Subject to revision.

Amid dozens of artworks stridently addressing the politics of identity at the infamously "PC" 1993 Whitney Biennial, Glenn Ligon's Notes on the Margin of the Black Book took a more elliptical and ambiguous approach. This elegantly conceived structural amendment to Robert Mapplethorpe's original Black Book consisted of two rows of individually framed images, appropriated directly from the photographer's controversial series of black male nudes. In the newly expanded "margin" between the photographs, Ligon inserted all manner of uniformly typed texts on race and sexuality, appropriated from heretofore unrelated commentators, ranging from high theorists and articulate drag queens to conservative politicians and zealous evangelists. Yet what Ligon was really inserting into the margins was himself. Insisting on the double connotation of "margin," he slyly suggested that as a black, gay artist, he'd always been there anyway, and perhaps we'd all do well to shift our attention to the sidelines. And it was there that he claimed a space in which his own ambivalent desires, identifications, and resistances might circulate among the desires, identifications, and resistances of others: not so much within the pirated images as between them.

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Ligon's intervention revealed a potentially deep connection between appropriative practices and investigations of identity, a link that was overlooked during the important early phase of theorizing appropriation in the '80s--especially as far as an artist like Mapplethorpe was concerned. For if Ligon was able to see in Mapplethorpe's work a latent point de resistance at the height of the identity-driven art of the '90s, such potential had not always been obvious. On this point, in 1982, Douglas Crimp, now considered one of the foremost theorists on subjectivity and representation, penned a short essay that he later deemed necessary to amend. Crimp's text, "Appropriating Appropriation," was an attempt to establish and then contrast two types of appropriative strategies: a modernist appropriation of style and a postmodernist appropriation of material. (1) Crimp deemed the first mode conservative, aligned as it was with traditions of "aesthetic mastery." The second was heralded as deconstructive, able, however briefly, to interrupt such modernist discourses. Crimp chose Robert Mapplethorpe and Sherrie Levine to flesh out his argument. Mapplethorpe, he argued, provided an example of the first kind of appropriation since--despite the sometimes explicit content of much of his photography--he appropriated numerous stylistic devices from prewar studio photography (whether Vogue fashion spreads or neoclassical nudes). Levine, on the other hand, undermined modern myths of mastery by baldly re-presenting high-art images without the camouflage of "originality." Rather than join a filial chain of creative genius by taking up and subtly transforming (or even actively refuting) the work of previous generations, she performed a kind of stopgap measure, disabling the smooth mechanisms of artistic legacy.

Looking back on this essay a decade later (coincidentally enough, in the same year that Ligon reread the Black Book), Crimp saw that he had neglected the relevance of Levine's position as a female artist who typically seized on allegorical images of those society deemed "Others." (2) But even more surprising to the author in retrospect was a radical element of Mapplethorpe's practice that had remained to him as invisible as Poe's purloined letter, hidden in full view. "What I failed to notice in 1982," Crimp writes in the introductory essay for On the Museum's Ruins, "was what Jesse Helms could not help but notice in 1989: that Mapplethorpe's work interrupts tradition in a way that Levine's does not." (3) That interruption, Crimp continued, had nothing to do with Mapplethorpe's style, which had seemed to him so cozily aligned with tradition, nor did it depend on appropriating the literal material of other art, as in Levine's approach. Rather, Mapplethorpe's radical interruption was defined by what his images facilitated outside the frame: how they "momentarily rendered the male spectator a homosexual subject," thus offering the possibility for an active, political, self-defining (defining through desiring) representation of gay subculture. (4)

