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Pastiche and Parody As a Post- Modernist Form of Cultural Identity

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Pastiche and Parody As a Post- Modernist Form of Cultural Identity Classical Art with Chinese Characteristics: Pastiche and Parody as a Post- Modernist Form of Cultural Identity Hannah Kirk Yenching Academy, Peking University June 2019 Introduction Pastiche has held a long-lasting presence in the artistic process. For centuries and across cultures, masters have copied the techniques and shared the subject matter eternalised by their predecessors. Most definitions of pastiche are synonymous with this process of copying in varying degrees of approval, ranging from accusations of near plagiarism to more sympathetic understanding of added creativity in layers above the original. This essay considers the definitional scope of pastiche as a foundation to its treatment as a legitimate post-modernist art form. The Jamesonian ‘blank’ and ‘blind’ pastiche where overlapping symbolism across eras or cultures renders all lost in meaning is contrasted against the ‘Hutcheonian transcontextual parody’ whereby the artist conveys precise meaning through the transplanted historical and cultural narrative. The suitability of such a definition for the Chinese context is considered in the past but also the present. Choice of artistic form reflects on the question of how best to portray cultural identity and I argue this art form has unique high-level interpretability by layering political and social comment between Western and Eastern artistic ideals, now and across time. As such, China’s modernity is painted amidst a complex maze of historical references, forms and ubiquitously recognisable imagery. In order to clarify the precise and poignant purpose of parody for modern Chinese artists, three examples will be presented in the form of two case studies and one comparative study across renditions of the same painting ‘The Last Supper’. Through these examples, this essay comprehensively demonstrates how Chinese cultural identity is so powerfully portrayed by means of pastiche and parody (used interchangeably throughout the discussion that follows). In doing so, it hopes to convince the reader that ‘pastiche articulates this sense of living permanently, ruefully but without distress, within the limits and potentialities of the cultural construction of thought and feeling’ (Dyer, 2007, p.180) Classical Art with Chinese Characteristics: Pastiche and Parody as a Post-Modernist Form of Cultural Identity 2 Section 1: Defining Pastiche and Parody In etymological terms, pastiche comes from the French pastiche or Italian pasticcio, a variety of pastry with multiple ingredients. Despite having an significant presence through the history of art, pastiche has become to be associated not just with multiple ingredients but with multiple other words. Cohan (2007) cites even plagiarism, forgery and hoax are all too often considered synonymous despite actually representing a strong opinion against this art form. Let us consider the range of existent definitions. Beginning with the most negative kind, consider Murray and Murray’s despairingly simplistic dictionary definition of pastiche as “an imitation or forgery which consists of a number of motives taken from several genuine works by any one artist recombined in such a way as to give the impression of being an independent original creation by that artist” (Murray and Murray, 1959). Offering greater neutrality, one of the earliest definitions demarks pastiche as: “1a. A work of art produced in deliberate imitation of another or several others, as of the works of a master taken together, and 2b. Especially, in decorative art, the modification for transference to another medium, of any design.” (Russell Sturgis, 1902). Finally, Edward Lucie Smith (1984)’s definition of “a work of art using a borrowed style and usually made up of borrowed elements but not necessarily a direct copy", introduces complexity by sympathizing with the concept of deliberate intention, and not imitation in entirety. In all the above and other “dictionary” definitions, the common theme relies on the process of drawing one idea from the foundation of another across a gradation of respect for the process of repetition, mimicking or imitation. Section 2: Pastiche and Parody in a Postmodernist Frame To uncover the legitimacy of pastiche and parody as meaningful art forms, each must be understood as a product of their time, as a part of the postmodernist production process. One theorist, Hal Foster, deems pastiche the distinguishing mark of postmodern art “Yet nearly every postmodern artist and architect has resorted, in the name of style and history, to pastiche; indeed it is fair to say that pastiche is the official style of this postmodernist camp” (Foster, 1985). Yet Classical Art with Chinese Characteristics: Pastiche and Parody as a Post-Modernist Form of Cultural Identity 3 Foster’s approbation is not universal. In a similar spectrum to dictionary definitions introduced above, the gradation to which each definitional school sympathizes with the originality of pastiche or parody and its place in postmodernism relies on the contrasting treatments of whether repetition of historical elements engender comment or lack of, the present. 