Chapter 4

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 19^th 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