an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 20,
Spring/Summer 2023, ISSN 1552-5112
Pop Goes Hyperreal!
My paper aims to investigate the notion of “hyperreality”,
introduced by Eco in the account of his journey across America in 1975 and
taken up by Baudrillard a few years later as the guiding concept of the
contemporary, an issue representing one of the key grammars for the historical
understanding of the transition from pop (the art of consumption) to postmodern
(the consumption of art) where the falsification of artistic content is shifted
into the average criterion of aesthetic pleasure. So my talk will be divided
into three parts: first, a look at
the aesthetics of pop, then an analysis of the problem of the fake as transition strategy to hyperreality, which will be the final point.
In
order to analyze what we call “pop aesthetics”, one immediately needs to sweep away
a misunderstanding hard to die: Pop is not Pop Art. Pop Art is a high-level
expression, with a broader meaningfulness relative to what most of interpreters
in the Fifties called “mass culture” and that a group of British intellectuals,
which met under the name of the Independent Group, began to call “pop art”. The
first intuition of the Independent Group was to assign to consumption cultural
products the same worth value of those of high culture. However, this operation
involved a global reconsideration of what was meant by art. The use of the
adjective pop became the key to the
solution. An extensive radiography of mass art started leading to the first
great synthesis: what distinguishes the mass art from
the high one is its consumability, the expendability. This allowed
understanding how what gradually came to be called pop was inevitably inscribed
in the logic of industrial capitalism. The Americanization of the Western world
in the Fifties found in the consumption not only an economic validation, but
also an aesthetic one. And the infatuation with America (an idea that today
seems so far away if not weird) means to do what millions of people do: to
consume movies, songs, and cartoons, and to recognize themselves in the same
culture.
It
is the rising of an aesthetic reality integrated in the urban universe
(differently from the folklore) and non-conflictual with the industrial
ideology (differently from the avant-garde). The mimetic operation that arose
was Pop Art: from the consumption to the representation of consumption. The
expendability of cultural and industrial mass goods became the reference for
this new mimesis as nature (external
and internal) was for the past. It seemed no longer necessary to argue in a
conflictual way the dialectics between the ego and the world. Suddenly the
interiority became archeology: duplicating the world was the new formula and also the big misunderstanding. In this sense, Pop Art,
as Arthur Danto remarked[1],
concluded the parable of Platonism and the long history of mimesis. The art of pop culture, what today we call Pop Art as
represented by this formula in textbooks of art history, built itself through
precise aesthetic strategies: the abolition of the ego and consequently the
definition of an anti-emotional culture, predominance of the artificial and
obliteration of nature, tautology of images, with no hierarchical distinction
between high and low.
Industrial
aesthetics could not record anything but the absolute validation of artificial
guidelines of the beautiful. Baudelaire’s insights, if
we follow Baudrillard’s line of interpretation, find their fulfillment in
Warhol: the natural beautiful does not exist. The natural threatens the idea of iconicity that pop seeks. The natural brings with itself a temporality that does not
integrate with the pop expendability, because it has different laws from those
of the market. The temporality of nature is not the temporality of consumption.
What
is, then, a pop beauty? First, it is a beauty that may be constructible. In
fact, the great aesthetic exercise of Warhol takes place on Marilyn Monroe, on
the constant denial of the natural and the planned affirmation of artifice and
its construction, the make-up. If
make-up corrects the natural defects, it should be understood
that this operation is an operation that mainly leads from the mimetic
to the iconic. The make-up fixes an image that from that point on becomes
repeatable, reproducible, an easy object of optical fetishism. Beautiful pop
declines always in a fetishistic way because it is always mediated by a
representative virtuality that coincides with the media universe. If nature
expresses a beauty that satisfies physically, pop shapes the beautiful
through strategies of erotic sublimation. The artifice of beauty pop flows,
always and inevitably, in that huge industrial scene of shared taste that is
fashion.
