ABSTRACT
Appropriation is a familiar term in art history, music theory, literary, and cultural studies, but one seldom used by architectural historians. The term “appropriation art” is commonly used to refer to the work of 1980s artists like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, who rephotographed famous photographs and then exhibited them. But we can consider also the cubists and bricoleurs of the early twentieth century – figures like George Braque and Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp – as appropriation artists in their use of ready-mades. Pop artists like Andy Warhol used appropriation in a slightly different register, referencing consumer imagery to conflate and complicate the boundaries of high and low art. Musicians, writers, filmmakers, and fashion designers of the last half century have constructed entirely new genres based on sampling and quotation: think of William Burroughs’s “cut up” method, Grandmaster Flash’s pioneering hip-hop events, or more recently DJ Mouse’s iconic splicing of the Beatles with Jay-Z in “The Grey Album,” anything by Girl Talk, and everything from Quentin Tarantino. But what is the architectural version of appropriation? And why do we use the term here? To appropriate is to borrow, to reclaim, to rethink. Although the source material may be different for architects than for artists, the conceptual operation is the same. We employ appropriation for the emphasis on technique – on the agency of the artist or architect in reconfiguring an earlier work – but also for the intentionality embedded in the transformation. To appropriate is to self-consciously reference, and then deliberately reframe or “re-see.”
