Realism

Reading Response: Representation and the IDea of Realism by Neil Mulholland.

Realism

Realism is a world with multiple connotations. Most of the time it is used to describe something the presents a reasonable facsimile of reality. When referring to the artistic movement however, the meaning goes deeper than that. Realism was an artistic style developed during the European Renaissance.

The Renaissance popularized the idea that there was rhyme and reason to the world. Everything was understandable and measurable. While in previous centuries, cause and effect had been seen as primarily spiritual matters that people could not hope to understand, The Renaissance sought to shed light on the workings of the all things. The belied humanity must solve it's own problems. As a result, artists became increasingly interested in politics. Courbet's Stonebreakers illustrates the struggles of the working class by depicting common workers in the act of back breaking labor.

The realists also showed a greater interest creating a greater verisimilitude of reality within their work. The philosophy that the world was measurable and understandable resulted in an unprecedented interest in anatomy and physiology. Moreover, artists began to discover ways of creating the illusion of the third dimension on the two dimensional canvas. Linear perspective was developed as a direct result of an attempt by Renaissance thinkers to develop a scientific system to explain how we perceive light.

The Realists saw the world as objective, physical and factual. They looked to use art to represent the physical truths of the world around them. In a post modern world, much of the appeal of Realism is lost on us. Post modernism rejects objective reality and truth. To truly appreciate realism, we have to recognize that they saw the world very differently from the way we do. To them, art had no greater purpose than to hold a mirror up to the world around them, showing things as they are without embellishment or alteration.

Museum Images

Reading Response: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.

The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.

The man who never threw anything away tells the story of a landlord digging through the apartment of a tenant who collected the rubbish that other people threw away. His entire apartment was filled will trash, filed in an ordered system with notes on the origin and nature of specific pieces of trash.

As the landlord and his niece continue to explore the apartment they discover a series of essays on garbage written by the tenant. In them, he explores the idea that the past is defined by the objects we live behind. He describes the whole world as enormous garbage dumb that holds everything we throw away.

The author, through the voice of an eccentric, collector voices the opinion that objects we discard tell us a lot about the value we place on our past. He also questions whether anything has any objective value considering the fact that everything eventually becomes trash. He points out that there difference between a building and pile of rubble is only a matter of time.

It's historical proven that the value of material objects is relative. The value of the US dollar alone has changed drastically since it was first introduced as the official currency. You might say that gold's value has remained virtually unchanged over the centuries, but that is only under normal circumstances. To a starving man, gold is not nearly as valuable as food.

The relative nature of material value is an interesting concept for an artist. Art is all about emphasis. A painting, poster, or sculpture, no matter what the subject, is about taking something out of it's normal context and placing it in a different one, thus assigning it a different significance or value than it had before. We can see this most plainly in the work of artists like Duchamp, who created striking artworks simply by taking something (sometimes a piece of garbage)and taking it out of it's normal context, placing a higher value on it than other people perceived.

We all have different concepts of material value. As artists, we take images and objects and change their value. In order to do our job properly we always have to question whether or not something is really garbage.

Reading Response: Image Icons.

Image Icons (36-72)

This article discuses the significance and nature of icons. The difference between an Icon and an image is the difference between connotative and denotative meaning. The article defines icons as an image that holds great cultural significance. The denotative meaning of an image is the literal visual information captured withing the frame. The connotative meaning is the cultural significance attached to that visual information. The article gives the example of the famous photograph of a young man standing up to a line of tanks in Tienanmen Square, Beijing. The photograph's denotative meaning is a young man standing in front of a line of tanks. The images power comes from it's connotative meaning. It is a picture of an individual standing up against impossible odds. An unarmed man could not possibly pose any threat to a tank. It could roll right over him without suffering any damage whatsoever. At the time, it was interpreted as a powerful image of rebellion and fearless individualism in the face of injustice and impossible odds. The photo has no universal value, but to our culture it represents ideals we have come to embrace.

A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. This makes sense considering the great significance we attach to certain images. In a way, images become part of our language. We use them to communicate ideas and information. An icon is an image that holds the same value of meaning for a large group of people. It's connotative value is the same for an entire culture, making it as much a part of their language as a world or phrase.

Proposal and Mind Map

Exhibition in a Box

Ryan Karson is a graphic designer and artist who works primarily with traditional art forms like painting. He is best known for his murals and use of optical illusions. Karson was born in Eugene Oregon in 1972 to Louise and Johnathon Karson. His earliest recorded efforts at design are evident in the school yearbook's from his Senior cover year which includes an illustration of the school logo similar to his later style.

Karson attended the University of Oregon from 1990-1992 studying fine arts and refining his skills as a painter. Then, in 1993 he received a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of design. He graduated in 1995 with a bachelor's in graphic design and went on to work for a number of advertising firms. In his free time he began painting murals pro-bono as part of a charity effort to cut down on graffiti. Eventually he became bored with normal design work, and in 2002 he started his own business creating murals and other public art. He quickly became well known for his work in optical illusions, creating paintings on walls and sidewalks that, from the right angle would appear three dimensional.

For the exhibition I want to use photographs of murals that match the style of my fictional artist. I plan to crop them and super -impose them onto virtual surface that matches the angle of the original surface. The end result will be an image that looked like a a room with a series of murals painted on the walls and floor. I also might make a kind of minuature three sided cardboard room with the images on the walls.

Chimp Cart

My take on David Salle's "Monkey Cart."