Practice of Looking: Chapter 4 - Realism and Perspective

Taking for grandit “realistic” images

Conventions of realism

Realism linked to variety of approaches

Signifier and signified

Arbitrary and contextually specific

Linear realism – connect with realism

Realist images depicts something as it would be seen by the eye

Extremely labored in the renaissance

Reproducibility – the aim and ability

Ability to hold in thoughts and memories

Conventions of representation – how people believe they see things

Visual Codes

Visual codes –assumptions about dates from content, style, medium, and formal qualities

Ex. sepia toning and 19^th century photography

Neoclassical style – aspects of classical fine art

Appeals to the artist’s subjective taste – politics

Questions of realism

Realism – a set of conventions or a style of art or representation that is understood at a given historical moment to accurately represent nature or convey and interpret accurate or universal meanings about people, objects, and events in the world.

Different ideas about realism coexist

Historical, geographical, or national context

Political expression – can challenge realism

Exposing means of production rather than hide technique

Can promote nationalism (soviets) – the constructivists reacted with the avant guard

Poetic realism – opposition of narrative film making – dramatized real and social conditions

Political allegory

Arts function was to reflect truths about society and nature back to subject in the world

Foucault – episteme – way that an inquiry to truth is organized in a given era

Accepted dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given period in history

What viewers are accustomed to

Objects shown in space through perspective

History of Perspective

Perspective – “to see clearly”; a set of systems or mechanisms used to produce representations of objects in space as if seen by an observer through a window or frame. Size and detail corresponds to the relative distance of the viewer

Development of painting techniques – looking through a window or screen

The enlightenment – importance of science – power of human reason will overcome superstition.

The picture as a mirror or window

The distance of the image will be judged by a real structure

Mathematical rules derived from nature

Linear perspective

Frame within a frame

Codes and conventions

Perspective, according to Panofsky, became paradigmatic, specialized form of the modern world, associated with rationalist thought

Cartesian grid

Empiricism – knowledge based on experience and experiment

Away from realisms of science and into natural

Descartes – the body and the machine, and the displacement of sensory performance

Viewers position is hypothetical

Rendered the image objective

Berger , 72, “proposed to the spectator that he was the unique center of the world”

Perspective and the Body

Ancient Egypt – the size of the figure shows the dominance of the figure

Mantegna- dramatic foreshortening

The used of a grid to help proportions of creating an image

Separates man from nude

Realism – making a composite of views and parts from other observed forms

Realism – combining parts and views and merging them

Ancient Greeks – rejected techniques to reproduce, believed it was trickery

Camera Obscure

Camera – simple device that is based on the phenomenon that light rays bouncing off of a well lit object or scene, when passed into a dark chamber

Different relation to the images

Long history – Vermeer – distorted highlights

Drawing instrument

Challenges to Perspective

Impressionism – visible brush strokes and impressionistic depictions of light to capture form

Empirical sense of being amidst nature – subjectively recording changes

Complexity of human visions and natural interactions

Emphasized the sensory interactions

Cubists – the human eye never rests, always in motion, paints different perspectives at once

Complicated vision

Sculpture and masks

Abstraction of African body art

Longevity of traditional linear perspective suggest as cultural desire for vision to be stable and unchanging and for the meaning of images of images to be fixed. The act of looking has been highly changeable and contextually meaningful

Fascination with distortion

Action painting – representation of emotional experience

Surrealists – automatism

Concept, process, and performance – “new realism”

Physical materiality of the body and the paint

Receiving in social context

Perspective in Digital Media

Videogames and the embodied experience of the user

Navigation of elements

Engagement with media

Help us to imagine

Emphasis on embodied movement

Isometric perspective – equal in measure. Objects are not represented as becoming smaller as they recede in space, linear perspective. Oftener used when one frame is embedded in another. Places the viewer in different relation to space than traditional perspective

The sims

Composing screen space, point of view shots

Virtual images – “not real” – something that exists in our imaginations only

Digital technologies

Break convention of what is seen

Ideal or composite elements

The real and mundane world

Parallel

Physical space