The Method Of Cultural Appropriation In Geers's Art

In our modern world of art there are so many different ways to portray a message to the viewer, including the method of cultural appropriation. Cultural Appropriation is described as when people from one culture use and adapt traditions from another culture. This is common in society that a dominant culture appropriates a sub-dominant culture. The ap-propriated culture is mimicked by the dominant culture, and this can be in many ways from symbolism use to traditional clothing use. Yet some artists aspire to use cultural appropria-tion in the form of a political statement to portray their message. A political artwork using cultural appropriation in a way that evokes emotion and thoughts as manner to portray the artists beliefs is an artwork

The whitewashing of the statue gives it a more european appearance (as the Congo was christianised by Europe), removing the true african appearance and refer-ring to the colonisation of Africa. Geers referred to the pouring of ink over the sculpture as “baptising” the sculpture with “words that cannot be read” as writing is a european tradition unknown to the native africans who have a more oral tradition. The artwork contains a lot of violence. There is the spiritual violence of the nails nailed into the statue in order for the people to communicate with their ancestors/gods. There is also the violence of the gesso primer taking away the african feel of the statue, destroying these spirits and their

The postcards were not old, historically rare images but they were re-productions for global distribution; selling as originals. This once pure culture has now be-come a marketing point. The “whitening” can also be a signifier for the lost innocence of this culture.

Another series of artworks implementing appropriation done by Candice Breitz in 1997 is Painting By Numbers. She approaches a different view on the artist-gallery relationship, where galleries push artists to finish their artworks in order to simply sell them to the public as soon as possible. An art gallery in New York asked Breitz to do a personal series of artworks for them, and she accepted with one condition. Daniel Silverstein, the gallery di-rector, would have to produce all the paintings of the exhibition.

Breitz handed Silverstein brushes, paint and canvases with popular brandnames and log-os traced onto them in linear templates with colour swatches. The brandnames she appro-priated included companies such as Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Marlboro. All companies that had great marketing power an were widely popular in the current western