Friday November 1st, 2007 Minneapolis, MN

Soap Factory Gallery - The Appropriation Festival (aka: finding a new use for empty cans, garbage bags and childhood heroes. )

This is a huge ass space. It showed a good mix of installation, 2d and video work. The show was funded by mnartists.org, a branch of the Walker Art Center.

While the show was diverse and drew a nice mix of twin cities hipsters and classic Fargo-friendly Minnesotans, the main theme 'appropriation' left me wondering but not about the right things. Most of the work never raised any questions about property- intellectual or otherwise. The average "appropriation" was a variation on the Three R's: Reuse, Recycle and Renew. Instead of using appropriation as a place to straddle the edge of ownership and stealing, in many cases it was represented as a design aesthetic.

But maybe this lack of innovation poses enough of a question. What is appropriation these days? How relevant is it as an issue? Maybe the idea of using ready-made objects and found footage is so readily accepted and so widely used that it no longer holds any weight in the current dialogue around ownership. In my experience, ownership is only important when someone is trying to take something that's yours- ideas, credit, style (no you di-n't). If someone is stealing my idea, then I'm going to question it. That said, more issues and questions of ownership are raised online in the unsexy dark of cyberspace than in the bright lights of the gallery. On the World Wide Web information and images are stolen all the time for personal gain. Two cents.

There were some nice pieces despite the vague curation. I really enjoyed the creepy stuffed animatronic sculptures. I also thought that the Western montage installation, which juxtaposed clips of classic spaghetti western characters shooting and a montage of the same westerns showing the receiving end of the violence, was fun. It was a clear, effective comparison and entertaing to watch. Who doesn't love a man in chaps?

Gnarly garbage art

Double click image to watch it move .