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My reason for rehearsing Crimp's critical double take is relatively simple. In the 1980s, appropriation came to be seen as one particularly effective means to reveal the working mechanisms of various cultural, social, and psychic institutions--and thus considerations of subjectivity and identity necessarily surfaced in such deconstructive terrain. Yet these latter exposes, in contrast to those directed at the museum, the media, or structures of signification, were apparently much harder for critics, artists, and audiences to see. In fact, an episode similar to Crimp's transpired for Craig Owens, whose canonical essay "The Discourse of Others" recounts his initial blindness to sexual difference in Laurie Anderson's 1979 Americans on the Move. (In part 2 of "The Allegorical Impulse," his discussion of the semiotic ambiguity of the raised-arm gesture for "hello" in one of Anderson's slides failed to note that the erect arm of the gesturer--a nude male--could be read in more obvious ways.) (5) But why this blindness? Was Crimp's queer eye eclipsed by the imperatives of institutional critique, and Owens's feminism temporarily trumped by his role as poststructuralist? Were such critical identities not simultaneously habitable? Were considerations of identity and subjectivity seen as incompatible with more "rigorously" critical enterprises?

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As it turns out, such overdetermined exclusions of race, gender, and sexuality were not the only omissions to be made in the name of a properly critical definition of appropriation in the early '80s. Pop art suffered an even more direct disavowal at the hands of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in his seminal 1982 essay "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art." (6) In that text, Buchloh took pains to reject Pop as a precursor for a number of up-and-coming artists (interestingly enough, all women, though gender is not addressed by the author), including Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Martha Rosler. Instead, he assigned them an overtly political bloodline--Dada, Productivism, and, later, institutional critique--while completely dismissing Pop as so many "well balanced and well-tempered modes of appropriation, and the successful synthesis of relative radicality and relative conventionality." (7)

Yet to refuse Pop--itself considered by some the prodigal offspring of Dada--any significant place in the history of analytical appropriation is to equate arguably "well-tempered" Pop objects too quickly with some of Pop's more far-reaching, insurgent effects, as well as to assume that a pose of ambiguity holds no promise of critical return. In this regard, one should consider in particular Warhol, since no other artist so successfully synthesized (and thus confused) the radical and the conventional and since his example is a key to any investigation of the intersection between appropriation and subjectivity (a topic, it should be said, that falls outside the parameters of Buchloh's project). It is often argued that Warhol's concept of subjectivity rendered all subjects nonsubjects, merely "one-dimensional," interchangeable goods. Yet even if (or perhaps because) this is the case, he revealed all identity, including that of the avant-garde, to be perpetually shifting and always for sale, at once constructed and devoured by social and economic forces. While this formulation hardly suggests much subversive potential at first glance, its fundamental turn away from the fiction of stable, normative subjectivity offers some compelling alternatives, particularly to those who actively read themselves as already outside or between the frames of conventional reference. To take just one example, Richard Meyer has recently argued that Warhol took up the very structure of postwar capitalism--its logic of repetition and difference--as a kind of sly metaphor for identity, and, in particular, gay male identity. (8) His camp sensibility and at times homoerotic code reframed "identity" simultaneously as an index of complicit consumerism and as a potential vehicle for resisting social norms.

It was precisely this ambiguous criticality that compelled Buchloh to cut Pop's limb from appropriation's family tree. For if Pop objects operated as so many "delicate constructs of compromise" (to adopt one of Buchloh's phrases), then it would surely undo any "clean" master narrative of decidedly political art--emphasizing instead the ambivalent, even duplicitous nature that is, in fact, inherent in every act of appropriation. (9) So too with considerations of race, sexuality, and gender, which, as evidenced by Crimp and Owens, show how localized identity and subjectivity threatened the comprehensive gamuts of poststructuralist approaches and institutional critique. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Freudian concept of identity is itself defined by compromise, in that the self is produced and maintained by the balanced assimilation and rejection of the properties and attributes of others.) Eighties appropriation, at its best, was deeply invested in precisely these questions--how to disable naturalized master narratives, how to remonstrate the singular and usher in the multiplicitous. To dismiss either Pop or localized identity structures was to unintentionally reinscribe a familiar, ultimately conservative, genealogy--one that did not account for artists' necessarily updated relationship to contemporary culture. After Pop, it was impossible to fantasize a space of resistance outside commodity culture from which to levy critique. Instead, repressive structures were potentially revealed and deconstructed (though also potentially revealed and multiplied) precisely through rapt immersion in and critical consumption of them. However different in effect, the success of both Richard Prince's presentations of masculinity as a handful of well-packaged accoutrements and Barbara Kruger's ventriloquization of coercive stereotypes relied on the artists' decidedly intimate relationships to their subjects. In order to resist the cultural riptides, one needs to plot (however tangentially) one's own longitude and latitude within them. The notion may have been best articulated by Hal Foster in 1982, when he asserted that this approach to culture suggested a model wherein artists treated "the public space, social representation or artistic language in which he or she intervenes as both a target and a weapon." (10)

