pasticheism: my (c)opium for creative ego death

THE MIRROR CRIT

when i came to art school, i asked myself of two things: don’t look sideways and read more theory. doing only half of what I promised was taking a shotgun to my self-concept. even though i’ve always been a snarky, pseudo-ironic piece of shit, i held an embarrassing modernist fantasy for far too long. I had internalised the image of the artist-as-origin, a figure who produces from some sealed interior, who answers to no lineage, no market. all i had to do was dig enough within me, make myself puke up something worth showing the world. while i wanted to know culture, god knows i chase the zeitgeist as much as anyone else, i didn’t want to pay respects to it. i wanted to learn it to put my flag in it, quixotically so. in sixth form, this mindset was especially self-important, isolating, and, who would’ve guessed, helvetica forward. i was planning to enter the most derivative art form out there, joined by eighty people, give or take, who'd been on the same internet as me. safe to say the delusions of grandeur had a pretty short shelf life.

in seeing my peers work, i got a very ‘this is water’ type epiphany. not even, water can be bottled at least. we were breathing the same air. i could see references to things i'd prematurely thought personal floating in someone else's piece, borrowed from nowhere specific, everywhere at once. I started quietly praying they hadn't migrated from pinterest to are.na. i started getting antsy about posting work in progress, lest my oh so original techniques get swiped. another thing I noticed was how much we all circled the idea that none of us were in any way unique agents. everyone has a subconscious realization that differentiation is less and less possible. to say you read a certain author, watch a certain film is an indicator of your online presence before it ever is an indicator of your personhood and point of view. everyone can quote kafka now. or, more accurately, everyone can quote fisher.

PAST THE END OF HISTORY

this whole situation is contextualised by fisher’s hauntology, building on derrida’s view on the recurrence of marx and the fact that culture at what fukuyama called ‘the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution, will become recursive. fisher presents us a present haunted with ‘ghosts’ of the past, with nothing truly new to offer, thus giving us a ‘cancellation of the future’. hauntology has re-entered the collective consciousness with how we understand the state of art today. i’ve seen it used to describe ‘underground’ revival scenes, the state of pop music, all the IP schlock that passes for cinema. a lot of creatives have taken up the notion in some form, some a bit too gleefully. i have seen a rise in people christening themselves archivists and curators even while participating in more directly productive creative fields. it’s understandable to take preemptive distance from your role as a creator when creation itself seems fraudulent. nostalgia and callback are the word of the day, partly because we know there’s not really a way around it.

while hauntology is a useful frame for understanding our condition, at its face it’s a total artistic blackpill. anyone concerned with originality in their art can lie down and rot for all we care. the term has often been used to excuse halting of culture as fated and unchangeable, but I’m only half convinced on that thesis.

MY OWN PRIVATE POSTMODERN

since the dawn of the internet, and perhaps before, media theorists have debated whether postmodernism is dead, ongoing, or recurring. a useful frame i have gathered is that as well as postmodernism existing as a set cultural moment or series of moments across the arts, it can be seen as a baton passed on from each generation’s creative output to the next. as kenya hara put it in 2007: “It was just a fleeting commotion that occurred during the hand off of modernism … an event symbolising the aging of the generation of designers that sustained modernism”. modernist thought of the time is polished with every generation, a way of picking up cultural slack.

in this context, the anxiety, the referentiality, the constant breaking of the fourth wall, the malaise and self-consciousness of current art are given a sort of historical reverence since the postmodern canon produced extraordinary work. all of it was flagrantly derivative in method, and yet entirely itself in voice. the anxiety about originality didn't stop any of them from being interesting. the idea that it may just be our turn makes the situation seem a lot less hopeless.

it feels reductive to say that we’re just going through the motions with broadband (about broadband, mostly), but i personally think the idea of a generation of truly internet-fluent artists now finally tasked with deconstruction is a thought worth paying attention to. i know artworld has picked up, but they’re always ahead when it comes to this stuff.

BUILDING FRAMEWORKS IS CRINGE

i know that no one artist will tackle the ‘call of the web’ with exactly the same ethos. for most people, practice is always kind of hazy and hard to set bounds or ideologies upon. but I personally need to grip myself to a frame of mind lest I become totally anhedonic. i’ve felt myself reach upon it, poorly. at every stage I felt like a hack. i wanted invention in what I was conscious of as an infinite world. therein lies the dilemma pasticheism had arisen from. pastiche was a running view I had of what postmodernist practice in this ‘generational’, speaking-from-the-inter-web sense could look like.

pastiche, the open imitation and recombination of existing styles, has a slightly dismissive connotation as it stands. pasticheism as I'm thinking about is built on the premise that recombination is not the wimpy fodder of creative work, it is its primary mode right now. we have too much raw data and not enough exciting combinations. the future of art is not in the virgin idea springing fully formed from the void, we know that much. the pasticheist future lies in finding disparate elements to join with the ultimate goal having enough of your own perspective shine through in the message that you can’t hide behind the ‘archive’ itself. if you can’t justify your artistic choices and references with fervor, you’re just doing collage.

but wait, isn’t this what the ai bros are talking about?

TASTE IS THE NEW BUZZWORD

due to many recent developments, taste is yet again lauded by people in power who have not a slightest what taste means. i don't want to be fed a belief system by openai staff who have specific incentives for why "taste" is suddenly important, and neither should you. the discourse coming from tech is largely nebulous, class-based, and conveniently individualistic, very modernist in its separation of ‘those who have taste’ and ‘those who don’t’. what I'm describing is more committed and artist-first. it's less about having taste (implying some elevated, untouchable discernment) and more about having a position, values, neuroses, things you believe in, and using existing symbolic material to articulate it. this does a clean swipe on the whole ‘well ai just makes combinations of unrelated things and imbues them with purpose too!” argument. a computer has nothing to go insane over, therefore it cannot be pasticheist. this is a tired point from artists, but true stays true regardless.

while I see a lot of discussion about the nature and practical applicable skills of taste in the foreseeable future, it’s not really in the same direction i’m looking at. pasticheism to me is more about a re-arrangement of values, some folk truth, and some emphasis on my own existing reference-neurotic practice. but what made me write this was the suspicion I am not alone in this tendency. i keep noticing a pattern across a lot of loosely connected creative niches toward an increasingly confident willingness to work inside existing symbolic debris rather than pretending to stand outside it. i think that if there is to be an artistic movement belonging to our generation, it will likely be derivative. i do have hope that it is derivative in the loudest, best possible sense of the word.

maybe one day ill go off the deep end enough to write a manifesto.

ummmm

stop looking its not done yet

errr

yo i told u to stop looking