October 19, 2003
Hyper-realism
In the comments to my Blue Velvet post Philip from Eye-Image introduced hyper realism as a counter to my mumblings about a postmodernist aesthetic.
More here on a postmodern aesthetic.
I'm not sure what Philip meant. In the comment box he says that visual reality is mirrored to an immense degree of believability. He adds 'How close to the truth can we get without actually being there?'
I remember that hyper realism was an art style of the last quarter of the 20th century, which came after a pop art that used popular images and ideas as raw material. With modernism buried realism is making a return. As an art style hyper realism refers to painters who made their paintings look just like photographs, with the painting exaggerating the photographic medium.
I thought that was a dead end myself. Why bother mimicking photography?
I suspect that Philip means more than a particular art style that developed after the collapse of an abstract modernism.
So how do we open up the issue?
Since I am going down to the coast for a week to paint the holiday shack, let me begin with some seaside imagery.
Is this what Philip is getting at:
Marc Appleton & Associates
as opposed to this from Joel Meyerowitz's book entitled At the Water's Edge:
More images from the Cape Light book can be found over at the wonderful pretty serendipities.
There is also some commentary with the photos.
The question these images pose is: Do you get closer to the truth by doing away with romanticism and its emphasis on subjectivity?
Do you get closer to the truth by returning to traditional realist conventions?
How then would you tackle Ground Zero in New York and what it means for Americans?
Does hyper refer to reworking those realist conventions?
Yes I remember the photo realism movement in art but I was thinking more along the line of recent documentaries and films. I spent a short period in London about 6 years ago before moving to Prague. I did not watch very much TV in Prague and so when I returned to London about a year ago, the changes in television seemed more noticeable. I observed that the documentaries, especially, had changed. Many documentaries had dispensed with a narrator leaving the cameraman himself to play this role and the characters in the film to unfold the story. One particular documentary had the cameraman visiting a prostitute, he filmed the whole evening, his conversations with her, them drinking, her undressing before him. At times consciousness of the camera evaporated completely. However, we (the viewer) could not see the cameraman, though we heard him, he was nevertheless visually taking the place of the viewer. Nothing was staged, a story ‘true to life’ unfolding with all its moments of laughter, sadness and vulnerability. The realism does not depend on the visual accuracy, quite the contrary; blur, strange angles, distorted color, focus play, flash moments of thought, all enhance the reality if done in the right way. This kind of realism is now common too in fictional films. The goal throughout is to bring you the viewer, as close as possibly to the reality depicted without stage acting, exaggeration, like we have in the theatre. Another great example was a documentary staged in the future ‘The Day Britain Stopped’ ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/the_day_britain_stopped/default.stm ). Major effort and resource was invested in believability.
Looking at realism from another perspective we have ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Visually here we have an extremely well made film, characters, monsters, beings of whatever kind live in space with almost complete believability, gone are the days of jerky, fake looking monsters. Sooner or later we will be creating completely ‘real’ characters without the need for ‘real’ actors. Anyway ramble ramble…