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The notion that appropriation might be seen as a mode of revealing language, representation, and even social space to be so shape-shifting as to subsist simultaneously as both weapon and target (and thus as both subject and object) still resonates today. Yet rather than deploy appropriated elements of culture as so many sharpened weapons and demarcated targets, a number of artists working now--including Amy Adler, Glenn Ligon, Aleksandra Mir, Francesco Vezzoli, and Kelley Walker--recycle them to reveal critically the ways that subjectivity is crafted, consumed, and controlled. Most of these artists are interested in redirecting or confusing circuits of exchange rather than jamming them entirely, perhaps having learned the latter's near impossibility. In other words, Foster's weapon-and-target analogy can be usefully amended by adding a drop of Pop's insistence on consumption--and the sometimes unexpected results of digestion. At the risk of sounding any New Age bells, I'd like to think of current practices of appropriation in terms of homeopathy, which treats diseases by administering small doses, as remedy, of what could otherwise be lethal. It is Derrida's famous "Plato's Pharmacy" that first suggests such a bodily metaphor as a critically useful deconstructive tool. (11) There, Derrida plays with the Greek concept of pharmakon--loosely translated as "medicine" but defined equally as "cure" or "poison." It is the ambiguity of the pharmakon that appeals to the philosopher; if the same substance that destroys the body can also save it, such an opposition is effectively unmoored. (12) Perhaps considering culture itself as a kind of loosely integrated body, we can imagine artists operating within its sphere by sampling and reinjecting its elements in less benign doses--not so much to "cure" the incurable as to render its symptoms visible, manipulable. Understood this way, homeopathy is the ultimate compromise, literally recalibrating and strengthening by recirculating (or, to recall its contrasting definition, potentially weakening the system from within).

It is, then, somewhat ironic that the concept of compromise best defines the ways in which artists are most compellingly utilizing appropriation today, often with overtly Pop overtones. Lest the word be read as passive (rather than passive-aggressive), let's turn to Mir, one of the more political artists of the day, whose projects nearly always involve collaboration--whether with artists, nonartists, or even entire communities. Mir's work coyly modifies both memories and mores, often in order to point to their underpinnings of class, gender, and race. She has temporarily run a cinema for the unemployed (specializing in Hollywood disaster movies) and spectacularly staged the landing of the first woman on the moon (with the help of an enthusiastic crowd, including altruistic construction workers who bulldozed a beach on the Baltic Sea into a lunar setting). In every case, Mir traces meaning back to a complex network of social and psychic concessions, which are at once the site of institutional oppressions and of potential resistance against them. To this end, Mir's 2003 book Corporate Mentality examines the pervasive incorporation of art into the sphere of commerce by archiving projects by various artists who take up the corporate structures of late capitalism only to confound them, however subtly. (13) Her ongoing manipulations of and linkages between the mass media and private photography (such as her Hello projects and her recent Barthesian manifesto, titled Finding Photographs) recall a statement made by Sherrie Levine in reference to some of her own work some twenty years ago: "I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and the future, between my history and yours." (14) If Mir's and Levine's appropriative methods have anything in common, then, perhaps it is an understanding of the work as a connective tissue, mediating the flow of collective and individual histories--and providing the opportunity to insert oneself, however promiscuously, within them.

