1. Remediation in and of Warhol's work
Alloway, L. (1958). The arts and the mass media. Architectural Design & Construction. Retrieved from http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/andy/warhol/articles/popart/popart.html
Lawrence Alloway was a British art reviewer, curator, and professor. He was the curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York during the sixties and played a crucial role in the careers of artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol. He is famous for having coined the term "pop art" in this article, although the term he used is actually "popular art," which was shortened later (see note at the top of the page).
In the article, Alloway discusses his views of the role technology plays in the remediation process for fine art:
The popular arts of our industrial civilization are geared to technical changes which occur, not gradually, but violently and experimentally. The rise of the electronics era in communications challenged the cinema. In reaction to the small TV screen, movie makers spread sideways ... and back into space ... Colour TV, the improvements in colour printing (particularly in American magazines), the new range of paper back books; all are part of the constant technical improvements in the channels of mass communication.He talks about the boundaries between "fine art" and items from popular culture, saying that the two are not necessarily separated. He also feels that mediated versions of art have two advantages for the public: 1) those who are only partially engaged with the content can continue their other activities and still gain something from the art, and 2) those who are actively engaged with the art are free to concentrate on it and benefit from that close scrutiny. He concludes, "the new role for the fine arts is to be one of the possible forms of communication in an expanding framework that also includes the mass arts."
Warhol began his career as a commercial artist and developed an appreciation for the beauty inherent in everyday items. Later, he remediated these items as art (Campbell's Soup cans, Brillo pad boxes, ordinary flowers, shoes). He also remediated items from popular culture such as photos of Mao or Marilyn Monroe, as well as reproductions of paintings so famous that they were part of the cultural lexicon.
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| Warhol commodified this photo, literally turning it into an icon by reducing it to a multi-layer silkscreen (I have no idea how D&G would respond to that, but it would be something about plateaus and territories) and printing it multiple times within a single canvas. Source: http://livelearnloveleave.com/design/top-20-andy-warhol-paintings/ |
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| This is a perfect example of his use of cultural icons. http://livelearnloveleave.com/design/top-20-andy-warhol-paintings/ |
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| Warhol's shoe drawings, while utterly fabulous, speak to his background in commercial art. They also highlight his interest in women's clothing. http://livelearnloveleave.com/design/top-20-andy-warhol-paintings/ |
Warhol's art, of course, has been remediated as decorations for many kinds of items. Here are two of my favorites:
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| Spotwelders, a film design firm, commissioned carpeting whose design is based on Warhol's flower paintings. It is an ironic remediation, because Warhol remediated the flowers to make those paintings. There are many other photos at http://www.officesnapshots.com/2011/01/12/spotwelders-office/ |
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| Cake Power, a Manhattan bakery, sells cakes that make me laugh. This one is my favorite, and it is a remediation of Warhol's "Daisy." If I ever throw a party that requires a $500 cake, I know where to get it. To see these wonderful creations, go to http://www.cakepower.com/default4.asp Choose Portfolios > Bold Wedding Cakes > Warhol Cake |
According to Bolter and Grusin, remediation requires the use of "new media." My favorite app aligns with this criterion:
2. Remediation of the Dies Irae
Gregory, R. (1953). Dies Irae. Music & Letters. 34(2), 133-139. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/730837
The Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is a Gregorian Chant that was added to the Mass in the 13th century, near the end of the Middle Ages. It is such a powerful composition that it soon became part of the popular culture in the day. In the 1600s, it survived the Council of Trent's purge of liturgical music. Composers still use it today, especially when they want to intensify the impact of the depiction of death in movies, TV shows, and video games.
In this article, Robin Gregory has written a detailed musicological analysis of the structure of the piece and traced it through similar compositions of Mozart, Verdi, Rachmaninoff, and Faure. It is a nicely written article that talks about the methods of remediation available to composers from the Middle Ages to the 1950s. Primarily, these methods were limited to using the Dies Irae as a compositional device like a harmonic pattern and/or a counter-melody.