2.1 Jamesonian ‘Schizophrenic’ Parody In order to understand Jameson’s position on pastiche we must understand his take on the postmodernist movement in its whole: "In the wholly built and constructed universe of late capitalism, from which nature has at last been effectively abolished and in which human praxis—in the degraded forms of information, manipulation, and reification—has penetrated the older autonomous sphere of culture and even the Unconscious, the Utopia of a renewal of perception has no place to go”. (Jameson 1985, 121-22) Jameson was at the vanguard of postmodernist critics in the 1980s, regarding this ‘wholly built and constructed universe of late capitalism’ as deprived of natural form, of meaning and of purpose. For him, the integration of cross-cultural or intertemporal histories introduces only confusion, the ‘coded’ intentions are no more than superficial and any art form lacking original content is contiguous to lacking creativity. Framing this criticism in a lineage of artist movements, the postmodernist partiality to reuse and repeat the past is seen by Jameson as the sad demise of great modernist individuality (Duvall 1999), the commodification of cultural expression. Jameson’s treatment of pastiche as an inauthentic form of cultural or historical expression arises additionally from his Marxist belief in a ‘true scientific history’. In the “temporal unification of past and future” (Jameson 1985, 26-27) interpretable historical record is obscured. Postmodernism opposes such a linearity of history, “Pastiche itself is the effect of the transformation from a society with a historical sensibility to one that can only play with a degraded historicism" (Jameson 1985, 10). The totality of Jameson’s postmodernist critique and Classical Art with Chinese Characteristics: Pastiche and Parody as a Post-Modernist Form of Cultural Identity 4 pastiche within that, is succinctly summarized by Duvall (1999) as schizophrenic, the inability to focus on temporal or cultural context of the subject. The “dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture” (Jameson 1985, 42) obfuscates an understanding of any culture at any time. For Jameson, by uniting past and present, neither is understood. 2.2. Introducing Hutcheonian Transcontexual Parody Hutcheon indorses a stark dissension clearly discernible in her following words: “the dialogue of past and present, of old and new, is what gives formal expression to a belief in change within continuity. The obscurity and hermeticism of modernism are abandoned for a direct engagement of the viewer in the processes of signification through re-contextualized social and historical references” (Hutcheon 2003, 32) Hutcheon’s explicit polemics against Jameson are most perspicuously divided along three key axes. Firstly, if we use one word, ‘schizophrenic’ is to Jameson’s critique what ‘transcontexual is’ to Hutcheon’s commendation. Transcontextualism concerns the interaction of the current piece with the original work, reusing and reinterpreting features of the past but relating them to present. Jameson despairs the ‘lost of the natural’ yet for Hutcheon this is exactly the “denaturalizing form of acknowledging the history” (Hutcheon 2002, 90), understanding this art form as a dialogue between historical and cultural discourse, is “what distinguished parody from pastiche or imitation” (ibid., 12). Hutcheon’s sympathy to parodic recall is derived precisely from its ability to blend across time, superimposing differences and similarities of imagery to represent changing interpretations. In doing so, the viewer is awarded with “historicity in terms of feeling” (Dyer 2007, 178). It is precisely pastiche’s evocation of ‘cultural memory’ which Hoestery (2001) claims allows higher level interpretation in the postmodernist movement. In addition, these conflicting interpretations also differ in their treatment of which agent bears the responsibility of interpretation. For Jameson, amalgamating images that belong to Classical Art with Chinese Characteristics: Pastiche and Parody as a Post-Modernist Form of Cultural Identity 5 neither past nor present, condemns the consumer to an inexorable confusion of interpretation. In its end, the attempt “to seek History” through “a simulacra of that history” is futile given the history “itself remains forever out of reach" (Jameson 1985, 25). Hutcheon’s alternatively rewards the cleverness
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