APPROPRIATION (art)

Appropriation as a term in art history and criticism refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of new works. Approaches include homage interpretation, imitation and proximation. 


I was looking at Pop Art - inter alia Andy Warhol's Merilyn Monroe prints.

Phi project- geometrical composition

"The discovery and subsequent fascination with the golden ratio arose with the ancient Greeks. Since Western civilization is mostly a product of the Enlightenment, which was a product of the Renaissance, which was a product of ancient Greece and Rome, it is highly probable that the fascination with the golden ratio is an exclusively Western phenomenon. 

Livio notes that "one clear source of the mystical attitude toward whole numbers was the manifestation of such numbers in human and animal bodies and in the cosmos, as perceived by the early cultures" (22). Indeed, the number two, for example, is found in many places on the human body: two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, et cetera.  There are four seasons, three tenses of time (past, present, and future), seven days of the week, the list goes on. Early societies were filled with whole numbers, and it is precisely for this reason that the golden ratio, which is derived from whole numbers, shocked people with its irrationality, as discussed earlier. Clearly the world has yet to recover.

History also shows that early cultures were fascinated with numerology. The Jews, Muslims, and Greeks all hd systems in which numbers could be translated to words by assigning numerical combinations to letters. This is still done today on the back of children's cereal boxes occasionally. Also, the number 666 has captivated Christians as the "number of the Beast." "Amusingly, in 1994, a relation was 'discovered' (and appeared in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics) even between the 'number of the Beast' and the Golden Ratio" (Livio "Story," 23): the sine of 666 degrees plus the cosine of six cubed (six times six times six) is a good approximation of negative phi. Is this an eerie connection, or just a coincidence resulting from residual fascination in numerology?

Plato himself was fascinated with numbers and geometry. In his Laws, he argues that the optimal number of citizens in a state is 5,040, because it has some rather peculiar arithmetical properties (like that it has 59 divisors, including all the whole numbers from 1 to 12, that its twelfth part can be evenly divided by 12, etc.). In Timaeus, Plato attempts to explain matter using what are now known as the Platonic solids: "the only existing solids in which all the faces are identical and equilateral, and each of the solids can be circumscribed by a sphere" (Livio "Story," 67). The golden ratio can be observed in the dimensions and symmetry of some Platonic solids. Since it is nearly impossible for any American college student to graduate without reading some of Plato's works, and because of Plato's revered status as one of history's greatest philosophers, the concept of the golden ratio as an ideal still continues.

In our earlier discussion of the history of phi, we mentioned Luca Pacioli, who really brought about a revival of the ideal of the golden ratio and its subsequent rechristening as the Divine Proportion. 


I created several compositions in which I used golden ratio. All the figures has been drawn by the golden ratio rule.

World made of stripes - personal project..

World in stripes.


Illusion of space defined by black and white stripes..

The project idea is to create a black and white installation that simulates the 3D within 3D space

(white room with dimensions 3m²).

In addition I was planning to use various streams of light.

Composition will be printed on white   silk/cotton fabric.

Final artwork consists of four pieces, each one is 3 m long making up one whole.

By means of using different techniques and perspectives I wanted to create a feeling of depth within space.  Each object of the composition has been created with black lines only which tend to play tricks on human eye when viewed ordinarily.

Together they create an imaginary and surrealist scene.

Here I put various parts which make up an entire installation:

  

Chirico Giorgio de (1888-1978) - 1917 Great Metaphysical Interior (Museum of Modern Art, New York City)

Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian painter who, with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi, founded the style of Metaphysical painting. After studying art in Athens and Florence, de Chirico moved to Germany in 1906 and entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His early style was influenced by Arnold Böcklin’s and Max Klinger’s paintings, which juxtapose the fantastic with the commonplace. By 1910 de Chirico was living in Florence, where he began painting a unique series of landscapes that included The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910), in which the long, sinister, and illogical shadows cast by unseen objects onto empty city spaces contrast starkly with bright, clear light that is rendered in brooding green tonalities. Moving to Paris in 1911, de Chirico gained the admiration of Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire with his ambiguously ominous scenes of deserted piazzas. In these works, such as The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) and The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914), classical statues, dark arcades, and small, isolated figures are overpowered by their own shadows and by severe, oppressive architecture.

In 1915 de Chirico was conscripted into the Italian army and stationed at Ferrara, Italy. There, he was able to continue making art and practiced a modification of his earlier manner, marked by more compact groupings of incongruous objects. Diagnosed with a nervous condition, he was admitted into a military hospital, where he met Carlo Carrà in 1917; together the two artists developed the style they named Metaphysical painting. In de Chirico’s paintings of this period, such as the Grand Metaphysical Interior (1917) and The Seer (1915), the colors are brighter, and dressmakers’ mannequins, compasses, biscuits, and paintings on easels assume a mysterious significance within enigmatic landscapes or interiors.

The element of mystery in de Chirico’s paintings dwindled after 1919, when he became interested in the technical methods of the Italian classical tradition. He eventually began painting in a more realistic and academic style, and by the 1930s he had broken with his avant-garde colleagues and disclaimed his earlier works. De Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings exercised a profound influence on the painters of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s.