Butler, Foucault, and Caravaggio

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Rakesh wrote:
>It's been some time since I read Jameson's comments on VG and AW and
>postmo. But Jameson doesn't seem to be simply on about *decadence*  in the
>movement from modernist to pomo aesthetics. Pomo as manifested in Warhol's
>shoes has much more to do with the fact that pomo aesthetics' only referent
>is late capitalism. So with Warhol's shoes there is an actual celebration
>of mass production and consumption. There is no sense of ironic detachment.
>Unlike the surrealists who use ready mades or "found art" to explore our
>modern fetishism as constitutive of modern consciousness; the surrealists
>attempted to make us self conscious of how our own processes of
>fetishization. Warhol just reproduces the commodity form. Simply an icon to
>the commodity. Interesting indeed but just doesn't seem to have the same
>critical function.

The relationships between Marxism, the working class, art, and mass
production have been complex and ambivalent. (Doyle Saylor's comments on
Hockney's use of photography, for instance, highlight a positive aspect of
mass produced technologies.) Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay "The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production" captures the aforementioned
ambivalence nicely. (It is available at
http://pixels.filmtv.ucla.edu/community/julian_scaff/benjamin/benjamin.html.)

W
hat of Andy Warhol? I think that Warhol's work may be read as palimpsests,
with death as an underwriting of commodity fetishism. (I suppose it all
depends on who reads it.)

Yoshie