REALISM AND PERSPECTIVE
What are the conventions between realism and abstract?
How
do we deem something to look realistic and another to be abstract?
-to
be held by ideals to be looking like the actual object.
Pectoral images appear to have served as form of symbolic
communications and expression among members of different religions when it was
the time of persecutions, these symbols were a way for them to hide the true
meaning from outsiders.
In the Renaissance the practice of artists changed because
they labored to reproduce the appearance of a scene, as the eye of an observer
would see it.
This
does not mean it became more scientific but the space as a replica of what
embodied eye would see took on greater symbolic, spiritual and philosophical
meaning.
Reproductability in images is not just about the capacity of
art works and images to be copied but also the aim to copy, or reproduce, the
real.
Cubism- the art of making an object in its simplest form and
then these simple shapes are shifted in space due to multiple viewpoints.
VISUAL CODES AND HISTORICAL MEANING
Today an old image is viewed from a different perspective
then it was when it was first created.
We take context clues about the style and technique to
determine time period.
Neoclassical - art that aims to reproduce aspects of
classical fine art.
The Pre-Raphaelite- they were a group of artists who were
driven to create non-conventional art in the Victorian era to reference the
medieval painter and sculptor.
QUESTIONS OF REALISM
Noticing changes in aesthetics and styles of naturalist or
realist images over time, we do more then simply chart taste or progress in the
history of art. We also follow the development of different ways of seeing, and
different views about value and meaning.
The term realism refers to a set of conventional belief or a
style of art or representation. At a given point in a historical moment to
accurately represent nature or the real or to convey and interpret accurate or
universal meanings about people, objects, and events in the world.
What do the different approaches to realism tell us about
the cultural and politics of a given social context. There is no universal
standard for realism, and the idea about that constitutes realism can vary
drastically.
Soviet Constructivist Realism Manifesto of the 1930s. The government was telling artists that
they must depict art in a specific way be cause that is the “right way” .
Limiting the freedom of artists.
Any artist that was outside of the realist style was deemed degenerate. In 1974 abstract painters Oscar Rabine
and Evgeny Rukhin had a public display of unofficial abstract art made by
artists who defied the mandate.
Michel Foucault, in his book “The Order of Things”, used the
term episteme to describe the way that and inquiry into truth is organized on a
given era. An episteme is an accepted dominant mode of acquiring and organizing
knowledge in a given period of history.
HISTORY OF PERSPECTIVE
The representation of objects in a space as if seen by an
observer through a window or frame. In perspective, the size and detail of the
objects depicted corresponds to their relative distance from the m=imaged
position of the observer.
The Enlightenment promised the power of human reason would
overcome superstition, end ignorance through the development of scientific
knowledge, bring prosperity through the technical mastery of nature, and
introduce justice and order to human affairs.
The system introduced by Brunelleschi involved the concept
of regarding the picture as kind of a mirror or window frame through which one
sees the world.
Architectural drawing relies on the precision of a
representational system that emphasizes the measurability of basic structures
of forms in space
PERSPECTIVE AND THE BODY
Mantegna adjusted the drawing so it most important feature,
the head, would not look too tiny. The compression makes Christ’s feet and
chest cage loom and his face appears squished.
Durer, realism is achieved by making a composite of views
and parts from a varety of observed forms. Realism in this case, is achieved
not by seeing one scene from the fixed perspective of an imagines spectator but
by combining parts views sketched at different times of different bodies in
different places and merging them into composite whole.
Da Vinci’s technique is called perspective anamorphous.
THE CAMERA OBSCURA
Today, perspective is recognized as one among a number of
possible means of realism among others; it no longer characterizes our era’s
episteme in a totalizing way.
CHALLENGES TO PERSPECTIVE
Perspective in its traditional forms has remained tied to
the idea of an objective depiction of reality.
Impressionism was an art movement of the late 19th
century that featured work that used visible brushstrokes and impressionistic
depictions of light to capture a sense of human vision differently.
Monet examined the process of looking by painting different
works of the same scene to show subtle changes due to shifting light and color
over time
In 1907 two painters, Braque and Picasso, became interested
in depicting objects from several different points of view simultaneously.
Cubism was a style that deliberately challenged the dominant
model of perspective through an analytic system that broke up the perspectival
space of the conventional painterly style
Action painting drew from the surrealist interest in
automatism, a technique of writing, drawing, and painting in which the producer
marks the surface with spontaneous gestures, giving little or no attention to
the aesthetic from that results.
It is an uncensored release of the inner feelings of the artist and that
the marks on the canvas would express these feelings without direct pictorial
symbolism
