Appropriation is the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of preexisting images and objects. It is a strategy that has been used by artists for millennia but, took on new significance in mid-20th-century America and Britain with the rise of consumerism and the proliferation of popular images through mass media outlets from magazines to television.
Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, and Roy Lichtenstein reproduced, juxtaposed, or repeated mundane, everyday images from popular culture—both absorbing and acting as a mirror for the ideas, interactions, needs, desires, and cultural elements of the times. As Warhol stated, “Pop artists did images that anyone walking down the street would recognise in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s pants, celebrities, refrigerators, Coke bottles.” Today, appropriating, remixing, and sampling images and media is common practice for visual, media, and performance artists, yet such strategies continue to challenge traditional notions of originality and test the boundaries of what it means to be an artist.
I liked the simplicity of these appropriated images. So to start I picked two heavily discussed topics (racism and feminism) to bring to a simple idea. I took two magazine covers from a popular magazine “TIME” and cut out the faces of a white woman and a black man replacing them with solid colours and the common female and male symptoms.
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