CCTP 725: Cultural Hybridity: Remix Culture
Fall 2008
Professor Martin Irvine |
Required Books:
- David Campany, Art and Photography. New York, Phaidon Press,
2003.
- Klaus Honnef, Pop Art. NY: Taschen Books, 2004.
- Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol: Commerce into Art. NY: Taschen
Books, 2000.
- Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science. Cambridge,
MA: Mediawork/MIT Press, 2004.
- Mark Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
- Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Melange. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
- The Photo Book (Mini Edition). New York, Phaidon Press, 2003 and
reprints.
Recommended Books:
- Uta Grosenick, ed. Art Now Vol. 2: Artists at the Rise
of the New Millennium (New York: Taschen, 2006). ISBN
978-3-8228-3996-6
- Regis Debray, Media Manifestos. Trans. Eric Rauth.
London and NY: Verso, 1996. ISBN: 1859840876.
Course Procedures and Requirements: This
course will be conducted as a seminar, and students will work together
to make new discoveries about the seminar themes, which are always
ongoing and developing in real time. Grading and evaluation will
be based on weekly student seminar reports, weekly contributions
to a course Wiki, seminar discussions, and a final Wiki
individual mixed-media article/essay project.
Student Presentation Schedule, Spring 2008
Click on the + / - to expand and collapse weekly units
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| 1 Introduction: The "Always
Already New" and Cultural (Re)Mixing |
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"I'll play it for you first and tell you what it is later." --Miles
Davis
Introductory readings
- Miller, Rhythm Science, pp. 1-29 | Paul D. Miller (DJ
Spooky) website
- Dario Robleto, On DJ Culture and Historical Re-Mixing | Interview with Robleto
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Toward
a New Cosmopolitanism: The Case for Contamination," New
York Times Magazine, Jan. 1, 2006. [Text-only version. This
essay is adapted from Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of
Strangers, to be published by W.W. Norton.]
- Taylor, Intro., 3-14.
- Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence," Harpers Magazine, Feb. 2007. [All writing has always already been a hybrid collage of language, sources, references, unconscious quotations, remix of inhereted written culture.]
Class Discussion & Examples:
Introductory Examples
from art, music, popular culture, movies, TV, photography, post-photography
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| 2 Core Theory Readings, I |
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Key concepts from Postmodernism, Postcolonial theory, and
Globalization theory:
pastiche, irony, parody, sampling, collapsing hierarchies,
horizontal vs. vertical analysis, merging popular and high culture, global
and international merging of cultures, global marketing of cultural goods.
The Post-postmodern?
Taking the "postmodern condition" as a given
and creating new hybrids disassociated from the modern-postmodern arguments
and oppositions. Movement from grids to networks and complexity.
Readings and Sources
- Overview of concepts
- Fredric Jameson's influential views of post-modern pastiche, irony,
and hybridity
- Jameson, "Postmodernism
and Consumer Society." From E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Postmodernism
and its Discontents (London and New York: Verso, 1988): 13-29.
His first statement of the argument that appears in his Postmodernism,
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
- Hybridity, Post-Colonial views of global culture, Globalization
- Homi Bhabha, from The
Location of Culture (read Introduction) (London, New
York: Routledge, 1994).
- Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Rowman & Littlefield,
2003) (Excerpts: Intro | Chap.
3)
- Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity,
or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2005). Read Preface and Chapter 1. [good
overview of issues from the point of view of international communications]
- Hybridity and Complexity
- Taylor, Moment of Complexity, 19-46.
Lecture Notes & Discussion Topics: PoMo
to Globalized Complexity Networks
Exempla:
Michael Kimmelman, Art
Out of Anything," Review of Robert Rauschenberg, Combines,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Times, 12.23.2005.
[Works by a hybrid art master being reconsidered.]
Dario Robleto: Interview
with the artist on hybrid art | On
Hybrid Art and DJ Culture | At D'Amelio
Terras Gallery | Artnet
Discussion of examples of postmodern and post-postmodern culture
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions
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| 3 Core Theory Readings, II |
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The Status of the Image and Image-Making Technologies:
The Contemporary Image is Always Already a Hybrid
Readings and Sources
- Walter Benjamin, The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. [Another copy.]
