The After-Party: The Concealment of Appropriation in Contemporary Art

Once a defining aspect of postmodernism, appropriation has retreated from the foreground of art parlance. With the dissolution of postmodernism, reconstruction has overtaken ironic quotation, and quotation has become a habit. Given that appropriation no longer constitutes a critically explicit subject of art, this investigation addresses the manner with which appropriation is still broadly exploited by artists and the commercial world alike in order to unearth low frequency emotional ties. Formerly served as an assault on prototype forms, appropriation now paradoxically provides a means for extending a prototype's qualities. With this in mind, an interdisciplinary production methodology that deliberately conceals otherwise recognizable appropriated elements using a data- matching methodology is demonstrated as possessing the potential to evoke a “ghostly feeling of familiarity” as opposed to any specific historical or ironic distance from prototype forms. Emphasizing the paradoxical implications of reemploying an anti-aesthetic strategy to the production of new works, an “agnostic” approach is presented as a register of the complex dilemma of “carrying on”.