What does the world look like? Other thoughts

Okay. My first attempt at marking a journal on this topic didn’t go so well. I hated the first piece of reading given here so much I had to post a rant about it. With that done, let’s look at the rest of it. 

 

Sadly I was not done with Hito Steyerl. I had to watch her short film “How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File”.

I hated it. It was Audio tourture (Sans using “When Will I See You Again” by Three Degrees and the end. That a great song and they deserved better than to be in this) And I didn’t care to try to interpret it. But it was still not as bad as ‘In Free Fall’. Other than that there’s nothing I want to say about it.  

 

I also had to see a 7 minute short about Clive Head talking about his painting Leicester Square.

It’s neat. I don’t really have anything to say except he seems like a cool guy and he does good work.

 

With that done. Let me respond to the ideas presented as a whole.

 

There are multiple valid perspectives (Both literal and figurative. But I’m talking literally here) They don’t cancel each other out. Though some can be more valid than others. If one could see all possible perspectives at once, have a God’s eye or omniscient perspective you would have the most valid perspective of all. 

So I don’t agree with the idea that all outlooks are equally valid. Nor the idea that you can just dismiss ones you don’t like. Though notice a lot of people hold both beliefs at the same time. Postmodernism means everyone is entitled to the postmodernists opinions.

I think said people are overstating how different perspective and real vision actually are. It’s fun to shit on an old paradigm even if it’s not an invalid one. It is a paramount tool in drawing and always will be.

 

I think the same thing can be said about the question of realism. Yes realism can be a real thing. And there are more ways than one in which something can be realistic. Lots of ways in fact. But you can grade realism on levels. Watership Down is clearly more realistic than Bugs Bunny.

Different things can be realistic in different ways. And yes realism can often, even frequently, become a parody of itself if often repeated. See how depictions of  Medieval Europe have gone from actknowleging that people didn’t live the most hygienic lifestyle to making everyone an inbreed moron covered from head to toe in shit. But the idea does still have merit.

 

 

On of the big ideas that is used against the idea of realism or a scale of things being more or less realistic is Schema theory. The idea we can only recognise something due to previous reference. We need a schema or we either draw a blank or see the thing wrong. Or even the wrong thing.

 

I do think schema has value. But I don’t think it ends the idea that something can be realistic.

Schema is experience. Experience is what gives us reference.Fiction can also be schema. But that does not invalidate the truth of lived experience.

Lighting and texture always look real to us, regardless of culture, as they are the tenants upon which vision is built. Light is a universal schema. We always recognise natural light vs studio light when watching a film. No-one has ever said movies with natural lighting look less realistic than old films shot on sound-stages.

 

There are other universal schemas too. We do recognise realistic motion or a good representation of it even if we don’t know that we do. Just like how we can recognise someone by their walk even if we’ve never taken time to pay attention to how they walk.

This why animation works. You know if a character is moving, talking, and acting like a real person even if You’ve never analysed how these things look in your life. You don’t even know your reaction positively to good animation. You just do. Even a small child can feel the the animation in Disney’s Aladdin is more realistic than the 60s Spiderman show even though many of them they could never say why.

 

There is a limit to have far you can take it. At least if you aren’t super talented. But it does work.

 

Still. I have to ask. What does this have to do with the questions of what is contemporary art?

This feels like diversion.