(1936) (Selections only: Focus on sections: Pref., I-VI, and XII)
- Guy Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle (1967) [Another copy.]
(Selections: Sections 1-6, 10-11, 17-18, 24-30)
- Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra
and Simulations." From Simulations, 1981; English trans.,
1988.
- Seyda Ozturk, "Simulation
Reloaded," Cinetext, August, 2003.
- Angela Ndalianis, "The
Frenzy of the Visible: Spectacle and Motion in the Era of the Digital," Senses
of Cinema, 3/2000.
- William Merrin, "'Did
You Ever Eat Tasty Wheat?': Baudrillard and The Matrix." Scope
(University of Nottingham, UK),
August, 2003.
Discussion Topics
Hybridity in all forms is also part of the ongoing question of the status
of images and cross-mediation (representation of "the same" image
in multiple media forms):
- How do we receive and understand images in all media that have no necessary
connection to a referential world outside of the image?
- Why are photography/video/film-based images given the code of "reality," some
assumed direct relation to something outside the image that it represents,
refers to, depicts?
- How much of our image-world or visual culture has no connection to non-mediated
world?
- How does the current mixed source and cross-mediation environment encourage
hybridity?
Lecture Notes:
Presentation on the the Status of Images: Statement,
Representation, Reference, Sign, Image
Exempla
- Las Vegas: Pure Realization of Simulacra and the Hyperreal?
- Of course, the porn industry embraced the simulacral hyperreal first!
Photography and Video
Film and Television
- CNN and the televisual: TV images as hyperreal
- The Matrix series;
Television
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions
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| 4 Hybridity in Visual Media: Intertextuality to "Intermediality" |
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Key Concepts and Learning Objectives: Ideas of postmodernism are closely linked
to the concepts of dialogism and intertextuality. Intertextuality should
now be redefined for contemporary media studies as intermediality, or
the ongoing dialogue among many kinds of cultural expressions in any medium.
A new work emerges within a network of prior and contemporary works, and we
interpret expression in a variety of genres that cut across our popular media--TV,
Web, books and magazines, art works, music.
Dialogism/Intertextuality Readings
- Daniel Chandler, "Intertextuality."
[Overview] | Intertextuality: Key Concepts
- Kristeva, excerpt from "Word,
Dialogue, and Novel." From Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva
Reader [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986]).
- Gunhild Agger, "Intertextuality
Revisited: Dialogues and Negotiations in Media Studies."
Canadian Journal of Aesthetics, 4, 1999. [Good overview
of theories as they apply to media studies.]
- Film Grammar: In case you need the basic background:
Film and Video Exempla
Lecture and Discussion Notes
Reading and Resources
Student Group Presentation
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| 5 Introduction to Pop: Rauschenberg,
Lichtenstein, Warhol |
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Reading and Resources
- Honnef, Pop Art, 6-26; sections on Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein,
Warhol
- Working with the idea of "the cultural encyclopedia"
(Umberto Eco):
- Eco, "The
Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader." [see
especially section III]
- Irvine and Metapedia Seminar Students, Definition of "cultural
encyclopedia"
in Key
Concepts
- How can Pop art be seen as a new way of engaging the cultural
encyclopedia: mixing received art and media categories, levels,
sources, contexts, institutions, a new intervention in the
cultural encyclopedia?
- Lawrence Alloway, "The
Arts and the Mass Media," Architectural Design & Construction,
February 1958. [the article often credited with starting the notion
of "pop art"]
- Richard Hamilton, Letter
on Pop Art, 1957.
- Luc Sante, Review of
1997 Rauschenberg Retrospective, Slate, 1997.
- [Recall] Michael Kimmelman, Art
Out of Anything," Review of Robert Rauschenberg, Combines,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Times, 12.23.2005.
- Current Critic's view of eclecticism and hybridity in art:
Christopher
Knight, LA Times, 11.1.2006.
Exempla/Sources
Lecture and Discussion Notes:
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content
discussions
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| 6 Andy Warhol: Icon of the Hybrid
Artist: Theory and Practice |
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Camp meets postmodernism: pop, combining high
and low visual culture, new materials in the artworld
- Camp always creates hybrids: deflations of high (straight) culture,
drag, sexual cross-overs in new forms.
