For my appropriation piece I created a simple type of audience performance game with the usage of objects with different forms of value and allowed players to do any action they wanted to the objects. I reference in this piece a couple of ideas from multiple artists and movements. For starters, what gave me this idea in the first place was Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece performance where she had members of the audience one by one to cut pieces of her clothing off of her. Another piece, I drew inspiration from was the Fountain piece, where the artist Marcel Duchamp showcased a porcelain urinal on it signed “R. Mutt” and presented it as taking an everyday object and giving new meaning to them. Lastly, a piece that is similar to my idea, is the Exquisite corpse game, created by Surrealists in 1925 where they added to a composition one by one to then reveal the final outcome at the end.
So, I took these ideas and slightly arrange them together into my artwork. In this game, players are presented with an object of a particular value that either has a backstory or personalized, and an assortment of tools that they can use to do actions to the object/s (players can also use anything in their possession to do an action). Players one by one are given the opportunity to do something to the object/s, while the other players watch. Players can do anything they want to the object; it can be something simple or extreme. After the first player has done their action, the next player will do an action and so on. The game ends once each of the players are satisfied with the number of actions they had done to the object/s or when the object/s no longer is usable in its original purpose.
During the in-class playtests I have brought different objects with a different range of values, from a brown paper bag to a random piece of wood, but the objects I’ll mostly talk about were the actions that were done to the wooden manikins that I brought in during the final playtest. During the playtest, I presented the 2 manikins to the players (one that was already damaged from the prior playtest and a manikin that hasn’t been touched) and gave them some background on why I owned them. Then I told them that they can do whatever they wanted to the manikins using the tools I provided and other tools they may have until they felt satisfied with all they have done or till the manikin was no longer usable for its original purpose. Each player kept adding to the manikin or removing from the manikin, such as drawing on it with markers, adding string to the manikin as hair, pulled apart the limbs, and so end till they no longer wanted to do more to it anymore. At the end, I asked the players if they felt anything after committing to their actions, one said they felt bad for me since I was the owner of the object, but none of them felt bad for the object itself. The purpose of this appropriation was to see how far people are willing to go to completely change an object knowing it will no longer be what it once was.
Start of Playtest and process
End Result