This is a difficult article to wade through if you aren't familiar with the musicology lexicon. Here is a website that discusses the same content in a much more accessible style: http://electricka.com/etaf/muses/music/ancient_music/dies_irae/dies_irae.htm. I didn't use this for the annotated bibliography because the assignment was to cite a scholarly source. I can't verify the author of the website, but the content is accurate -- or at least as accurate as I can determine. Another article tracing the use of the Dies Irae can be found here.
No one knows who originally commissioned or wrote the Dies Irae; here is a photo of one of the earliest extant manuscripts. Notice that the manuscript is the original artifact, not any kind of performance (because there was no way to make a recording in the Middle Ages).
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| This is an "illuminated" (illustrated) manuscript. Notice that this score uses a four-line staff instead of the five-line version standardized during the Renaissance. Although there are stems on some of the notes, none of the note heads are hollow (indicating a longer length). The stems in this kind of manuscript indicate very short notes. The black rectangular (diagonal) note heads are a for a melisma, or a range of pitches played in order. It is a form of ornamentation used today by many vocalists and is the primary reason I don't watch "American Idol." |
This is part of Mozart's Requiem, which quotes the Dies Irae in the lower instruments, giving it a haunting, eerie quality.
Rachmaninoff uses the Dies Irae in his famous "Variations on a Theme of Paganini." The DI begins in the piano part at 5:32 and quickly gets handed off to the woodwinds and then the brass.
The DI is used in current media such as movies, primarily as a means of intensifying frightening or sad scenes. In the 2010 short movie "Deus Irae" (a play on the DI title, meaning "God's Wrath), the mother hums the DI as she nurses her daughter, who is very ill. She is in an altered state, and it's creepy to hear her mother acknowledge musically that she is near death.
The DI is also used in the theme to the "Matrix" movies.
In this example of remediation, Adi Scheiss climbs a peak in the Alps called "Deus Irae." The interesting thing about this video is not the coincidental name, but that the music in the soundtrack uses the Dies Irae as its harmonic base.
My very favorite mediation of the DI is Susan Boynton's book and CD, Grunt: Pigorian Chant from Snouto Domoinko de Silo. The book is a story about a monastery whose monks, depicted as pigs in Franciscan robes, sing "Pigorian Chant" in -- you guessed it -- Pig Latin. The first track on the CD, "Anima Fundi," is the Dies Irae.
Here is the illuminated manuscript.
3. Remediation of Shakespeare's plays
Mabillard, A. (2000). Shakespeare's influence on other artists. Shakespeare Online. Retrieved from http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespearewriter.html
Amanda Mabillard is a frequently-cited Shakespearean scholar who has put together a website of resources that address various aspects of learning and teaching Shakespeare. On this page, she discusses the influence Shakespeare had on other artists. It is much like the page that traced the influence of the Dies Irae, in that it assumes that the primary modes of remediation for centuries have been imitation and revision.
She quotes various author's opinion of the importance of Shakespeare. Keats calls him the Genius presiding over writers, and Thomas Carlyle says, "[W]e are of one blood and kind with him." She lists six monumental novels that take their titles from Shakespeare, and she lists thirteen movies that are based on his plays.
There are countless remediations of "Romeo and Juliet," but some of the other plays are less often adapted. One very famous version of "The Taming of the Shrew" is Cole Porter's musical, "Kiss Me Kate."
Another remediation is the movie, 10 Things I Hate about You, starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger.
The movie was such a hit that the ABC Family television network adapted it for two seasons. The network has disabled the embed code for the trailer, but you can watch here.