- Susan Sontag, Notes
on Camp (1964; reprinted in essay collection, Against
Interpretation, 1966).
Reading and Resources
- The Warhol Museum
| Warhol
on Artnet | PBS
Bio | Museum
Images of Warhol's Work
- Warhol
at Dia | Warhol
in Artcyclopedia | Index
of Warhol images| Warhol
Foundation
- Warhol, List
of Major Exhibitions, 1952-1987.
- Warhol ranking in Artfacts.Net's
artist ranking list.
- Warhol Articles
and Interviews (Warhol Stars).
- Review
of 2002 Retrospective (Artnet)
- Douglas Crimp, "Getting
the Warhol We Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture."
Invisible Culture, 1, 1999. [Useful review of debates
on approaches to Warhol: art history, cultural studies, visual
culture.]
- Thierry de Duve, "Andy
Warhol, or The Machine Perfected," October 48
(1989).
- Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol: Commerce into Art. NY:
Taschen Books, 2000.
- Gerard Malanga (Warhol's first studio assistant) discusses working with Warhol (video).
Discussion: Selected works by Warhol
Screening: Chuck Workman, The Life and
Times of Andy Warhol - Superstar (1990). (Info:
IMDB)
- "Andy made fame more famous." Fran Lebowitz
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content
discussions
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| 7 Outside is Inside:
"Street Art," "Outsider Art," Graffiti, Illustration, Graphics |
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"Pop art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside
and put it inside."
--Andy Warhol
Discussion Questions
- How did "street art" and "graffiti art"
become recognized cultural categories?
- How does the "outside" become a privileged category
"inside" the established art and media institutions?
- Media coverage, rebel artist persona's, identity politics,
art world institutions.
- How do the people and genres continually cross-over institutional
boundaries? Multidimensional cultural categories and differentiations,
cross-category sourcing for hybrid art forms.
- Post-Everything art since 2000: "high" and "low"
culture categories also subverted in the "low-brow"
and "no-brow" art movement (John
Seabrook's essay on "nobrow" from The New Yorker,
1999).
- Post-Pop: beyond, after, "pop," but possible only
through the cultural preconditions and new market categories assumed
since pop.
Sources and Readings:
- 1980s: First Wave of post-Pop "street art" hitting
the mainstream:
Jean-Michel Basquiat & Keith Haring
- Documents:
- Artists & Street-Graf Art Collectives
- Magazines Devoted to Hybrid Art
- Art Galleries featuring Cross-Over Street Artists,
Low-Brow, Pop-Surrealism
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content
discussions
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| 8 International Pop, Anime, Japanese
Pop |
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Anime and Manga: Examples of Contemporary Developments
in the Genre
Japanese and pan-asian anime and manga have now produced an international pop animation style.
- Ghost in the Shell: Original and Part 2, followed by the TV series, Stand
Alone Complex
- Appleseed: Directed by Shinji Aramaki. Hybrid anime, composition with photography
of scale models, computer graphics, 3-D animation rendering,
digital editing; also hybrid story elements, Japanese and Western
classical mythology, quotes from everything from Bladerunner to
the Matrix series, anime rendering of "bullet time."
- Appleseed: Ex Machina: Produced/Co-Directed by John Woo, Directed by Shinji Aramaki. Further hybrid development of the theme and ideas with new 3D animation technology and digital motion capture from live actors.
References all prior SF, anime, and the John Woo style of action movies.
- Cartoon Network: Adult
Swim: US reception of anime inspired animation and
cartoons
Resources and Background:
Japanese Pop and Contemporary Art as Paradigm for the Internationalization of Pop
Recent Japanese Pop Art is both a fascinating ongoing hybrid
experiment and a major influence on the international art market
and art world in general. Takashi Murakami and his studio (with
proteges like Takano, Aoshima, and "Mr.") have been
the most influential. Examine some examples as case studies for
things going on around the world.
Murakami's Art and Context: The Philosophy of "Superflat" (1999-2001)
- Review
of 1999 Show (Jerry Saltz)
- Superflat Exhibition (Museum of Contemporary Art, LA
and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis): Walker
Art Center |
- Michael Darling, "Plumbing
the Depths of Superflatness," Art Journal,
Vol. 60, No. 3. (Autumn, 2001), pp. 76-89.
