Replication
Zayn El Hajji
First Year Writing
Professor Bodenrader
The Replication of Everything
Replication, reproduction, repetition, it is all the same in the end. Postmodernism was defined by its use of replication and reproduction to show the dehumanization of the mass production capitalistic world. David Foster Wallace writes in the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never do again “The apotheosis of the pop in postwar art marked a whole new marriage between high and low culture. For the artistic viability of post modernism was a direct consequence, again, not of any new facts about art, but of facts about the new importance of mass commercial culture. Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images.” What this is saying is that the idea of a common belief such as religion or politics has disappeared, and be replaced by whatever the mass commercialistic society has shoved down the throats of the people. Society during this time period was becoming what it is today, a society not of beliefs, but of brands, Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola, paper or plastic, The Mustang or The Camaro. “The things that you own end up owning you”2 said by Tyler Durden in Fight Club. The use of Replication is shown all over in postmodernism art, literature, even architecture. The works of Andy Warhol really demonstrate this concept. Warhol’s painting, Campbell’s Soup Cans, dated 1962 is a great example of replication, we have something as simple as canned soup but at the same time it is more, it is a name, it is a brand, it is Campbell’s Soup. The individual cans are not important from the pea soup to the tomato to the iconic chicken noodle, what is important is that it is Campbell’s Soup, it becomes more significant about what it is with the replication of it, 32 times in this painting, 100 in another one, and 200 in another one. The singularity of each individual dies with the replication and the whole, the name, the brand, the shape, the colors of
First Year Writing
Professor Bodenrader
The Replication of Everything
Replication, reproduction, repetition, it is all the same in the end. Postmodernism was defined by its use of replication and reproduction to show the dehumanization of the mass production capitalistic world. David Foster Wallace writes in the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never do again “The apotheosis of the pop in postwar art marked a whole new marriage between high and low culture. For the artistic viability of post modernism was a direct consequence, again, not of any new facts about art, but of facts about the new importance of mass commercial culture. Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images.” What this is saying is that the idea of a common belief such as religion or politics has disappeared, and be replaced by whatever the mass commercialistic society has shoved down the throats of the people. Society during this time period was becoming what it is today, a society not of beliefs, but of brands, Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola, paper or plastic, The Mustang or The Camaro. “The things that you own end up owning you”2 said by Tyler Durden in Fight Club. The use of Replication is shown all over in postmodernism art, literature, even architecture. The works of Andy Warhol really demonstrate this concept. Warhol’s painting, Campbell’s Soup Cans, dated 1962 is a great example of replication, we have something as simple as canned soup but at the same time it is more, it is a name, it is a brand, it is Campbell’s Soup. The individual cans are not important from the pea soup to the tomato to the iconic chicken noodle, what is important is that it is Campbell’s Soup, it becomes more significant about what it is with the replication of it, 32 times in this painting, 100 in another one, and 200 in another one. The singularity of each individual dies with the replication and the whole, the name, the brand, the shape, the colors of
Cited: Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Print. Fight Club. Perf. Brad Pit and Edward Norton. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000. Klosterman, Chuck. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966. Print.