OUGD501 - Study Task 03 - Defining the Brief

Research Question:

This is the question that will guide your theoretical and practical work in CoP2. Your question must reference one of the CoP themes (Politics, Society, Culture, History, Technology or Aesthetics) either broadly or focussing on a specific aspect (e.g. "gender" being a specific aspect of Society); and one specific graphic discipline (Typography / type design, Advertising / public awareness, Branding / logo design, Editorial, Design for screen or Print making).

My proposed research will look broadly at parody and pastiche within graphic design, touching on the themes of aesthetics. More specifically within this I could look at parody and pastiche within branding

Is it viable: 

Using this weeks lecture (Proposing a research question) answer the following questions in relation to your research question: What is there to study (ontology)? How can we know about it (epistemology)? How do we study it (methodology)?

Themes explored within this topic can include the occurrence of parody and pastiche within the wider art world and then more specifically in graphic design. The theory of these motifs and whether pastiche and parody can be considered good or bad, and uses of parody and pastiche within specific examples of design. This topic can be explored through a range of academic sources, books and websites.


Defining the design problem: 

Whilst your research question should provide opportunities for both contextual/theoretical research and practical research, you need to ensure that there is an obvious design problem to resolve/explore. For example, your research may focus on branding and politics therefore your design problem would be: a political party requires a logo and brand strategy for an up-coming election.

There are many potential outcomes that could be produced through the exploration of this topic, including an option to create branding using parody and pastiche techniques.


'Client' needs or requirements: 

If there is a specific client or organisation or individual who you will be producing this work for (hypothetically) then you should take this opportunity to address any needs or requirements they may have. Similarly, if there is no obvious client needs then you should outline any specific requirements that will guide the project forward.

Should the practical exploration take the shape of a rebrand using parody and pastiche techniques, there will be many considerations that need to be adhered to. In any rebrand it is vital to produce work that is client-led, appropriate for both the company and then company's target market, and is within the boundaries of the company's current branding strategy in terms of colours, typefaces, tone, application.

Mandatory requirements:

Here you should outline (again, tentatively at this stage) what the mandatory requirements of the brief are. For example, adverts must include the slogan "just do it" or design outcomes must include the company logo or Typeface designs must be functional yet contemporary.

If the practical work should explore a branding strategy, mandatory requirements will include colours and typeface samples appropriate to the selected company, a range of branding ideas and then a final resolution.

OUGD501 - Study Task 02 - Parody and Pastiche

Jameson's definition of postmodernism:

Random cannibalisation (cherry picking)
A desperate attempt to make sense of an age that is chaotic and confusing
No grand narratives
The end of history? (not the end of things happening, but the end of new inventions changing the world, a system of resignation, a culture of repetition)
An age of information, possibly overstimulation?
Imitating and reusing dead styles, but without the importance, the emotion, the creativity
Depthlessness?
Born out of a pessimism of the world
A dystopia
Neo - beware concepts that begin with Neo; it probably means that it is not a new version of that concept, it is the old concept recycled
A culture that is more concerned with reproduction rather than production
Technology replacing human productivity and human skill
The weakening of historicity - because we have now have a cultural history of sampling, our understanding of history is completely change - we take styles and images without understanding their original uses and contexts - creates a divorce between us and history



Jameson's definition of pastiche:

The increasing unavailability of personal style, pg. 16

The producers of culture have no where to turn to but the past: the imitation of dead styles, pg.17

Pastiche is the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style...but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry...devoid of laughter and without any conviction pg. 17

Modernist styles become postmodernist codes, pg. 17

Deja Vu, pg. 24



Hutcheon's definition of postmodernism and parody:

postmodernist art offers a new model for mapping the borderline between art and the world, a model that works from a position within both and yet within neither, pg. 180

postmodernism is a fundamentally contradictory enterprise: its art forms (and its theory) use and abuse, install and then subvert convention in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and provisionality and, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past, pg. 180

'Parodic references to history textually reinstate a dialogue with the past', pg. 180 - sampling anything opens up a critical and social dialogue with the past, making people aware of what came before

What both its supporters and its detractors seem to want to call "postmodernism" in art today -be it in video, dance, literature, painting, music, architecture, or any other form -seems to be art marked primarily by an internalised investigation of the nature, the limits, and the possibilities of the language or discourse of art.

[works] are resolutely historical and inescapably political precisely because they are parodic

[the very label of] postmodernism signals its contradictory dependence upon and independence from the modernism that both historically preceded it and literally made it possible. (It's not necessarily just blind imitation, it's an art form in it's own right that wouldn't exist without the movement of modernism before it).

"Postmodernist ironic recall of history is neither nostalgia nor aesthetic "cannibalization."

'The politics of pluralism' is getting us away from a white anglo-dominated culture.

She also writes about how people who don't accept pluralism are elitist snobs.

One of the main features that distinguishes postmodernism from modernism is the fact that it "takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statement"

The use of parody: citing a convention only to make fun of it

Unlike Jameson, who considers such postmodern parody as a symptom of the age, one way in which we have lost our connection to the past and to effective political critique, Hutcheon argues that "through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference"

Parody de-doxifies: it unsettles all doxa, all accepted beliefs and ideologies

she values postmodernism's willingness to question all ideological positions, all claims to ultimate truth.

LEVEL 5