- Hiroki
Azuma, "Superflat Japanese Postmodernity," Lecture,
MOCA, LA
- Review
of "Superflat," 2001 (Artnet)
- Murakami, et al., Margrit Brehm, ed., The
Japanese Experience: Inevitable (In the Floating World: Slash
with a Knife (book)
(Amazon). Publisher's
website.
- Wired
Magazine Review,
2003
Murakami's Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding
Subculture (2005) (Exhibition and Book)
Takashi Murakami, his studio, and art entrepreneurship
(2004-present)
- Artist's Studio Website:
Kai Kai Kiki (Japanese)
- Arthur Lubow, "The
Murakami Method," New York Times Magazine,
April 3, 2005. [See slide show.]
- Carol Vogel, "The
Murakami Influence," New York Times, April
6, 2005.
- Review
of Murakami's book, The Art Entrepreneurship Theory (2005).
(Artnet)
- Murkami as Art Fair Promoter: Geisai
No. 10: Review of Event | Press
Release | Geisai Website
- Shows
at Marianne
Boesky Gallery, NY (2003) and Gagosian
Gallery | 2007
show
- Retrospective in LA: © Murakami,
MOCA LA
- Feature article on Murakami
and Retrospective (Art + Auction Magazine) (pdf, 6m)
© Murakami Retrospective @ MOCA-LA-Geffen Contemporary:
Follow the Money and Symbolic Capital
© Murakami is made possible by endowment support from the Sydney Irmas Exhibition Endowment. The exhibition and publication are made possible by generous support from Maria and Bill Bell. Major support is provided by Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. Generous additional support is provided by Steven and Alexandra Cohen; Kathi and Gary Cypres; Gagosian Gallery; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami; The Norton Family Foundation; Dallas Price-Van Breda; Janet and Tom Unterman; Ruth and Jacob Bloom; Marianne Boesky; David Teiger; The MOCA Contemporaries; The Japan Foundation; and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
Images of Murakami's Art Works
Yoshitomo Nara
Aya Takano
American Post-Pop Pop: Jeff Koons:
Hybridity, Irony, Satire, Humor, and the Art Market
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content
discussions
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| 9 Photography: Introduction to the Defining
Medium of the Contemporary World |
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Overview of highlights in the history of photography
From optics to pixel grid:
Photography has always required hybrids:
the invention of photography was optics + chemistry = photographic image. Today
there is a shift in thinking with photographic images: from what
the lens "sees"
(principles of optics, focus, perspective, light sources), and metaphors of
capturing, registering, mechanical means, to what a screen
can display (digital
pixels, imitation of camera lens point-of-view, focus, and perspective).
Now many images are made to look photographic, are called "photographs," whether
a lens, or many lenses, were used in the making of the image.
Intersections of technologies and institutions:
Photography
has always been linked to developments in technology for the film medium and
cameras as light capturing devices. But the interesting history is found in
the many conceptual uses of photography, the institutions and social organization
of the medium, and the mass adoption of cameras in the middle class for "taking
pictures" of
family and domestic life.
What important ideas can we extrapolate from the history of photography,
early cameras to digital cameras and camera in phones (iPhone)?
Readings and Sources
- Early encoding of photography: photography as an index of reality, photography
and truth (documentation, evidence). Early photographs and other arts:
early photographs imitated paintings and theatrical staging for making images
"pictorial".
- Introduction to Photography (Powerpoint) (Irvine)
- Examples from The Photo Book (Phaidon Press,
2003):
Note genres and photo technologies
- See: Abbe, Ansel Adams, Atget, Barnard, Bellocq, Brady, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson,
Daguerre, Doisneau, Durieu, Eakins, Eisenstaedt, Fox Talbot, Hill and
Adamson, Hine, Horst, Karsh, Lange, Lissitzky, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy,
Muybridge, Nadar, Negre, Rosenthal, Sander, Southworth and Hawes, Stieglitz,
Tripe, Turner, Weegee, Weston
- Key Issues in Modern Photography: Making a Photograph vs. Taking a Picture (Irvine)
- Photography Resources Site (Irvine)
History of Photography Sources
Introductory Theory and Statements on Photography
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Statement
on Photography" ("The Decisive Moment" theory), 1933.