Vezzoli and Adler pursue a similar kind of insertion, stitching themselves into the glamorous fabric of celebrity culture. Vezzoli, who often appears in his own films, themselves rife with intertextual knots, has featured (or, failing that, conjured) divas from Edith Piaf to Bianca Jagger, all of whom serve as camp vessels through which desire loosely circulates. In Vezzoli's most recent work, for the Fondazione Prada in Milan, he pays tribute to his long-standing muse, Pier Paolo Pasolini. For part of the installation, Vezzoli re-created a vintage movie theater in which his own altered remake of Pasolini's 1964 Comizi d'Amore (Love Meetings) was continually screened. Vezzoli would seem to subscribe to Pasolini's belief in film as a kind of nonsymbolic language nimbly attuned to characterizing social realities--but only so long as those realities are always shown to be constructed. For his version of Comizi d'Amore, the artist recast the original film as a contemporary reality-TV show, in which four divas--Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Marianne Faithfull, and Antonella Lualdi--engage in emotionally detached mating rituals, the scope of which exceeds any gay/straight dichotomy and revels instead in polymorphous perversity. Audience participation is, of course, key but completely inconsequential, and the four women take turns watching as various men, one woman, and a drag queen vacuously vie for their affections. The payoff for the winning couple (determined by audience poll) is the opportunity to publicly marry, then consummate. Such overdetermined decadence is typical of Vezzoli, whose attraction to velvet couture and strands of pearls translates into a perfectly fetishistic aesthetic--so many disavowals and recuperations.

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No less interested in the malleable patina of glamour and fame, Adler is aware that the slightest of turns can render deeply conventional celebrity images not quite right and thus available as screens for the play of presumably unintended projections. She finds her subjects not in vintage cinema but in teen magazines or on the cover of People: River Phoenix, Jodie Foster, Britney Spears, Leonardo DiCaprio. Yet just as often she pictures herself as a conglomerate of everygirl and It Girl, looking just familiar enough to sneak into the universe of pop-cultural imagery. Adler usually begins a work by selecting preexisting photographs of celebrities or herself, though sometimes snapping pics of her own, and then making drawings after her photographic "originals" (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one). Next she photographs these drawings, after which point they are destroyed. Thus her drawings merely serve as transit stations between different phases of photographic copies, since they are modeled on and ultimately presented only as photographs. One can discern the influence of Cindy Sherman here, since Adler alludes to the vocabulary of film through her still images, which are nearly always done in series, stressing that the relationship between images is more important than any single one. (In a different, if related, vein it is perhaps no coincidence that both Sherman and Adler created "centerfolds" when commissioned to do projects for Artforum.) Adler, however, lets her own desires seep into the images she produces; it's hard not to notice that she sees a little of herself in Leo or that the guitar chick in the recent exhibitions "Different Girls" bathes in the glow of more than just house lights. Such willfully contaminated modes of identification (do I want to be Jodie or have Jodie?) pleasurably echo from the mise en abime of Adler's images.

For Walker, there is no abime when it comes to images--only an impossibly flat, ever-increasing stack of them. Walker literally scans the field in which he operates, taking images starkly from their contexts and reinserting them, often awkwardly, back into circulation. Using his scanner as a camera, the artist updates Rauschenberg's "flat-bed picture plane." He combines photographic images--pictures of race riots similar to those usurped by Warhol, selections from Benetton's controversial ad campaigns, photos of Martin Luther King--with tactile stuff imported from the realm of the real: streamers of Crest toothpaste, cereal boxes, pantyhose, and bricks. Walker's digital assemblages foreground the ways in which media images are intended to work as ideological signposts, desire-piquing decoys, or pure propaganda, while testifying to the inherent multifariousness of every such message. This approach is underscored by the potentially unending manipulation of many of Walker's works, which are often sold on CDs with the stipulation that the owner may continue to alter his or her purchase. Walker suggests that nearly every mass-media image partakes in the trafficking of identity, proffering uneven reflective surfaces on which to glimpse ourselves as estranged part-objects. Such a reading is made literal in his multicolored, mirrored Plexiglas Rorschach splotches, which come off less as keys to the unconscious than as icy allusions to its salability.

