I Only Have Eyes For You: Three Case Studies in Rock 'n' Roll, Fandom, and Pop Art
Open Access
- Author:
- Mednicov, Melissa Levia
- Graduate Program:
- Art History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 02, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Sarah K Rich, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Nancy Elizabeth Locke, Committee Member
Brian A Curran, Committee Member
Madhuri Shrikant Desai, Committee Member
Christopher Gervais Reed, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Pop art
rock 'n' roll
popular music
Peter Blake
Pauline Boty
James Rosenquist
melodrama
pop music - Abstract:
- Rock and roll was a crucial ingredient of Pop art. From Peter Blake’s collages of fanzines to Andy Warhol’s silkscreened Elvises, Pop artists in Europe and the United States exploited the youthful exuberance and provocatively lowbrow aesthetics of popular music. Yet, while the scholarship on Pop art is substantial, there has been no specific study of popular music’s broad influence on Pop. This omission is surprising, given that, as my dissertation will show, many artists during the Cold War era used rock, pop, and blues to address changing forms of gender, race, and class, as well as changing notions of group identity offered by the category of “fandom.” My dissertation focuses on a small group of artists: Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, and James Rosenquist, and their varying approaches to popular music in art. Each chapter will serve as a case study, focusing on a close reading of one work of art. Chapter One, “Jukebox Modernism: Or, How to Hear a Painting” looks and listens to Peter Blake’s Got a Girl (1960-61), a work that explores the operations of reproduction on the level of the song and image as well as libidinal desire. Chapter Two, “It’s a Girl’s World: The Sound and Look of Melodrama in Pauline Boty’s Pop Art” features a close reading of the artist’s My Colouring Book (1963), a work which traffics in girl group sounds and the melodrama of a pop song heartbreaks. Chapter Three, “Pink, White, and Black: The Strange Case of James Rosenquist’s Big Bo” investigates the ways in which race appears (and is suppressed) in Pop art when that movement addresses popular music. My project explores a range of such works, in the hopes that by investigating this unique intersection between visual art and musical work, new insights will be produced about both.