Abstract
Amidst the ruins of modernity’s dream of progress and the glittering wastescape of technological debris, new cultural forms are emerging, simultaneously imitating and overthrowing the post-industrial grid through which they grow. Born as cultural marginalia, these are the practices of certain immigrants, homeless youth and other displaced urban peoples.
This essay was originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art for the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Art From Latin America: La cita transcultural’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 9 March to 13 June 1993, and later revised and expanded for The Biennale of Sydney.
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Notes
By icons I mean signs that, as a consequence of their decontextualization, display their cultural load only at the level of the signifier. In this condition they become susceptible to the attribution of a disparate range of meanings, as I show below. This process is comparable to what Roland Barthes calls ‘myth’, or the second degree of meaning. See Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Cape, 1972), first published by Editions du Seuil, 1957.
See Oswalde de Andrade, Do Pau Brasil a Antropofagia e as Utopias in Obras Completas, vol. 6 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacao Brasileira-Mec, 1970).
For a critical survey of the postmodern debate see Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, New German Critique, 33 (Autumn 1984), pp. 5–52.
See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).
For my view of postmodernity and some of its fundamental issues and theoretical texts see Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217–52.
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© 1996 John C. Welchman
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Olalquiaga, C. (1996). Vulture Culture. In: Welchman, J.C. (eds) Rethinking Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12725-2_5
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