Against the backdrop of this discussion, it is worth returning to the work of Glenn Ligon, who, for a recent series of work, gave "black-themed" '70s coloring books to schoolchildren, most of whom colored in figures like Malcolm X with no trace of anxiety over the details of race. The resulting pictures (many of which Ligon took as models for his own full-scale paintings) were weird palimpsests--outlines of ideology undone by the not fully indoctrinated scribbling of a child. Such work draws on many of the artist's earliest ventures, from his well-known minimally painted appropriations of texts culled from all manner of black history (James Baldwin's prose, or Richard Pryor's jokes) to his Notes on the Margins of the Black Book. And while Ligon's response to Mapplethorpe was in many ways aligned with Crimp's reassessment of the photographer, it also shows significant differences. Just as Crimp had noted that Mapplethorpe's images offered room for play of desire around their edges, so too did Ligon--though Ligon revealed how less affirmative desires are played out there, as well. And, the question of race, not addressed by Crimp, was taken up explicitly by the young artist, whose response to the nude black body was neither simply desire nor identification but instead a kind of staged inquiry into the ways in which blackness and sexuality are so often entwined in the cultural unconscious.

Of course, by grouping these artists together as latter-day appropriationists (a term dubiously adopted even in its day), one risks plotting yet another genealogical strand, a family tree in which Warhol is, well, Pop. This is hardly the intention of this essay; rather, by invoking Pop's model of compromise, I have attempted to address its ramifications in some current modes of appropriation, particularly those that call on (or call out) representational strategies of identity. These modes of appropriation, predicated on recycling rather than on out-and-out refutation, are necessarily contaminated and quite often ambiguously intentioned. To this end one recalls Harold Bloom's treatise--addressing not the plastic arts but, rather, Romantic poetry--in which any notion of a respectable genealogy is succinctly sullied. He argued, "Poetry is the anxiety of influence, is misprision, is a disciplined perverseness. Poetry is misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance. Poetry (Romance) is Family Romance. Poetry is the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resistance to that enchantment." (15) Warhol as peculiar uncle, then.

NOTES

1. Douglas Crimp, "Appropriating Appropriation," in Image Scavengers: Photography (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1982); reprinted in Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 126-137.

2. On the allegorical implications of Levine's work see Craig Owens, "Sherrie Levine at A & M Artworks," Art in America, Summer 1982, 148; reprinted in Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 114-116.

3. "Photographs at the End of Modernism," in Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, 7.

4. Ibid., 27.

5. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (Part 2)," October 13 (Summer 1980): 58-80. Republished in Owens, Beyond Recognition, 70-87. Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 57-77; reprinted in Owens, Beyond Recognition, 166-90.

6. Benjathin H.D. Buchloh, "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art," Artforum, September 1982, 43-56.

7. Ibid., 46.

8. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality, in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 150.

9. Buchloh, "Allegorical Procedures," 46. The phrase "delicate constructs of compromise" here refers specifically to Rauschenberg's Factum I and Factum II as well as Johns's first Flag, with regard to the balance between painterliness and readymade they effected. Yet, given Buchloh's earlier description of American Pop's program as "one of liberal reconciliation and successful mastery of the conflict between individual practice and collective production, between the mass-produced imagery of low culture and the icon of individuation that each painting constitutes," I am allowing the phrase to more broadly stand for his conception of Pop.

10. Hal Foster, "Subversive Signs," in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA; Bay Press, 1985), 100. Such a definition of the procedures effected on and by way of culture gave an indication of the artist's changed position--as no longer a "producer of art objects" but, rather, a "manipulator of signs." (Not new to the '80s, such strategies are traced back--as with Buchloh--by Foster to include Duchamp, Broodthaers, and Haacke, though he significantly acknowledges the ways in which such an inheritance is markedly recast in the '80s by artists with overt feminist interests.)

11. Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63-171.

12. Apropos of the current argument, Derrida argues that "the pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference." Ibid., 127.

13. Aleksandra Mir, Corporate Mentality, ed. Mir and John Kelsey (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2003).

14. Quoted in Flisabeth Sussman, "The Last Picture Show," in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 61.

15. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 95.

Johanna Burton is a New York-based art historian and critic.