One of the key terms I got from the "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" essay was the concept of pastiche as distinct from parody or historical fiction. Pastiche has a quality of imitation without the mockery that is implied in parody. I see this in many pieces of art today, there is a sense of nostalgia in much postmodern art, which to me seems a little antithetical to the pull away from this sense of differentiation between high-brow art and art for the masses. I suppose much of pastiche actually makes older pieces of art more accessible or relatable to a wider audience.
I recently came across a painting from a local artist that was a reproduction (or pastiche, I suppose) of Van Gogh's "At Eternity's Gate". This painting, though had a few alterations and was titled "At Eternity's Gate in the Time of COVID". The subject is modernized to a healthcare worker wearing crocs, but it is unmistakably the within Van Gogh's thick stroked style and color pallet. I thought this was a particularly postmodern piece of art for these reasons and because of the commentary it holds. It uses this sense of nostalgia to inform topical issues and document a pervasive and very current feelings regarding the state of the pandemic. I wouldn't consider this parody as it isn't mocking the original piece or time period, the style is just a vehicle to convey these ideas.
The idea of making art more accessible through this kind of repetition of the past is absolutely the way in which postmodernism abolishes the high/low distinction of modernism and high modernism particularly.
ReplyDeleteGreat example here! This is a repetition/reenactment of Van Gogh without the critique. It is a painting in quotation marks in a way. The flattening out of history occurs in that it draws a connection to the past purely through form alone, but it has no relation to that past outside of a generalization. What is the emotion of the first painting, for example, compared to the contemporary one? What does it mean to reduce these two emotions to a generalized "sadness"? One is related to old age, the other to a global catastrophe. A personal pain vs a social one. By associating the later with the former, pastiche/reenactment here removes that social critique, which parody--think of Charlie Chaplin in any factory scene reenacting what life is like on the job--could not do.