Pastiche

Cultural theorists see contemporary society marked by radical hybridity in manifold social practices. In the last two decades the arts have participated in these processes of heterogeneous conjunction in various ways, most conspicuously through the redefinition of a genre of artistic expression that for centuries was regarded as both elusive and notorious: the pastiche or pasticcio. Today highly engaging manifestations of the genre minor can be found in architecture, painting, mixed media installations; in film, literature, and performance modes ranging from the operatic to rock event; and in supposedly trivial discourses such as advertising narratives. Pastiche is about cultural memory as a history of seeing and writing. One of the markers that sets aesthetic postmodernism apart from modernism - nolens volens categories for the author - are artistic practices that borrow ostentatiously from the archive of Western culture, which modernism, in its search for the unperformed, tended to dismiss. Contemporary artists are re-examining traditions that modernism eclipsed in its pursuit of the "Shock of the New" or - in the case of the architects - the functionalism of the International style. Rejecting the Bauhaus paradigm, architects practiced an aesthetics of quotation and incorporation of past forms with a vengeance for two decades. The style that has run its course, its decorative component watered down in general building practices across the land, is significant for the author's argument. As the architects return to, and re-evaluated, constructivism, their move makes it possible to historicize postmodern style and separate it, to a degree, from a totalised concept of the post-modern or postmodernity as epoch and from other discursive practices such as "postmodern thought." Such differentiation enables the critic to look at pastiche structuration in the various arts as an exemplary feature of aesthetic postmodernism, which in contrast to hard-core modernism, situates itself in general culture beyond a high-low dichotomy.