Michael Glassco: Contested images: the politics and poetics of appropriation
"The dissertation traces the tactics of appropriation of Barbara Kruger, The Billboard Liberation Front and Shepard Fairey as exemplars of transgression and commodification within the changing commercial conditions of neo-liberalism. Their works, tactics and strategies are emphasized as points of insight into the practices and conditions of subversion as well as the limits of hegemonic containment that reproduces the political and economic structure within which they operated. The dissertation furthers and contributes to the theoretical and methodology of critical cultural studies as it emphasizes the role of the economy and ideology in reproducing the prevailing hegemonic order. Critical cultural studies hinges on the concepts of hegemony as lived discursive and ideological struggles over meaning and communication resources within historically specific and socially structured contexts. This framework emphasizes the poetics of appropriation - the use, meaning and spaces of articulation of visual representations with the politics - the socio-economic and discursive conditions that reproduce the dominant social order."
(Michael Glassco, 2012, University of Iowa)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Allen Jones: the pop artist whose transgressions went too far
"Jones explains the situation, as he sees it. 'For artists of my generation, coming on stream in the Sixties, whatever you did you had to reckon with American gestural abstraction. The problem with figurative art at the time was that it had run out of steam, but the polemic was that you couldn't do it any more, which seemed absurd after 4,000 years of people making representations of each other. To me the Pop movement was incontrovertibly a swing of the pendulum back towards representation. The problem wasn't with representation, it was the age–old one – with the language. And the language had run out of steam. Using urban imagery as source material revitalised figurative painting, without a doubt. And recently the main thrust of the avant–garde from Basquiat and Schnabel up to Koons and company has been figuration with a vengeance.'"
(Andrew Lambirth 1 November 2014, The Spectator)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Do Look Now: A playful meditation on sexual pleasures
"From academic and cinephile Helen Yeates comes this 16–minute mash–up of sexual and erotic scenes that creatively pushed the sensual boundaries of cinema, challenging audiences over the last four decades.
An ironic intercutting of arousing and transgressive scenes, Do Look Now creates a provocative interplay of love, sex, desire, humour, nostalgic yearning and cultural memory.
Part postmodern pastiche, part cut–up passion project, Yeates's creation explores the contours of female eroticism and sexual politics, playing with the way context can lend fresh meaning and nuance to sexual depictions."
(Brisbane International Film Festival, 2012)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pink Flamingos: a provocative celebration of otherness
"'Pink Flamingos was an antihippie movie made for hippies who would be punks in two years. It's a pothead movie. I wrote it on pot.' – John Waters"
(Jeff Jackson, DreamlandNews)
Fig.1 John Waters (1972). trailer for "Pink Flamingos".
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Les Enfants Terribles: Illustrator Robert Williams
"This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America's most opprobrious and maligned underground artists, the painter, Robert Williams. It was this artist to brought the term 'lowbrow' into the fine arts lexicon, with his ground breaking book of 1979, The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams. It was from this point, that the seminal elements of West Coast Outlaw culture slowly started to aggregate."
(Robert Williams)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
