hypertextuality and pop art murat gungor harjant gill october 3, 2006
TRANSCRIPT
HYPERTEXTUALITY ANDPOP ART
Murat GungorHarjant Gill
October 3, 2006
Today…
• Role of the Reader– Text– Signs– Eco’s Perspective– Cultural Encyclopedia
• Pop Art– What is it?– Critiques and Proponents– Enablers of Pop Art– Pop Artists– Experiment: Putting Eco into Pop Art
Umberto Eco
• Born in 1932• Italian medievalist, philosopher and
novelist• Most famous works: The Name of the
Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum• Worked as a cultural editor for
Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI)• His works illustrate postmodernist
literary theory concept of hypertextuality.
On Text
• Text is a lazy machinery, which forces its possible readers to do the part of its textual work by its modalities of interpretive operations.
• In order to engage with a text: a pre-textual theory of signs is needed.
• Notions of linguistic signs must me addressed in such a way that the textual destiny of the sign is recognized: a junction between theory of signs and a theory of text can then be achieved.
• Text are the loci where signs are produced.
On Signs
• Buyssens: Sign (and visual image) in itself becomes fully meaningful when inserted within the larger context…
• Larger Context: Simple word-processes in some way that certain features, which prescribes it textual fate. Signs cannot exist outside the context of the text.
• Theory of Signification should be the first theory of all a theory of signs.
• Dictionary/Production of new meaning: They make signs interact with each other in the light of their previous intertextual history.
• Text (possibility of new semantic kinship/production of new discourses) Vs Sign (forced unification and limiting of discourse).
• Kristeva: The Ideology of sign is coherent with the classic ideology of the knowing subject.
For Eco
• Language is Homonymic: Eg. Bachelor, Smoke.
• Objecting to: Unified concept of sign… “Signs are conceived of as being intentionally emitted and conventionally coded, linked by a bi-conditional bond to their definition, subject to analysis and syntagmatically disposed according to a linear sequence.”
• Reconsider the history of signs: followed a different evolutionary pattern: one would realize that linguistical fixing of signs is recent phenomenon…
• Eco is critiquing the previous linguistic model and eliminate the notion of linguistic signs.
What is Eco Proposing?• Need to understand how text is interpreted.
• Role of the reader: Active interpretation of the text, informed by subjectivity.
• Encyclopedia-like semantic representation: Semantico-pragmatic rules: establish how and under which conditions the addressee of a given text is entitled to collaborate in order to actualize what the text actually says.
• The sememe are visual texts: the text is expansion of the sememe.
• Encyclopedia Competence: Notion of cultural encyclopedia.
• Scripts or frames… would consider the standard sequences of actions that an interpreter needs to presuppose in order to work out a text and to render explicit information which is not expressed, or at least not apparent at the level of manifestation
When Reading a Text
Maneuvering Coded Semantic Information
Negotiate Different Semes, Provided by the Sememes
Make Them Mutually React and Amalgamate
Eco Argues• Signs are the starting point of a process of interpretation
which leads to infinite series of progressive consequences
• Signs are open devices (Multi-Conditional)… Echo is deconstructing bi-conditionality of Signs.
• Textual interpretation SAME PRINCIPLE APPLIES Sign interpretation
Deduction and Induction vs. Abduction
• Principle feature of text is its ability to elicit abductions.
• Reader looks for a possible context capable of making initial expression intelligible and reasonable.
• Signs are not fixed/dead; they are continuously evolving their readings…de-constructing the notion of sign as definition or as synonymous.
• The reader plays an active role in textual interpretation.
Cultural EncyclopediaExchanges of Meaning
Cultural Memory
Cultural Dictionary (Pre-exists Individual User)
Memory Machines of Culture:Language, discourses, narratives and visual images
Media-Externalized Memory Machine:Privileging Ideology, Promoting Hegemony,
Hierarchy of Cultural Knowledge
Social Functions of Encyclopedia are Culturally Constructed
In Conclusion
• Eco is trying to understand the epistemology of thinking and how meaning is produced.
• LITERARY TEXT FIELDS OF MEANING (rather than STINGS OF MEANING) OPEN, INTERNALLY DYNAMIC & PSYCHOLOGICALLY ENGAGED FIELDS.
• Eco is moving beyond intertextuality, to consider the reader as an active subject…leading to HYPERTETUALITY or INTER-CONNECTEDNESS of all texts.
• Meaning is manufactured by consciousness, and how it may be possible for human reading to be without the pursuit of, and sometimes-unconscious application of meaning…
Pop Art
“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”
What is Pop Art?
• Lawrence Alloway’s comments:– Masses doing art, not minorities– Democratization of art– Characteristic of industrial society– Accompany changes better– The rise of the audience
• Shift of focus from England to USA• Pop Art forms celebrating the urban culture
Critiques and Proponents
• Greenberg:– ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ essay (1939)– Avant-garde artist uninfluenced by commercial art– What is avant-garde?
Avant-Garde Art
• Definition of Avant-Garde• Paris Salon and Salon de Refusés• Progressive notion of art• Non-representational art
Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe)
Critiques and Proponents
• Greenberg:– ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ essay (1939)– Avant-garde artist uninfluenced by commercial art– What is avant-garde?
• Lucy R. Lippard:– Unexpected outcome of a decade of Abstract Expressionism– Uncritical reflection of our environment can be a breath of
fresh air.– Branded Pop Art under abstraction
Where is Pop Art Coming From? - Enablers
AVANT-GARDE AVANT-GARDE ARTART
Impressionism
Divisionism.
.
.
Abstract Expressionism
POP ART
Socialist Realism
Cold WarCold War
Capitalism
Communism
Postmodernism
Pop Artists
• Lived in Manhattan and knew each other• Had experience in advertising• Used mass culture to create their segments
Lichtenstein
• Style: Used comics• Technique: Used projection and silkscreen
Brush Strokes (1964)
Pop Artists
• Lived in Manhattan and knew each other• Had experience in advertising• Used mass culture to create their segments
Rauschenberg
• Style: cords, mundane tarnished objects• Technique: Painting and sculptures
Dylaby (1962)
Pop Artists
• Lived in Manhattan and knew each other• Had experience in advertising• Used mass culture to create their segments
Warhol
• Style: Celebrities, repeated frames, tragedy• Technique: Silkscreen, mechanical
production: ‘Factory’
Campbell’s Soup Can 1 (1968)
Re-Cycling Pop Art: Putting Ecointo Pop Art
• How can the reader make sense of Pop Art today?
Trek Thunder Kelly
iPod Gharib - TortureiPod Gharib - Electrocution
Re-Cycling Pop Art: Putting Ecointo Pop Art
• How can the reader make sense of Pop Art today?
Trek Thunder Kelly
Suicide of Frida Kahlo
Devolution of Fool Bull
Geronimo’s Last Stand
The Instigator
Re-Cycling Pop Art: Putting Ecointo Pop Art
• How can the reader make sense of Pop Art today?
Trek Thunder Kelly
Clintonian Cigar Cereal KillerViagra Pills Ohs
Putting Eco into Pop Art
• How can the reader make sense of Pop Art?
Re-cycling Pop Art
Thank you