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