Red Tree by Mondrian by Hodgkin by Hinc (Pastiche)

PASTICHE in postmodern art, media and literature can be characterized by intertextuality as the narrative mode, and the postmodern period can be characterized by the death of the grand narratives as proclaimed by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). The grand narratives such as religions, ideologies and the Age of Enlightenment project have been substituted by the small, local narratives, e.g. love of one’s family. Pastiche is intertextual in its very form as it is a recreation of an earlier text. In the postmodern pastiche the older text (the hypotext) may reflect one of the bygone grand narratives, yet its new postmodern version may reflect a local narrative, so that the two enter into a dialogue in the pastiche. This is for instance the case with Francis Glebas’ "Pomp and Circumstance"- the seventh segment in Fantasia 2000 from 1999, in which the grand religious narrative of the Deluge is merged with the local narrative of personal love, personified in Donald Duck and Daisy. Though the grand narratives may be dead as ontological frames, they can here in the pastiche narrative regain some of their ontological strength when the local narratives are confronted by them in this narrative way.