Art after appropriation. Essays on Art in the 1990s

Beginning with an account of the discourse of appropriation that dominated the art world in the late 1970s and 1980s, this study creates a matrix of inflections and refusals around the culture of taking. Author John C. Welchman shows how the second-world culture of the USSR gave rise to new visibility for photography at the Union´s dissolution in 1989, and explores how genres of ethnography, documentary and travel are crossed with fictive performance and social improvisation in the videos of Steve Fagin. It also examines the creation of public art from covert actions and social feedback, and how bodies participate in their own appropriation.