culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

LIGIA PÎRVU
famous people of this age. When his friends suggested that he should paint what
he loved most, he took the suggestion literally and in his first major exhibition
he presented his now famous cans of Campbell's Soup. Gradually, Warhol went
from being a painter to being a designer of paintings, removing the artist's 'hand'
and focusing on a unique signature style. The use of techniques derived from the
media and photography developed into his famous 'silk-screens', a form of fine
stencil on which an image taken from a photograph is captured and transferred to
another surface, such as a canvas. His most celebrated works use this technique
in which the subject-matter is sometimes reduced to the icon itself as in the case
of celebrities, brand names or everyday objects. Some of his paintings transform
personal tragedies into public performance thus signaling the media's zest for
disasters which is as true today as it was in the Sixties. His art is, above all,
topical in what concerns subject matter: the Red Race Riot carries a profound
protest against racial discrimination while Sixteen Jackies and Golden Marilyn
speak of an age by painting two of its most powerful female icons, both related
to Kennedy and to the Vietnam War. The fragmentation/split/disruption felt in
Andy Warhol's suite of paintings is felt the same way as Jimmy Hendrix's
version of The Star Spangled Banner, and it voices the way in which the
mainstream culture was shattered by the countercultural movements within the
larger frame of the dissatisfaction and alienation produced by consumerism and
the Vietnam War; it is also a prominent feature of the postmodern age which
started in the Sixties and which is still on its way.
However, we should not forget that there cannot be a counterculture
without a mainstream culture and therefore, we must acknowledge them both.
Literary critic Ihab Hassan aptly summarized the importance of both mainstream
culture and counterculture in his well-known book on postmodernism:
“Sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be
honored if we are to attend to history, apprehend (perceive, understand) change
as a spatial, mental structure and as a temporal, physical process, both as pattern
and unique event” (1987: 88).
References:
Marwick, A. 2005. An Introduction to the Humanities, Block 6, The Sixties:
Mainstream Culture and Counter-culture, London: The Open University
Hassan, I. The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture,
Ohio State University Press, USA, 1987
Electronic Source
Wikipedia, the Free Web Encyclopedia
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