- André Bazin, "The
Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film
Quarterly,
1960. (Focus on pp. 6-9.)
- Roland Barthes, "The
Rhetoric of the Image," from Image,
Music, Text, 1964.
- Rosalind Krauss, "A
Note on Photography and the Simulacral," October 31
(1984), especially pp. 55-62.
- Christian Metz, "Photography
and Fetish," October 34, 1985.
- Pierre
Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions
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| 10 Photography to Post-Photography: Contemporary
Photography and Hybrid Media |
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Overview
of Important Directions in Photography Today & Exemplary Artists
Some observers and theorists of photography and film are talking about our current era being "post-photographic": we live in a culture trained to read photo-produced images (and images as judged or assumed to live up to photographic expectations), yet many of the images we experience every day imitate photographic features without being produced by (or solely by) a device with a lens and recording medium. What are the implications of living "post-photographic"? Is this an extension of the notion of the hyper-real? With photographic "realism" still providing the codes for "the real"?
- The Changing Status and Function of Photography in Art Institutions
- Sign of the Times: New gallery for modern and contemporary photography
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: News | Met
Press Release |
Readings, Sources, Theory
- Photography
to Post-Photography and the Hybrid Image [Resource Page]
- Review Modern and Contemporary Photographers in The Photo Book: Araki,
Arbus, Baldessari, DiCorcia, Dijkstra, Fuss, Goldin, Gursky, LaChapelle,
Leibovitz, Mann, Mapplethorpe, Prince, Sherman, Sugimoto, Tillmans, Wall,
Warhol
- Taylor, Moment of Complexity, 125-143
- Göran Sonesson (Lund University):
- Douglas Crimp, "The
Photographic Activity of Post-Modernism," October 15,
1980.
- Deidre Stein Greben, "The
Medium of the Moment," ARTnews, Feb. 2003. [On large-scale
photography in the art market.
Discussion of leading photographers and multiple category
cross-overs
Fashion Photography, Advertising, Art: W Magazine
and Cross-Over Art
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions
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| 11 Music: Post-Digital, Post-Globalization
Genre Mixing |
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|
| 12 Peter Greenaway:
The Pillow Book, Hybrid Film, and the Body as Medium |
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Writing
on the Body, Film of a Book and the Body as Text or Writing medium
Greenaway has been making fascinating "hybrid" cinema for over 15 years. The Pillow Book allowed him to combine new film technologies (film window within the main film frame for contrasting two narrative time sequqnces) and a film whose subject matter was writing, sex, the body as text and instrument of desire--the word made flesh made film.
"...this notion of the skin
was as an open palimpsest on which to write." --Peter Greenaway, interview in
Salon Magazine
"I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing." -- Peter Greenaway
Greenaway Sources
Body|Writing|Word and Flesh
- Compare: Whitney Museum exhibition: Skin
is a Language:
January 12, 2006-May 21, 2006
The largest organ of the human body, skin is also the
one with which we are most intimate, even as it presents
the exterior of our self to the world. Skin is a Language
explores ways in which artists use skin, literally and
metaphorically, to examine a diverse array of social,
physical, and cultural phenomena. Featuring sculpture,
drawing, photography, and prints from the permanent
collection, the exhibition includes works by Bruce Conner,
Ellen Gallagher, Félix González-Torres,
Nancy Grossman, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Jasper Johns, Annette Lemieux, Glenn
Ligon, Catherine Opie, and David Wojnarowicz.
- Shelley Jackson
- Ineradicable Stain (body-text-art project)
- Lee
Wagstaff (tattoo art on the body of the artist) | Artist's
website
- Tattoo history, demographics, and background on The
Vanishing Tattoo site.
- Shirin Neshat: calligraphy on the body, women as sites for inscription:
TIME
photo essay
- Zhang Huan at the Asian Society: "The body is proof of identity; the body is language."
Student Group Presentations and Wiki content
discussions
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| 13-14 Final Project Presentation |
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