Recently a British comic book publisher decided that the public was in imminent danger of forgetting Shakespeare, so they published several of the plays as manga. Here is an example from Hamlet:
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Source: http://www.selfmadehero.com/title.php?isbn=9780955285615 |
Here is a slightly disturbing remediated video game:
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| Source: http://www.killshakespeare.com/ |
4. Remediation of Xanadu
Koenig-Woodyard, C. (1998). A hypertext history of the transmission of Coleridge's "Christabel," 1800-1816. Romanticism on the Net: On romanticism, the canon, and the Web. (10). Retrieved from http://www.erudit.org/projspec/article/005806ar/005806arp007.html
Koenig-Woodyard uses hypertext to create an analysis of the history of the authorship of Coleridge's "Christobel." Coleridge published many iterations of this text, and scholars in 1998 were trying to sort out these various versions. In the 1800s, scholars used holographs but were unable to decide which portions of the text were written at which period in Coleridge's life. In 1998, Koenig-Woodyard found that hypertext provided the level of linkage necessary to create a workable database that led to a greater understanding of the editorial changes Coleridge made to the poem.
This hypertext system is named Xanadu, after Coleridge's famous poem "Kubla Khan." Ted Nelson, the originator of the term "hypertext," began the Xanadu in the 1960s as an attempt to link the contents of the world's greatest libraries. He explained the choice of title this way:
I choose the name 'Xanadu' for its connotations in literary circles. As the mysterious palace in Coleridge's poem 'Kubla Khan'--a great poem which he claimed to have mostly forgotten before he could write it down--Xanadu seemed the perfect name for a magic place of literary memory.I found this article interesting because it is a remediation on both levels. This is a remediation of ideas, not artifacts, and thus is more like the treatment of the Dies Irae.
Here is an illustration of Xanadu, from an early manuscript of Marco Polo's writing. Xanadu was Kubla Khan's palace, and its description was a heavy influence on Coleridge's poem.
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| Source: http://italophiles.com/marcopolo.htm#Excerpt_6_/ |
Poetry translates readily into lyrics, and many popular groups have written songs about Xanadu. Here is one of my favorites, by Rush.
In the movie Citizen Kane, Xanadu was the home of Charles Foster Kane:
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| Source: http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/18/expensive-fictional-homes-forbeslife-fictional1508-cx_mn_de_expensivehomes_slide_2.html |
Initially I promised myself not to listen to Olivia Newton-John's horrid song with ELO, but I couldn't resist this video.
5. Remediation of Tolkein's world
Culotta, E. (2006). How the hobbit shrugged: Tiny hominid’s story takes new turn. Science, Vol. 312. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/
In 2004, archaeologists found the remains of a small human in Indonesia that lived approximately 18,000 years ago. This person stood only a meter high and had disproportionately large feet. Many scholars feel that this tiny hominid is an island-bound descendant of Homo erectus, one of humanity's ancestors. Officially, the little hominid's species is listed as H. floresiensis, but most people just call it The Hobbit. Currently, archaelogists and anthropologists are arguing about whether the Hobbits were altered by microcephalic disease or whether they truly are a miniature hominid.
This is the most well-known case of scientists naming finds after characters in Tolkein's books, but this article lists many more, including insects, fish, and fossils. This kind of remediation is interesting because it assumes a society-wide knowledge of the literature.
Tolkein had a huge influence on artists and musicians. This website traces many of the musicians who have attributed their work to him or used one or more of his characters, settings, or phrases. Oddly, enough, it didn't have Led Zeppelin's song, "Ramblin' On."
Here is Blind Guardian's tribute album, Nightfall in Middle Earth.
Here are Tolkein's own illustrations for his books, which were remediated as calendar images in 1973, and now are reprinted here in their own volume.
In addition to Peter Jackson's movies, there are other films that tell Tolkein's stories. Here is a 1977 cartoon version of The Hobbit.
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| Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077687/ |
The example of remediation that most closely adheres to Bolter & Grusin's book is gaming. It is common knowledge that Dungeons & Dragons was based on scenarios from Middle Earth, and now that game has shifted online. Even the monster grandaddy of all of the games, World of Warcraft, shows heavy influence from Tolkein.
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