AVANT-POP 101. Here's a List of Works That Helped to Shape Avant-Pop Ideology and Aesthetics, Along with Books, Albums, Films, T
Larry McCaffery AVANT-POP 101. Here's a list of works that helped to shape Avant-Pop ideology and aesthetics, along with books, albums, films, television shows, works of criticism, and other cultural artifacts by the Avant-Pop artists themselves, in roughly chronological order. PRECURSORS: The Odyssey (Homer, c. 700 B.C.). Homer's The Odyssey had it all: a memorable, larger-than-life super-hero (Ulysses); a war grand enough that its name alone (Trojan) is still used to sell condoms; descriptions of travels through exotic places; hideous bad-guys (like the Cyclops) and bad gals (Circe); an enduring love affair (Penelope); a happy ending. Commentators have long regarded The Odyssey as Western literature's first epic and masterpiece. What hasn't been noted until now, however, is that its central features—for instance, its blend of high seriousness with popular culture, a self-conscious narrator, magical realism, appropriation, plagiarism, casual blending of historical materials with purely invented ones, foregrounding of its own artifice, reflexivity, the use of montage and jump cuts—also made it the first postmodern, A-P masterpiece, as well. Choju giga (Bishop Toba, 12th century). Choju giga—or the "Animal Scrolls," as Toba's work is known—was a narrative picture scroll that portrayed, among other things, Walt Disney-style anthropomorphized animals engaged in a series of wild (and occasionally wildly erotic) antics that mocked Toba's own calling (the Buddhist clergy); in its surrealist blend of nightmare and revelry, Toba Choju giga can rightly be said to be the origins not only of cartoons but of an avant-pop aesthetics of cartoon forms that successfully serve "serious" purposes of satire, philosophical speculation and social commentary.
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