Classical realism, and other confusing epithets in the way of emulation...
With
my book The Challenge of Emulation in Art
and Architecture due to be available from booksellers by the end of the
month, I thought it might be useful to distinguish its argument from the
current confusion about the aims of art and representation that has arrived
with burgeoning figurative art movements....
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Giovanni Battista Gaulli’s pendentives in the Gesù, spectacular examples of the
painterly, idealizing mode of the grand manner of classical painting.
They are not realistic, but they are compellingly verisimilar.
They are also, paradigmatically, Painting.
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Realism
is a modern problem for the classical tradition. Opposed to the classical in so
many ways—human form, subject matter, composition—realism is still for many an
appealing alternative to inaccessible Modern art. Yet it is not itself a real alternative
to Modernism, but its corollary, and in some sense its precursor. That
contemporary realists call themselves “classical realists” betrays the
confusion that creeps in when one sees all pre-Modern figuration as broadly
“classical.” Confusion is there wherever the old distinctions—between classicism and realism, idealization and documentation—are treated
as inconsequential.
Confusion about means and ends is rife in this
artist’s TED talk:
That
body-painting is self-evidently different than painting the body is lost on a
TED audience ready to burst boundaries. To them, no doubt, crying “foul” here
would be pedantry. A parallel to this confusion is the current (small) wave
of interest in art so real it can’t be distinguished from a photograph. As
if human craft has been reduced to a pale simulacrum of what machines can do,
and so we are amazed when the human artist can achieve a level of precision
otherwise only possible by our machine-masters:
One
should be suspicious that our culture so readily embraces both the excesses of
Realism and the confusion of what
“painting” actually means: it suggests some affinity, rather than opposition, between
these artists' work and the current worldview. Given our worldview, that can't be a good thing.
The
realists themselves are not much interested in what stood for centuries as the
pinnacle of the figurative arts: history painting and its attendant
idealization of the human figure, schematization of the individual figure
within a larger compositional framework, and understanding of naturalism as a
means, not an end. Before the nineteenth century, documentation of mere reality was primarily a form of training, never more than a
technique or a tool, and never an end in itself.
Emulation
in the classical tradition was about artists relating to artists. A modern
artist friend recently asked me whether artists emulate Nature? But if we
accept the definition of emulation as primarily rivalry, albeit by imitation,
how in fact could an artist “rival” Nature? Frankenstein attempted to emulate
Nature, and we know how that turned out. In terms of representation, and the
invention of formal landscapes, artists and architects only emulated Nature in
striving to perfect it, not replicate it or its processes. Artists primarily
saw themselves vis-à-vis other artists, whether living or dead. Nature, and
representation, was one of the means of emulating other artists, but never an
end in itself.
Watch for The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture from Ashgate later this month.
And
hasn’t anyone read Umberto Eco’s “Travels
in Hyperreality”? Or didn’t they get it? I find all digitally-generated
imagery kitsch—architects’ “renderings,” cgi filmmaking, Photoshop
collages—because they feign reality in such a naïve way. Bernini, instead, knew
that his remarkable portraits in marble could never (despite what his acolytes
said) re-present their subjects. He said himself that if we covered a person in
white powder (made them look like marble) we wouldn’t recognize him or her. He
simultaneously strove for remarkable verisimilar rendering of flesh in stone,
and acknowledged that, in the end, we are still looking at a block of marble
worked into an image. 
