I was surprised to see the word appropriation used in a positive manner.  So often I hear people sling accusations of “cultural appropriation” as a cardinal sin. The argument against cultural appropriation is that (white) people steal and colonize cultures that they don’t understand, using it as they see fit and dropping it as soon as it no longer suits them in a disrespectful manner.  Here, however, the artist is taking pre-existant images, altering and combining them to give them new meaning.  it is done with consciousness and sensitivity.  I wonder if that would mean that cultural appropriation is okay if it is done in the same manner.  I wonder where the line is between appropriation and exchange.

Seeing the images I wondered where all of them came from. Clearly not all of them were the polygenesis images. Based on the clothes some were from at least the 1920’s.

I think that the change is color, even with out the text bring the images into a new light.  The red looks angry and hurt, like a swollen bruise to me.  I think it’s great that these images, many of which I am sure were taken in an exploitative manner can now be used as a source of empowerment.

“Woman with a Parrot” was painted in 1866 by Gustave Courbet. It is oil on canvas with the dimensions fifty one inches by seventy seven inches. Courbet was a French painter and “Woman with a Parrot” was originally painted for the Salon. It was housed there and then ended up in the H.O. Havemeyer collection until 1929 when it was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City where it remains to this day.
The image is a painting. It has a large central figure and a small peripheral figure. The central figure is that of a nude woman. The woman is reclining on her back with the top of her head pointing towards the bottom of the picture. The woman is Caucasian and has pale skin. Her primary sexual organs are covered by a white cloth though her breasts are uncovered. Her breasts are on the smaller side of average. She has thick, heavy eyebrows, but no pubic hair. She has a very slight paunch on her lower stomach. Her hands are delicate. Her left hip is raised while her right hip is flat. She is lying on a green velvet day bed that is partially covered by a white cloth; said cloth reflects white light up against her splayed legs. Her knees are bent; her right leg extended forward, her left is back. Her right hand is resting on her right leg, her while her left arm is extended in the air.  The image is sensual, but not sexual.
On the central figure’s left hand is perched our peripheral figure. A large colorful bird that based on the title- must be a parrot. The bird has a small curved beak. Over its beak is a splotch of blue. Above the blue it is yellow; the bird’s breast is yellow too. The back and wings are a muted grayish green with orange, yellow and blue highlights. The wings are spread, the head faces down towards the bottom of the painting. The tail is the same mix of colors as the wings and points towards the upper left hand corner of the painting. The bird looks as if it has just landed and its claws encircle the woman’s left forefinger.
The background is dark and muted. A tall stand with several horizontal bards is behind the right corner of the day bed. The viewer can assume that this is a perch for the parrot. It is an ambiguous grayish brown that could be wood or tarnished metal. Behind that hangs a dark, but richly patterned cloth and in the far back ground seems to be trees and a sky.
The way that the parrot is placed on the woman’s hand, the angle of its head in relation so her head suggests interaction. The woman smiles up at the bird. In my opinion she looks slightly delirious, as if she has a fever or is on drugs. She is nude, never uncommon in art, but it may suggest that she isn’t thinking clearly. Moreover, beyond artistic expression, why is a woman in a fairly conservative time lounging nude with a bird? Birds are known carriers for disease. From a simple hygienic stand point, I can say that I would never be naked around a bird because of the propensity to defecate everywhere. So is the woman feverish? Is she high? Does she suffer from some mental illness? Or is it simply a romantic artistic choice? The woman has ruddy cheeks but a pale body, heavy eyebrows but no other body hair. Any of these things could point to an illness, but more likely they are all fanciful artistic choices. Certainly if I had not been looking at this image for this class it never would have occurred to me that it is medical in nature.

V0016791 A surgeon bleeding the arm of a young woman: she is being co
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
A surgeon bleeding the arm of a young woman: she is being comforted by another woman. Coloured etching by T. Rowlandson (?), 1784.
1784 By: Thomas RowlandsonPublished: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The Wellcome image I chose was from 1784.  It is an engraving by Thomas Rowlandson and it depicts a young woman being bled by a doctor.  There are three figures in the image. Two are female and one is male. The central figure is female and is interacting with both other figured. The make figure is to the central figured right and is holding the central figures arm. The figure on the left is also female and is embracing the central figure and holding a bowl in the cereal figured lap that is collecting blood.

The make figure is presumably the doctor.  He wears a blue coat, yellow vest and white pants and shirt. The central figure wears a pink dress and the left figure wears a yellow dress. There are only nine distinct colors in the image. The colors are black, yellow, pink, white, blue, gray, beige brown and white. All the figures gave the same shade of hair and skin. The yellow of the dress and the best ate identical. Although the image portrays a woman being bled, there is no red. The blood is represented by black lines falling neatly from the central figures arm into the bowl.  The entire scene is very calm and civilized, there is no mess. It portrays blood letting as a simple , relatively painless procedure, reflecting the attitude of the time.