Appropriation can involve taking another artist’s work and assimilating it into your own work or changing the context to give it a new perspective. This reminded me of a section of meme culture called medieval reactions where renaissance paintings have been given captions to change the piece’s context. This type of meme often juxtaposes the medieval characters with modern place settings, like a nightclub. For this task I photographed  a sketch from Picasso and re-captioned it. I altered his picture twice by cropping it and giving it a caption which changed the context, therefore I’m not presenting Picasso’s sketch as my own even though it was clearly his drawing. The original context for this sketch is that it was a preparatory sketch for the piece, Guernica, representing the grief of the Guernica bombing during the Spanish Civil War. By changing the tone from grief, to light hearted drama, I don’t seek to undermine the seriousness of the Spanish Civil War, only to highlight how strange the sketch looks out of context. Many of these memes contain features to show it’s social media influence, like having captions in the format of twitter or snapchat. To make it clear that it is not my sketch I took the photo on snapchat and wrote the dialogue  with the characteristic grey bar and white text of the app. 

Bibliography

FREEMAN, J. (1994) Picasso and the weeping women. Los Angeles, Calif: Rizzoli.