Thoughts: Photorealism

Photorealism is a truly amazing moment in the history of Western painting during which artists, in a variant of Realism, based their paintings on photographs. Occurring during the late 1960s in the United States and somewhat in Europe, artists focused on photographs and photographic advertisements that showed items of popular culture and consumption, esp. cars.

Scholars of Photorealism have focused on the movement's connection to Pop art (it its focus on pop culture), to the tradition of realism (both stylistically and in its reflection of the new American consumer landscape), and to the rise of the popularity of the snapshot camera. It has been suggested that Photorealism reflects the banality of the landscape despite the fact that some artists actually painted photographs of members of their family (very un-banal subjects).


All of this is most likely true. However, I was thinking that one thing that I don't believe has been discussed is what the act of painting a photograph says about "the photographic." What I mean is that to take a snapshot photo in the late sixties is to "snap" an image...it is over in a second. It captures and freezes a moment, eternalizing it for the length of the existence of the film or printed photo--this comment isn't new, it's standard in the history of photography. To translate a photograph into a painting is to slow down the photographic moment even further and to preserve it to an even higher degree on the more indestructible medium of canvas. The gesture is by turns boring, neurotic, loving, and even fetishistic. If loving, the photographic is conceptualized as insufficient at extracting and preserving. If boring or neurotic, it is seen as is incomprehensible, necessitating obsessive repetition.

Also interesting is that Photorealism, while compounding the freezing element of the photographic, acts in a reverse direction. It takes place in time. It thereby reinserts the synchronic photograph back into the diachronic. Photorealism, at least that of artists like Robert Bechtle or Richard Estes, thus re-animates the dead photograph, resisting its pull, and yielding something even more unyielding. It is thus a kind of exercise of and on futility.




Photo: Robert Bechtle, '61 Pontiac, 1968-69. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Richard and Dorothy Rogers Fund © Robert Bechtle

Actually popular art: Bolt

So Bolt isn't exactly "high art" or "mass art" or possibly "art" at all, but searching for the "correct" word is rather semantic at best and truly pointless at worst. Bolt is most definitely a film...or a movie...or an animated feature. It is also the production I found myself planted in front of with my family during Thanksgiving away from NYC.

Thankfully, Bolt the dog is adorable. Those wide kitten eyes from Puss in Shrek2 are a near perma-feature of this white-furred, giant-headed furrball. (In fact, the fascination with "cute eyes" is a truly bizarre phenomenon that perhaps reflects some desire for the ability to look at others and find them truly non-threatening, even welcoming. The GAZE is met, returned, and fully open.)

But aside from "the gaze," Bolt the movie tells a completely implausible story that unfolds like this: Bolt is chosen from a shelter by a young girl named Penny (homage to Inspector Gadget anyone?) and raised inside a televison studio to believe he is a super dog who every day rescues his beloved Penny (who truly does love her dog) from an evil green-(cat-)eyed man. One day, much to Penny's dismay, the studio stages Penny's abduction to raise ratings and Bolt is prevented from saving her. Desperate to find her, Bolt escapes the studio confines, falls in a box, and gets shipped to New York. Yadda yadda yadda, he heads back West with the help of a cat and a hamster, learns he is NOT a super dog, learns how to be a regular dog, then saves Penny from an actual death when a Hollywood studio catches fire, and the whole group ends up together as a family.

That's the cheesy version. The version that makes anyone with any cultural studies training cringe and of course...dismiss. Yes, the movie ends in a ridiculously happy ending with all ends neatly bowtied. Yes, it is ironic that the movie is about movies being false, etc. etc.

However, Bolt is also genuinely touching tale.

Why? Because as Disney's (granted highly market-tested) foray into mirroring the contemporary American family, it posits the possibility of the hybrid familial unit predicated on adoption. The varieties of adoption and types of families are exhibited by the various characters: Bolt himself is a shelter puppy who never knew his parents. Mittens the cat was abandoned by her own family and is distrustful of humans and others in general. She is forcefully "adopted" by Bolt, and only over time comes to view him as her new family. Rhino the hamster (whose name itself hybridizes the creature by adopting a cross-species reference) has a fine home life, but actively chooses to leave his current family behind to become part of Bolt's. And finally, Penny, who has a mother but no father (unusual for many Disney films which are based on the killing or absence of the mother figure, e.g. Bambi) and ends up creating her own new family by adopting all three animals.

