The strategy of postmodern appropriation that burgeoned into
an international style in the 1980s is currently epitomised
by the work of New York artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara
Kruger, Hans Haacke and David Salle. This book examines the
parallel yet highly original evolution of Australia’s
leading appropriationist Imants Tillers.
The author argues that whereas the New York school was predominantly
based on the appropriation of mass media imagery, from 1975
onwards Tillers turned towards the appropriation of fine art
imagery. While the New York school was primarily oriented towards
a deconstruction of the ideological signs of mass media, Tillers
pioneered an alternative Australian school of appropriation
based on the deconstruction of authorship.
Tillers’ post-Duchampian interest in the more surrealistic
facets of contemporary science led him to develop a massive
‘holistic system’ consisting of hundreds of modular
paintings composed of juxtaposed and layered quotations from
the works of other artists. Tillers’ holistic image matrix
offers an alternative, postcolonial, art history in which Euro-American
art is confronted by powerful antipodean sources such as Aboriginal
Papunya painting and the work of the New Zealand artist Colin
McCahon.
Coulter-Smith also argues that the lack of authorial presence
that arises out of Tillers’ approach foregrounds the role
of the viewer in the construction of meaning and in so doing
expands the discourse of appropriation into the multi-dimensional
space of intertextuality.
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