Appropriation Art
Appropriation is taking possession of something (object and/or image) that already exists. Artists who use appropriation is in no way trying to pull one over anyone, but rather putting these objects and images in a new context without transforming their original concepts. The earliest form of appropriation art was in 1912 by Pablo Picasso who created a glass bottle and guitar out of newspaper clippings discovered this form of art and design, but this does not dismiss the fact that an artist runs the risk of accusation and lawsuits due to plagiarism, non-original and copyright infringement. This is one that Andy Warhol became much familiar with when he was sued by Campbell's Soup for his portrait of the Campbell's Soup Can.
A Literary Discipline
When an author writes, they face the task of creating characters which develop throughout the book. An editor then brings form into the writers' text like a carver brings form to a block of wood or stone. A graphic designer could add new layers of meaning to the text they are structuring — they’re capable of permeating the immediacy of a single word, phrase or expression with narrative. Writers, editors and designers all speak the same language.
An example of writers, editors and designers speaking the same language, I am currently reading Honoré de Balzac’s classic novella, “The Girl with the Golden Eyes”, the first 30 pages Balzac is basically walking the reader through Paris describing how horrific and awful it is. An artist name Eugene Delacroix created a painting called ‘The Death of Sardanapalus’ which depicts a society of chaos, giving Balzac’s textual description of Paris a new layer of meaning.
Not Self-Expression
Self-expression is the way we declare our personalities, our feelings, thoughts and ideas in a variety of ways. Throughout my two years at Salt Lake Community College studying graphic design, most of my professors would constantly state that graphic design is a service rendered by you for other people and that your own design idea(s) were irrelevant. So, we were taught and trained to follow specific instructions given in the form of assignments and projects.
Presentation days were the most boring and longest days of my life, not because I hate speaking in front of the class (I really do hate speaking in front of a large group of people), but enduring a whole two hours of students presenting on the same thing, using the same terminology only with a twist in sequence in the process of completing the assignment. This is true in the sense of a marketing profession or a product designer but not for graphic designers who draw inspiration from their own ideas and interests.
We are constantly surrounded by graphic design, whether we notice it or not. It is the visual communication through the combination of typography, photography and illustration which creates a symbolic representation of an idea or message. It is on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive and the candy wrappers we immediately discard after devouring its contents. Some of us may have drawn a mustache or two on an image on our handouts, added curly hair to a character in a book, filled in the holes in the letters p, o, capital A or even added serif and tails to printed text. You may have done this unconsciously, but you were able to add a new layer and idea to something even if boredom inspired you, it is a form of self-expression in the form of graphic design.
I like that example that you gave about that graphic design class that you took, where all of the presentations followed the same formula. The true creativity does indeed come from the individual, not a set of guidelines.
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