theviewer must be at the cost of the painter.”

I used to think that our world is so crowded with things, knowledge, even people that to find something pure, new, unique is really hard, maybe even impossible. In her statement Sherrie Levine (1982) said that “we can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.” I strongly agree with her and that is why I looked for more information about her and her statement. This is how I stumbled upon Appropriation (art). After a bit of reading about it I decided to choose this idea as my topic.