In
the reified universe of late capitalism, it was almost a tautological operation
to prefer the object to the subject. It was a landing already inscribed in the
processes of commodity fetishism identified in the mid-nineteenth century by
Marx and Baudelaire, then recorded more effectively by Benjamin and more
problematically by critical theory, and finally promoted to the only structure
of reality in the early works of Baudrillard. Artistically, the jump was
simple: from the thoughtful gesture of Duchamp, from the transformation of the
archetypal object to the possible object, one moved to the representation of
the object filtered by the media and reproductive technology. However, pop, and
Pop Art in particular, realized that the object has in itself
always two dimensions. The mystery of the goods described by Marx before
becoming a seductive form (Baudrillard), the nineteenth-century industrial
object before becoming postmodern gadget, defined itself essentially as a persuading image. This formula, offered by
Richard Hamilton between 1959 and 1960, changed the object in the
representation of itself. In this sense, all objects that pop chooses are
design objects. This double nature is what marginalizes the use value of the
object emphasizing its aesthetic aspect. We can see a first
idea of this characteristic in the list given once again by Hamilton in January
1957, when pop art had still the same meaning of pop culture: “Pop Art is:
Popular (designed for a mass audience). Transient (short-term solution). Expendable
(easily forgotten). Low cost. Mass produced. Young (aimed at youth). Witty.
Sexy. Gimmicky. Glamourous. Big business.”[2]
The
severe modernist ethic was replaced by the uncritical practice of consumption
that became more and more symbolic. What was consumed was pictures more than
the same objects as Antonioni showed in Blow
Up, or Warhol himself in the series Campbell's
Soup Cans, where what is visible of cans are only labels (brand, the
exchange value) and not their contents (the soup, the use value). In the excess
of media signs, the pop object unmasks the last frontier of capitalism: the
object does not belong as much to the universe of production, but to that of
communication. Nevertheless, the phenomenon, although it is more understandable
and manageable at the object level, becomes significantly more alienating if
not sinister for the subjects. The whole “Marilyn Monroe” mythology is an
example of a strategy of an artifice that changes in uncritical dimension,
shared consumption, and instant recognition. This mimesis brought to excess is what in the pop becomes myth or sign
as Roland Barthes already showed. With Marilyn and Elvis, the
anthropology becomes sign, sign among signs, and finds home not by
chance in those pop and postmodern semiotic systems, which are Los Angeles and
Las Vegas.
Have
these simulation mythologies changed into something else? Have they outlined a
tradition? Alternatively, maybe the perspective is another: where in our lives
today is the point that marks the difference between pop and everyday life?
Where is it still visible? This question leads us to the problem of what is
true and what is fake.
The
problem of fake came out forcefully in Plato’s aesthetics. The complexity of
the Platonic discussion of fake is known and depends on the interconnection of
different aspects that cannot be isolated: the true, the good, and obviously,
the mimetic.[3] The issue of fake is not only at the centre of Platonic
mimesis, but is also the most visible and recognisable translation of that
space of untruth involving the human being in all manifestations of logos. In the Sophist and the Republic Plato worked out subtle classifications
to give an account of this illusory space that gives rise to an actual
“technique of deception” (Soph.
264d6). At least three types of fake emerge. They are not always
distinguishable from each other, but apparently produce three different
experiences: the eikon (copy), the eidolon (image), and the phantasma (appearance). These
experiences take shape in relation to their degree of difference with the truth
and/or with the original model they reproduce.
The conflict between appearance
and reality, triggered by the mimetic process, leads not only to the awareness
that one can have a distorted reproduction of reality, beyond any reproduced
likeness, but also to a scenario in which the fake is assumed to be a possible
reading of reality as a whole. As Plato states in the
allegory of the cave, it is a false idea of the world. What remains of Plato’s
condemnation of fake is obviously a vision that
considers the pseudos as a project of
the global falsification of reality, a falsification that has to do not so much
with the production of objects, as with the production of fluctuant and humoral
opinions. Where there is falsehood, there is the possibility of an art
of deception, the mimesis of fake.
