CCS BARD

The exhibition Inappropriation brings together ten artists from the Marieluise Hessel Collection whose works adopt a range of appropriative techniques, such as collage, assemblage, recontextualization, and defacement, while simultaneously summoning and taunting social structures—school, the family, and media, among others—that classify behaviors as inappropriate. From Mike Kelley’s artist book Reconstructed History (1989), which transforms historical images through sophomoric drawings, to the absurd invocations of stereotypes in Miguel Calderón’s photographs, the presented artworks mine preexisting, readymade forms for resources of unexpected insubordination. The types of artistic gestures that Inappropriation takes seriously are ironic and, importantly, irreverent. To “inappropriate” (verb) is to appropriate and to be inappropriate. At a time when conversations around cultural appropriation are increasingly taking place, this exhibition reflects upon the potency of such techniques when deployed satirically and scrupulously, appropriating the languages of the powerful as opposed to the marginal. Inappropriation presents works that transform the negative connotations of juvenile defiance into poignant statements of resistance and political refusal.