IN WARHOL'S WAKE: MINIMALISM AND POP IN THE AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE FILM

In 1963 Pop Artist Andy Warhol began his notorious career as an experimental filmmaker, thus marking the beginning of the avant-garde's increasingly intimate association with the contemporary American visual arts. The most important point about the avant-garde's turn toward the visual arts, however, is not that Warhol and the filmmakers that followed him came from the world of the visual arts and brought critics with them, but that the films of the period shared the aesthetic concerns of contemporary work in the American visual arts. Thus, the avant-garde developed strains of Pop and Minimalism, the two most significant new styles in American art of the 1960s. My concern in this study is with these films, mostly produced in Warhol's wake. The crux of my argument is that the Pop strain and the Minimal strain each trigger specific perceptual and cognitive processes on the part of the viewer, and that these processes should be the focus of the analysis of the films.; My analyses emphasize the viewer's basic comprehension of the films' overall organization rather than the interpretation of the films' meaning. In analyzing the viewer's efforts at comprehension, I draw on the Constructivist theory of perception and cognition developed in the last 30 years by cognitive psychologists, linguists and philosophers. I also analyze the critical environment that surrounds these films: it provides what I call "interpretive schemata" that play an important role in shaping the experiences of the viewers of these often puzzling films.; Chapter one lays out the basics of the Constructivist model of perception and cognition. Chapter two analyzes the critical environment of the Minimal strain. Chapter three analyzes what I call the "simple schematic" film, an important subset of the Minimal strain. In chapter four I turn to the critical environment of the Pop strain. Chapter five analyzes two strategies for incorporating Pop iconography into the avant-garde film: "Collage Pop" and "Compilation Pop."...