The Platonic dialectic
of the original and the copy has defined, especially in the context of the
reflection on artwork, a distinction between what is authentic and what is not.
The negative fetish of the inauthentic is one of the most enduring legacies of
Platonic aesthetics. It is a devaluation that was initially aesthetic and then
became a moral condemnation: the inauthentic as a field of seduction and guilt
as shown, just to give two examples, by the
modernist attacks on kitsch or the vexed suspicion toward cosmetic surgery. Plato’s warnings against the pseudos
(ontological, moral, and mimetic) pour into what remains one of the most
obsessive attempts to work out a grammar of counterfeit art: the 1897 essay What is Art? by Tolstoy. The specificity of Tolstoy’s text, a sort of ante
litteram x-ray inquiry of kitsch, is that what is analysed and considered
as a product of counterfeit (poddelka)
is not a series of minor works, immediately recognisable as artistic
surrogates, but the great works of nineteenth-century modernity, the first
being Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.
Unlike in Plato’s
work, the fake (counterfeit in Tolstoy’s lexicon) is not so much a perceptual
error or an illusory appearance, as a strategy to create only an aesthetic
pleasure, an act of enjoyment (and indeed Plato might agree on this point). To realise this purpose the poddelka
shows itself through four features: borrowing, imitating, strikingness and engagingness[4]. The first two are related to the object, the second two to
the subject. The borrowing (zaimstvovanie)
is the use of clichés, the recycling of familiar images and content, whereas
the imitating (podrazhatel'nost) is
the tendency to fill in the work with details, descriptions, in this way trying
to make a kind of cast of reality. In turn, the
strikingness (porazitel'nost)
represents the ways in which the subject’s senses are stressed in the fruition
(violence and sex scenes), whereas the engagingness (zanimatel'nost) is both a mere intellectual dimension, for example analysing the plot complexity or the
author’s technical competence, and at the same time a distracted fruition, a
mere entertainment.
Plato and Tolstoy
consider the fake and the relative grammars as a mimetic dimension that
repudiates an ontological (Plato) and artistic (Tolstoy) authenticity and they
arrive at an ethical characterisation of the aesthetics of pseudos. In modernity, this interweaving
will be maintained only in the criticism of kitsch, while the issue of the fake
will change into another inquiry.
The ontological
impasse of the fake leads to new scenarios. The contemporary aestheticisation seems
to modify the experience of fakery. In daily practice the discernment of authentic, the final
outcome of the aesthetic taste, is replaced by artistic fetishism. It is a
condition that leads directly to what Eco and Baudrillard define as
hyperreality. So we see the uncontrolled phenomenon of fake aesthetics, where
the ontological and mimetic problem has now changed into a dimension, so to
speak, intended for tourists. Certainly the Parthenon in Athens is “historically” better than its 1897 replica in Nashville, a reproduction of the Parthenon
in every detail, showing it to us as it should appear in its original
appearance.[5] In this difference we still feel the dimension of the
fake: “tourists who in Florence fetishistically admire outside Palazzo
Vecchio the copy of Michelangelo’s David (without knowing that the original is
preserved elsewhere)”[6], or the Getty Museum in Malibu where
“original statues and paintings are inserted in very well reproduced ‘original’
environments, and many visitors are uninterested in knowing which are the
originals and which the copies.”[7]
In the account of his
journey into the American make-believe in the mid-1970s, Travels in the Hyperreality, Eco notices a decisive dialectic: the relationship
between the real thing and the absolute fake. No longer platonically opposed in an ontological struggle, these poles
now define a continuous exercise of the desire in a culture increasingly tied
to the image. The desire for
authenticity can only be expressed in the logic of the absolute fake.
Everything is a duplication, particularly the past that undergoes a pervasive
iconic cannibalisation: “the completely real becomes identified with the completely fake.”[8] This involves a shift in
the role played by the mimetic. Now Plato’s targets, activated by the mimesis
(illusion, double, iconic seduction), become a cultural strategy:
the fake moves away from the mimetic process, that process which considers
itself still tied to an original model in a subordinate way, and becomes the sign of itself, and creates a new
dimension of reality – the hyperreality. Even the aesthetic pleasure aroused by the hyperreal has its own inner
logic. The fake is not so much the reaching of a technical perfection but the
idea for which, in front of this absolute iconism, the real will always be
inferior and therefore less pleasant and desirable: the falsification turns
into a criterion of aesthetic pleasure. Even better than the real thing: the
infamous Venus of Milo with arms described by Eco in 1975 as the mimetic
prototype of this process. The same condition, e.g., we have with the replica
of a Montezuma headdress in the Anthropological Museum in Mexico City, the
second most crowded exhibit of the collection (the first is the Sun Stone), and
the (maybe) real one in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna.
In
parallel with Eco, Baudrillard has analysed these processes of derealisation by
interpreting contemporaneity as an evident agony of the real and rational that
is the modern, and as an input into an age of simulation: the age of production
is followed by the age of simulation, the logic of fascination (or seduction)
follows the logic of sense. The simulation
is the dimension that exceeds or denies the ideology of representation, namely
the ideology of a still hierarchical relationship between reality and image
that expresses, as its goal, the attestation of the truth. It is around this belief that the whole philosophy of Simulacra and Simulation focuses,
the 1981 book by which Baudrillard gives definitively
his theory of the hyperreal fake: “It is no longer a question of
imitation, nor duplications, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting
the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring
every real process via its operational double.”[9]
Baudrillard
has repeatedly insisted on the articulation of the fake indicating three
phases.[10] The first one, the counterfeit, dominates the classic
period of modernity, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. It is the impulse toward artifice, the negation of the natural. The first modernity
engages in a huge enterprise of imitation of nature before moving to its own
production. This is the second stage, one that coincides with the Industrial
Revolution: the imitation of nature is followed by the technological
production. The simulacrum of the natural is overcome by the introduction of
the replicable model, the mass production. The fake turns into industrial code and the centrality of the authentic
and unique falls. The third stage is the
simulation: medium after medium, the real accomplishes itself. The industrial
code turns to the communication code. The art itself takes this principle of simulation that removes every other
competitive principle, be it reality or pleasure. So modernity has produced in its course three types of simulacra: 1) the
natural or mimetic simulacrum based on image and counterfeiting, that is
the simulacrum condemned by Plato; 2) the industrial simulacrum that is the
expression of the technologisation of reality simulacrum, finding in Benjamin
and McLuhan its decisive interpreters; and 3) the simulacrum of simulation that
defines the contemporary hyperreality. Where there was reality there is now
simulation; where there were objects constituting reality, now there are
simulacra.
The
paradigmatic expression of this historical condition is Disneyland which
Baudrillard, like Eco, does not hesitate to define as the exemplary model of
all simulacra, at least in the Seventies and in the Eighties. Disneyland shows the final dimension where the aesthetics of the fake
overturn every Platonic principle in a spectacular way (and so it reveals
itself as deeply Platonic). Disneyland shows hyperreality to its most primordial degree; it is the
step that will activate – just to give two movie examples – the sinister
dystopias of a reality simulated by machines and their dictatorship (Matrix), and a further variant of the
myth of the cave, the world as a reality show (The Truman Show).
Disneyland is,
however, at the same time, the end and the beginning
of a path: it marks a border between reality and
hyperreality. It
records the historical moment when the fake, as suggested by Eco, becomes an
absolute fake and in this process its confrontation with the authentic loses
all its meaning. Thus
we do not have to consider Disneyland (nobody lives in Disneyland), but rather
those cities where the fake is still in conflict with the idea of an original model. If Los Angeles is the city that still belongs to a clear pop
culture[11] and Disneyland to a third phase of early hyperreality, Las
Vegas shows that central moment when the hyperreal did not yet emancipate
itself from the logic of falsification: it has not yet reached the absolute.