Such a diversity is refreshing in a children's movie.

Also interesting (as well as a bit of a stretch) is Bolt's story's relation to that of U.S. IF one can accept that possiblity that in some ways Bolt the dog stands for the United States, then Bolt the movie is about the waning and death of its power and the realization that what power it had was impotent. It is also about the nation's wish for a final demonstration of true power and redemption.

Bolt is under the impression that there is danger everywhere, he is so convinced that he becomes paranoid. (More importantly, Disney sets it up so that Bolt has been tricked into being convinced there is danger. He has also been tricked into believing he is omnipotent.) Bolt will do anything to save Penny from the perceived danger. Bolt and Penny are divided from one another. Bolt, over the course of many hard knocks, realizes that he is not a super dog, but a regular dog. Still motivated by his love of Penny, he decides to reunite with her regardless lack of superpowers. Finally, he is given the opportunity to save her from a real death, redeeming both himself and her and reuniting them.

Replace "Bolt" with the government of the United States and "Penny" with the concept or notion of the United States as a country and you have an abstracted (borderline conservative) parable about the how the Iraq war rent the nation from itself, and the country's desire for its sense of self to return.

Kate Gilmore at Smith-Stewart

Kate Gilmore opened this Friday, Nov.21 at Smith-Stewart in the incredibly small space of her dealer's gallery. Visitors stepped in from the freezing cold through a series of Gilmore's, at this point, near trademark busted-up drywalls for the opportunity of meeting the winner of the Rome prize and catching bits of three of her videos (Between a Hard Place, Down the House, and Higher Horse, all 2008). Packed to the point of immobility, it was difficult to view the work (but when is an opening a good time for viewing the work), affording a real-time sense of the claustrophobia immanent in much of Gilmore's work.

Gilmore is smart. And her work is smart. It is aggressive and beautiful and draws on some of the greatest lineages of art history, critiquing and extending the legacies of performance, process, feminist, and masculinist art. Each of Gilmore's pieces is a performance as well as a film (which documents the performance) in which the artist casts herself as the protagonist, often battling walls or blocks of concrete and wood. Higher Horse shows Gilmore standing on a column of plaster blocks in high heels while two men slash away at the pile of blocks around her with sledgehammers. In Down the House, we see Gilmore from above, ribbon in her hair, smashing debris all around her, again with a sledgehammer. In Between a Hard Place (the work created for Gilmore's solo show at the Philadelphia ICA, curated by Whitney Lauder curatorial fellow Stamatina Gregory), Gilmore batters her way through a series of drywalls wearing high heels and a dress, this time with only her hands and feet.

It's wonderful to see a feminine figure being so forceful, but of course there are intimations here that this force is not desired by its subject, but instead necessary. She is trapped and must fight her way out. Oddly, she does so in an almost calm, methodical manner, as if she's been doing this forever. Worse, "out" may not even exist; the struggle may be endless, or perhaps it is just that no end is in sight. In Down the House, the house may be crumbling, but the screen fades to black before Gilmore can free herself. In Between a Hard Place, the rock is implied. Gilmore fights through multiple gray walls only to be met with a final yellow wall. In Higher Horse, she survives the assault (or rescue) but her situation remains precarious. She might come down off her high horse...if only she could.

Gilmore alludes to the social and the political incisively. Strikingly, however, she does not negate beauty, leaving it as an open question in her work, asking for its interrogation. Each performance has an elegant chromatic theme. Yellow heels match the yellow wall (and the reverse sides of the gray drywall indicating an alternate side of things), red ones rhyme with red drips down the wall behind the plaster column, and a pink hair ribbon reverberates with wet, pink paint. Gilmore's colors are attributes of femininity, but also of architecture; they are applied and not inherent. They are excessive, but not unimportant. They are also indicators of the legacy of the monochrome--the Utopian gesture towards a One thing, a full presence, or a no presence.

Gilmore herself embodies and enacts Lucio Fontana's, his Spatial Concepts, his buchi and tagli.
She steps through, breaks through, again and again, hoping, fighting for something beyond.

http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/gilmore.php