Infinite Mirror: Critical Reflections on Wayne Barker’s Strategies of Appropriation

Contemporary South African artist Wayne Barker is well known for mixing referents taken from high art and popular culture in his art practice that spaces more than 30 years. Barker’s infamous appropriation of J. H. Pierneef’s works has been interpreted as iconoclastic acts that critique the ideals Pierneef represents. Barker’s seemingly irreverent pilfering is a strategy that he has brought into his recent Beadworks Series. Through focusing on selected works by Wayne Barker, this paper explores the complexities of appropriation as a contemporary strategy for art making. It begins by distinguishing between different types of appropriation. Then the genealogy of strategies of appropriation within western modernist art is outlined in order to locate Barker’s art making practice within the trajectory of the historical and neo avant-gardes. The subsequent analyses of selected artworks critically consider the extent to which Barker’s appropriation challenges or reinforces the cultural associations and symbolic meaning of that which he appropriates.