The Austrian
architect Hans Hollein proposed a first analysis
of architectural fiction, where the image (the simulated simulacrum) is more
central than the reality that may be experienced (the building). “A building can become entirely
information – its message might be experienced through informational media
(press, TV, etc.). in fact it is almost no importance whether, for example, the
Acropolis or the Pyramids exist in physical reality, as most people are aware
of them through other media anyway and not through an experience of their own.
Indeed, their importance – the role they play – is based on this effect of
information. Thus a building might be simulated
only.”[12] Recovering Benjamin’s theories discussed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, Hollein focuses on the aesthetic experience of the role of
the image in the media universe, no longer a substitute for the original, but
the only usable dimension: the exhibition value is the new real.
It is in the way this
exhibition’s value, following Benjamin’s concept, is expressed that illustrates how postmodernity sharpens its
mimetic strategies. The processes of falsification are poured out in a cultural
hermeneutics which is translated into a “replication of a permanent past,”[13] like the Parthenon in Nashville has shown. However, that replication logic still admits a relationship with the past
model: another example, in which the postmodern already appears as
hyperreal, is the case of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. Here you can see in
action the operative fake in the overlapping of signified and signifier when a
dimension of the past, ancient Egypt, is replicated. The signifier (the word “Luxor”) does not indicate the reproduction of the Luxor Temple but has another
meaning, the Sphinx and the Khafre pyramid at Giza, although the size of the
hotel refers not to the Khafre pyramid, the second largest after that of
Cheops, but to the pyramid of Menkaure, the third and smallest of Giza site. A
real pastiche of references as you can see.
The
operative fake is still an exercise of accumulation of cultural referents, a
conscious exercise of quotations, and it is the last stage before the
hyperreal. If today Piazza
d’Italia (1976–1979) by Charles Moore in
New Orleans has become a symbol of postmodern architecture, at the same time it
is also an implicit model (more or less conscious) of
every Italian outlet store. The revival of the old as a solution to
contemporary needs can also take the form of the ironic provocation that the
fake often brings on purpose with itself, as the postmodern Bible, Learning from Las Vegas, proves.
The history of Las
Vegas, in the decades that separate it from the year of
the first publication of Learning from
Las Vegas (1972), shows the
passage from a city modulated according to an iconographic logic (the signs on
the Strip) to a city identified with its own scene-design strength (as
documented by the Luxor Hotel). A dramatization of urban
space, its hyperreal Disneylandisation, leads to
the extreme logic that postmodernism had developed in its relationship with
modernist aesthetics – a game of mirrors that seemed to repeat what had
established Platonic mimesis, the struggle between true and false. Heinrich Klotz, the German historian of architecture, at the
conclusion of his The History of
Postmodern Architecture[14] has identified ten oppositions between the modern and the postmodern
and one might add that it is just in the space
opening from this dialectic that the fake finds its operativity. The ten features
proposed by Klotz revolve around a basic bipolarity: the postmodern has placed
at its centre a fictional representation marginalising the totem of modernist
planning, the function. In other words, it
replaced the function of truth, the realisation itself of techne, with
the tale of illusion, the extemporaneous work of the imagination. It dismissed the primacy of technological utopianism and replaced it with a
multiplicity of meanings. This grammar resumes wholly the vocabulary of the fake (fiction, illusion,
allusion) and transforms the fiction (the fake) into the new function (the
truth), a perfect exchange of values that leads directly to Disneyland and
beyond.
In conclusion, all
that remains is to rely on two suggestions. First, it is possible to accept the fake as a viable and unproblematic aesthetics,
and indeed it is so. But it is not possible to ignore the sinister presage of a
humanity that resolves in a replication of
itself, has its own image in its specular simulacrum, the “more human than
human”, the motto of Tyrell Corporation,
the company that produces replicants in Blade
Runner. And then the other possibility. The city of Tianducheng in
China builds the replica of an
entire city: the fake as a living space, the achievement of hyperreality as the only and true reality. More Parisian than Paris.
However, can we spot the real one, right?
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 20,
Spring/Summer 2023, ISSN 1552-5112
Notes