MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture

MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture traces the inexorable rise of collage, montage, sampling and the cut-up. Tracing its roots from the multiple-perspectives, montages and readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Hoch, to the present with its postmodern network culture, where remixing and co-production are the norm and the New Aesthetic seeks to harmonise the now-everyday crossover of the digital and the actual.

The book addresses the development of détournement and deconstruction in art, architecture, music and society. Each chapter is a detailed, inclusive look at a cross-section of the main artists and thinkers that have embraced and developed all forms of 'mashup' culture, since its inception in the late nineteenth century with Braque and Picasso's experiments into perspective.

MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture finds parallels between the works of luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Price, Joyce Wieland and Jeff Wall, tracing the lasting impact of such seemingly disparate cultural phenomena as voguing, hacking and the use of audio and film as a kind of a globally available, open source language in vidding, hip hop and dub, and in art that deals with the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies.

MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture situates the work of Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Guy Debord alongside the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, Superstudio, Brian Eno and Cory Arcangel, and more generally within a culture where the new is necessarily re-made and re-modelled, and quotation and re-appropriation are an integral part of the way we talk about it.

Published in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery.