Detournement and the Situationists, also known as Mashups

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Détournement

In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original. The term "détournement", borrowed from the French, originated with the Situationist International; a similar term more familiar to English speakers would be "turnabout" or "derailment", although these terms are not used in academia and the arts world as they are inherently 'anti-art,' often involving the blatant theft and sabotage of existing elements. Détournement is similar to satirical parody, but employs more direct reuse or faithful mimicry of the original works rather than constructing a new work which merely alludes strongly to the original. It may be contrasted with recuperation, in which originally subversive works and ideas are themselves appropriated by mainstream media.

This practice builds upon the Political Collage that was a product of the Dada movement in the early part of the 20th century:

The real hayday for political collage came in the interwar years (1918-1939) in Germany when a group of Dadaists including John Heartfield (born: Helmuth Herzfelde, 1891-1968), George Grosz, Hannah Höch (1889-1978) and Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) started to experiment with pasting together images from magazines and newspapers. Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch were lovers and together with George Grosz they claimed to have invented the technique but this is not really accurate. Collages including photographs had appeared a lot earlier and the technique of merging different images was already widely used in advertising.



Adolf the Superman Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk 1932




Dada (1916-1923) was an artistic and literary movement that attacked political and artistic norms as a direct response to the chaos of the First World War (1914-1918). Photographic collages proved to be a powerful tool to promote critical thinking about the establishment and much of the work was centered at the Wieland Herzfelde's gallery and publishing house, Malik Verlag. Malik Verlag was one of the most important printers of Dada publications. Although a lot of the early Dadaist works were a random collection of images and textual fragments John Heartfield appreciated the political possibilities of the form and in 1924 produced an image called 'After ten years: fathers and sons' that showed General Von Hindenburg, one of the key figures of the First World War (1914-1918) and soon to be President of the Republic, standing in military uniform in front of a series of skeletons, who are above a marching group of infantry.