While I often try to keep my design ideas fairly broad and widen my scope as to what I am able to do with my designs, one of the things that I love to utilise in my own design work quite regularly is the idea of ‘pastiche’, that is, the idea of appropriating or imitating the work of another artist, without being as negative as parody or as critical as satire. I often use appropriation in my works because I love the feeling of placing my own spin on an already existing and well known concept or design that already resinates with people. Through pastiche I’m able to take what people already recognise and alter the way they view and perceive some of their already favourite images. In a way for me as well pastiche also allows me to, for lack of a better phrase, ‘pay respect’ to other artists by saying that I love their work so much that I want to encorporate it into my own work. This form of design is used on many different levels, from cartoon to higher design and even into fashion. One designer who’s work I identify with is that of Mike Cherman, a slightly smaller graphic and fashion designer based out of LA California as the founder and designer of ‘Chinatown Market’, a relatively new fashion brand that has rapidly developed over the past 3 years due to Chermans amazing designs as well as a huge work ethic. As Tara Aquino, a blogger for clothing brand The Hundreds puts it, “It’s that kind of intuitive and fearless hustle that’s made him a living legend”. Cherman is known to often ‘bootleg’ existing designs from well known fashion houses or fashion designers. Some of his most famous designs are his Gucci sneakers and hoodies in which he takes the existing Gucci logo and redesigns it in a more hand drawn aesthetic to illustrate the ‘lesser grade’ quality that someone could find at a literal chinatown market of a more high end brand.

Pierre Bourdieu talks about style and taste in his work ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’ in which he talks about educated individuals being able to decode and understand artists works with a pure gaze, understanding the exact idea behind the work, and I feel that often with Cherman’s and my own work this is often the case. The works are less open for interpretation and more so displaying the meaning for the viewer, obviously with some encoded meanings behind the work but less so than that of a purely open work. Similar to Mike Cherman in this design work of mine I have taken very well known cartoon characters that already resinate with individuals and have displayed them as if they were ‘off set’ or ‘behind the scenes’ of their respective cartoon TV shows as Hollywood actors would be.

This pastiche style is also something that I love exploring because of the way it allows me to work with artworks and designs that I love and also be able to add my own style and design to them to create a completely different work. One of my favourite quotes which illustrates the idea behind pastiche is from American screenwriter Tim Kring who says “I really enjoy the pastiche storytelling of watching seperate stories slowly collide with one another, the audience gets to decipher how one story will connect with another.” Kring is talking about the way in which, in my case, the two artists/designers can collide to make a new piece.

Bibliography

T. Aquino, HOW I GOT HERE: Mike Cherman, Designer & Founder of Chinatown Market, The Hundreds, 2018.
https://thehundreds.com/blogs/content/mike-cherman-chinatown-market-interview-2018

P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, introduction, pg 4, 1984

T. Kring, pastiche quotes.
https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/pastiche.html

Walking into the exhibition I could immediately feel that this was not going to be a regular exhibition that I’d been to before. With stark white walls and sparse artworks, the gallery really lent itself to the idea of recycled waste with no extra ‘unnecessary’ aesthetics which could potentially distract from the intended subject of the viewers gaze, the artworks. Upon entry to the exhibition we were greeted by a woman named Jordan who ran us through the ins and outs of the space and the works that inhabited it, we were told that a total of 31 artists, both men and women, were asked to participate in the exhibit and were allowed to work with anything under the sun with the one prerequisite being that it was in fact recycled. Materials within the exhibition ranged quite dramatically, from more standard materials such as timber and metal to far more abstract materials such as pigs blood, and everything in between. In our culture today we view ‘waste’ as something that is a by product of another that can simply be burnt or buried then forgotten, and yet there are much better ways of dealing with waste as this group of artists are displaying. Inside the exhibition the artworks were all laid out around the circumference of the square room all facing towards the one central work in the middle of the room which in my opinion epitomised what ‘Welcome to Wasteland’ was all about; the central work was a large pile of debris and waste collected and placed in the centre by all the individual artists. The Waste itself was all of their (the individual artists) respective waste that was created whilst making their works of art, so not a single scrap was wasted.

As I mentioned briefly above, The bland stark white walls of the exhibition which aides the idea of recycled waste with no extra aesthetic is also helped by the dispersion of the works as well as the quiet nature of the space. These combined attributes, I found anyway, gave the viewer an experience that saw them really connect with the idea behind the exhibition itself because it, in a way, made you feel at one with the works themselves; made you feel that the exhibition space wasn’t only for holding the artworks but was itself a work of ark too. The one artwork which really drew my eye for the entirety of my stay at ‘Welcome to Wasteland’ was, as I have briefly already mentioned, the centre piece of the gallery. With no visible name for the piece surrounding it, the artwork really did stand out as being some sort of ‘open work’ which Pierre Bourdieu talks about in his work ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’ as being a work open to interpretation, having many different meanings and allowing the audience to view and interpret as they wish. As previously said as well, the piece is a combined work of all 31 artists from many different walks of life, both male and female, bringing in the important topic of gender equality within design which hasn’t always been the case historically, as Jane Connory talks about in her 2017 document ‘Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design’ in which she says “a woman’s freedom to pursue a graphic design career has been a struggle against the established social order and its gendered expectations.” ‘Welcome to Wasteland’ displays, as well as many other ideas, equality of all sorts through the exhibition and the different artists displaying their respective talents within the gallery.

Bibliography

P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, introduction, pg 4, 1984

J. Connory, Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design, pg 2, 2017

Welcome to Wasteland, 2019
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/welcome-to-wasteland/

G. Keulemans, Welcome to Wasteland exhibition, catalogue essay, 2019
http://solar.friendsand.associates/manifesto