![]() ![]() Because the art works in question were language-based, I relied on forms of textual analysis and theories of the sign to define how the “Happening” was being brought in as a cultural trope. If Paris was previously considered as the epicenter of the avant-garde, the popularity of this gimmick was evidence that New York was now taking center stage at the height of the Cold War’s cultural politics. Itself a response to the concept of time made available by American composer John Cage, the “Happening” first became identified in the 1960s as a signifier for experimental, non-object-based art. Using semiotic analysis, I analyzed the Mass Media Art Group’s artistic output as a critique against the international proliferation of Allan Kaprow’s “Happening” in the Argentine media. Verón taught courses on structural anthropology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, and it was in these institutions that these artists became exposed to structuralism. ![]() ![]() The Mass Media Art Group (El Grupo de los Medios) was comprised by members Roberto Jacoby (born 1944), Eduardo Costa (1940), and Raúl Escari (1940), who were closely involved with art critic Oscar Masotta and Eliseo Verón, a semiotician of mass media who had studied with Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology in the Collège de France. Its goal is to provide a glimpse into the shadow history of Warhol’s art. By tracing these trajectories from their source, this study aims to participate in the mode of perception that it hopes to describe. The Oxidation paintings and the Shadows designate a culmination of certain, otherwise obscured, trajectories in Warhol’s work as much as they provide an introduction to the themes and methods that would dominate his painting practice during his final decade. ![]() The current study represents an attempt not just to provide a more complex understanding of Warhol’s engagement with abstract art, but also to reconsider his late abstract paintings according to the more immediate contextual forces that shaped the conditions of their production and reception. It examines the origins of Warhol’s relationship with abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s, his uses and misuses of abstractionist picture making strategies in the 1960s, and the cultural contexts that influenced his first two major series of abstract paintings-the Oxidation paintings and the Shadows-in the late–1970s. This dissertation is about Andy Warhol and abstraction. The Velvets’ first album produces meaning precisely through this dialectical tension in a manner made possible only through its mediation in the commodity form. I propose that we instead examine these discourses as themselves signifiers that can be manipulated by artists. I contend that much of the discourse about authenticity in popular music is hampered by the assumption that artifice and authenticity are incompatible. A close textual analysis of The Velvet Underground & Nico functions as an entry into theoretical arguments about truth and meaning in popular music. This project emerges from the tension between these identities. While much ink has been spilled explaining the original and authentic genius that is the Velvet Underground, an equally compelling case can be made that the band’s first album marked a turn towards insincerity and inauthenticity in popular music. Musicians, journalists and academics often hold up the Velvet Underground as the paragon of authenticity in rock music, and the band indeed portrayed itself this way from the outset. ![]()
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