Lauren Perkins

Within my practice, I explore and investigate appropriation art through a feminist perspective. As it is my belief that reiterative practice exemplifies the notion that art should not adhere to any obligatory need to create the ‘new’ or ‘original’. The intent of my work is to jettison the outmoded concepts of originality and authorship, through the adoption of pre-existing material. However, I also wish to highlight and speak to the sensibilities of a historically gender biased art society. Whilst many do not recognize the art world as being a patriarchal system containing gender inequalities; a 2017 article by the Guardian found that female artists account for just 4% of the National Gallery of Scotland’s collection, 20% of Whitworth Manchester’s and 35% of Tate Modern’s collections. [Petersen, 2017]

 

When reading critically on the subject of appropriation, I engage and consolidate my thoughts with the poststructuralist text of Ronald Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’, and Michael Foucault’s ‘What is an Author’. I debate the role and relevance of the author in conjunction with the modernist myth of artistic ‘genius’ throughout my work, utilising the aforementioned texts as an aid within my exploration. Additionally, I re-examine some of the issues spoken about in Linda Nochlin’s, 1971 writing, ‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’ and Hilston Kramer’s, ‘Does Feminism Conflict with Artistic Standards?’. I explore their suggested notion, which proposes there have been no ‘great’ women artists despite the abundance of female artists but rather due to societal conditioning of what ‘greatness’ is. How could there be ‘great’ women artists when the merit of their work is judged by a preexisting system, created and delegated by men? The following critical reading has informed and inspired my work, helping to propel my concepts in a progressive manner. My work poses a thought-provoking narrative because if artwork created by female artists is deemed to be substandard, due to a biased system in favour of male counterparts, how does this system respond when a female artist copies a male-authored artwork, praised for its ‘artistic genius’?  If we are to devalue its status, claiming it cannot be ‘genius’ as it’s a replication, then we must re-evaluate the so-called modern masters like Duchamp and Warhol, whose status is built upon the use of pre-existing materials.

 

Over the past year, my body of work has consisted of framing, altering, cropping and recreating a vast number of acclaimed male-authored artworks, in doing so I am attempting to represent the historical state of the art world with regard to what it considers ‘great’ or ‘artistic genius’. My most recent endeavor centers on appropriating Franz Kline’s painting Untitled (1910-1962) in a multitude of forms, from obvious replications to obscured appropriations. How the viewer feels when viewing my work as opposed to Kline’s is significant conceptual factor within my work. I want the viewer to feel fooled and begin to doubt themselves and their ability to know ‘great’ when they cannot tell the two apart. I intend to create this reactive chain, of thinking and rethinking, evaluating and re-evaluating, and ultimately to question the engendering of genius and masterpiece. We must ask ourselves if we feel differently about the work if it’s not by the author we initially thought it was, can we still admire it in the same way? And ultimately ‘What matter who’s speaking?’ [Foucault, 1969 p.314]