Micro-post #147: A good explanation I found about patiche

Found the following passage while thumbing through books at a library a while ago and gave me a good way to think about a different approach to art-making (even if I disagree with his views on postmodernism):

The name of the game: pastiche. Pastiche is a literary technique where an author takes the major tropes from one or more existent works and uses them to create something new. Pastiche can be limited to a single passing reference, can overrun an entire work from beginning to end, or fall anywhere between the two extremes. When pastiche is used primarily to highlight the weaknesses of the original work in a comedic way, either affectionately or derisively or both, that’s parody or satire. When done poorly, pastiche can be little more than barely concealed plagiarism, by artists who are either not talented enough to come up with anything original or so cynical that they think they can cash in on the success of something that’s currently popular — or both. In the parlance of literary/cultural theory, that’s called a ripoff. The third major form of pastiche is homage, and it tends to be used to call attention to the tropes it’s co-opting, sometimes by explicitly subverting them.

A pastiche works best when the audience doesn’t need to be familiar with the works being referenced in order to enjoy it. So, for instance, you can dig Star Wars without ever having heard of Flash Gordon, even though the former is heavily indebted to the latter. If a work is influential enough that it inspires a large number of different artists to pastiche it, it can lead to the creation of a whole new form; imitators of Edgar Allan Poe evolved the mystery genre, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s thralls propagated high fantasy.

At the far abstract end of pastiche, a creator appropriates the structure of one or more works but empties out the content and fills it with their own. The effect of this is twofold. First, if it works at all, it tends to work really well: because the content is original, it doesn’t rely exclusively on the works it’s referencing for its success. It’s enjoyable on its own merits because the parts that are borrowed are below the surface and not necessarily immediately apparent. The skeleton may be stolen, but the flesh is fresh.

Second, this application of pastiche is particularly suitable for purposes of deconstruction, which is why it’s been so popular in postmodern art. Postmodernism is interested to the point of obsession in constructedness and in reexamining past works to expose the architecture of their influences, assumptions, and internal contradictions; their successes and, especially, their failures. A lot (though certainly not all) of postmodern art is content to vivisect the canon with its audience sitting in the operating theater and then go home, leaving it out to die on the surgeon’s table.’ Beckett, Pynchon, and a lot of Brett Easton Ellis’s stuff tend to fall into this category, exposing the emptiness without any suggestion for how to fix the situations, implying an inevitable hopelessness.

Art — in my opinion, better art — can do more than deconstruct; it can reconstruct. It can take a work apart, even strip it down to its bones, and then proceed to sew to it a new skin made of insight and love for its source materials.

And this is the genius of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

 - from Raise Some Shell: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Pop Classics)

by Richard Rosenbaum, pg. 5-7

The YouTube channel matttt - comic & manga history has a good video that goes into the history behind the Turtles a little more that matches up with Rosenbaum's assessment.