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Realism and Perspective: From Renaissance Painting to Digital Media

Chapter 4

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Plus overflow from Week 3: bell hooks reading review

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Bell hooks (aka Gloria Watkins), 1952-2022

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Gloria Jean Watkins, American author, professor, and feminist activist, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

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Books: Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) All About Love: New Visions (2000) We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004)

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Bell hooks, “the oppositional gaze”

  • Critical look at spectatorship as being inherently white

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  • Absence and presence of black women on screen and in art

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  • Black spectatorship, black female gaze: looking and looking back

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  • Political, sexual, and cultural implications of ”the gendered gaze” as always also racialized and ethnicized, class and ability based

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bell hooks’ Oppositional gazes

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  • first coined by bell hooks in 1992 essay collection Black Looks: Race and Representation,
  • a type of looking relation that involves the political rebellion and resistance against the repression of a black person's right to look.
  • a tool that black people may use to disrupt the power dynamic that perpetuate the Othering of blackness in white male dominated media. 
  • works by creating a representation of blackness in media by developing independent black cinema, and by the cultivation of black audiences with critical voice
  • criticizes both the ”male gaze” through "relations of power” and the prevalence of white feminism in feminist film theory.
  • encompasses modes of looking[ that employ reflexive gazing.

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bell hooks’ Oppositional gazes

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hooks noted that white slave-owners would punish their slaves regularly simply for looking at them.

Color drawing, from sketchbook of BH L;atrobe, Collection of the Maryland Historical Society

"Cultivating Tobacco, Virginia, 1798", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed January 24, 2022, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1181

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Ship architectural, visuality, and power in the �transatlantic slave trade

Designed for African captive to row the ship, sitting facing forward, toward the back of the person in front of them, below deck.

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Slavery and imperialism both led to unprecedented social arrangements that congregated people into crowded environments where they were under constant surveillance. Plantations, military, and government officials established surveillance mechanisms to control the movement and activities of African people taken captive by the white slave trade managers. Slave ships and colonial plantations emerged as places where visibility and control as well as containment and management of bodies occurred in a system of white domination over Black African bodies.

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Map showing spatial relationships between secondary house and slave quarters. Main house is located behind (uphill from) the secondary house on the map.Map by Tom Gwaltney

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Architecture, surveillance, and segregation

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Architecture and the Black gaze

a group of 12 pioneering Black architects, including Wendell Campbell and John S. Chase, founded the National Organization for Minority Architects in 1971 in Detroit to "minimize the effect of racism" within the architecture profession.

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Architecture and the Black gaze

MOVE was founded in 1972 and still exists, though its membership numbers are unknown. Members lived communally and described themselves as a family, changing their last names to Africa out of reverence for their founder and for the continent. In nonviolent but disruptive demonstrations, members protested at zoos, pet stores, and political rallies; the group believed in composting, homeschooling, and a diet of raw foods, and spoke out against war and police brutality.

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Architecture and erasure of Black presence

“most households in the world don’t have street addresses”. That includes many parts of rural America. When Mask took a trip to West Virginia  to find an acquaintance who doesn’t have an address, she got lost: “For generations, people had navigated West Virginia in creative ways. Directions are delivered in paragraphs.” The lack of an address can be a matter of life and death if you need an ambulance.  Without a street address you have no access to credit or bank accounts, a pension or voting rights. But large parts of the world’s population still live off the map. 

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Architecture and state surveillance

On the evening of May 13, 1985, longstanding tensions between MOVE, a black liberation group, and the Philadelphia Police Department erupted horrifically. That night, the city of Philadelphia dropped a satchel bomb, a demolition device typically used in combat, laced with Tovex and C-4 explosives on the MOVE organization, who were living in a West Philadelphia rowhome known to be occupied by men, women, and children. It went up in unextinguished flames. Eleven people were killed, including five children and the founder of the organization. Sixty-one homes were destroyed, and more than 250 citizens were left homeless. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadelphia-bombing-1985-move

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Architecture and state power

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Architecture and presence-building in communities: consider the architecture of the church and the gaze� https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/02/19/three-quarters-of-black-americans-say-black-churches-have-helped-promote-racial-equality/�

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Architecture and presence-building in communities: consider the architecture of the church and the gaze� https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/02/19/three-quarters-of-black-americans-say-black-churches-have-helped-promote-racial-equality/�

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realism

  • Realism: style of representation understood to accurately represent the real
    • definition changes / varies depending on episteme (era, knowledge paradigm), cultural context, professional or institutional framework
    • Meaning is sometimes tied to ethical ideas about truth and accuracy
    • Meaning is sometimes tied to formal conventions associated with truth-telling and accuracy
    • Sometimes associated with connection to unmediated ‘real world’
    • Highly contested, always!

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Fish and loaves fresco, Chapel of the Good Shepherd, Catacombs of San Calisto, Rome, Italy, after 150 ce.

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Introduction

  • Function of visual art not always to reproduce scenes as observer would see them
  • Elements of early Christian paintings used as symbolic communication among members of marginal religious sects
    • concern with symbols overshadowed concern with reproduction

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Realism and power

  • Definition of realism in given time and place subject to contestation, often levied powerfully in visual expression of political movements
    • episteme: accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in given historical period

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1840s France saw the first modern movement in art organized around “Realism” This movement rejected traditional forms of art, literature, and social organization as outmoded in light of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Artists: Show real events, not idealistic scenes!

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“A painter is just a painter”

“It is not a matter of absolute beauty. The artist paints neither history nor his soul. He should be judged simply as a painter,” not a moralist.

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1840s France saw the first modern movement in art organized around “Realism” This movement rejected traditional forms of art, literature, and social organization as outmoded in light of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Artists: Show real events, not idealistic scenes!

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"Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial of Romanticism."

Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-50, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, oil on canvas,

w6680 x h3150 mm

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”the ugliness of ordinary people."

Man with a Hoe, Jean-François Millet,

1860-62, the Getty, Los Angeles

�

�

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“the first modernist painting, for "the way it took the stuff of politics as its material, and did not transmute it”” TJ Clark

Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David, 1793, oil on canvas, 65x50, Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium

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Other types of realism

  • Social Realism: a 19th-century photographic style documenting true conditions of immigrants and working class to prompt reform

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Lewis Hine, 1908 photo taken in a S Carolina textile factory for the National Child Labor Committee

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Other types of realism

  • Social Realism: a 19th-century photographic style documenting true conditions of immigrants and working class to prompt reform

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Lower East Side taylor shop, Jacob Riis, from How the Other Half Lives

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Other types of realism

  • Social Realism: a 19th-century photographic style documenting true conditions of immigrants and working class to prompt reform

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Chidlren sleeping on Mulberry Street, 1890, Jacob Riis

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Other types of realism

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  • Constructivism: geometric abstraction that represented changing social life of modernizing Soviet state in the late 1910s - early 20s
    • valued industrial materials and technology as true and real symbol and actual means of new modernizing nation
    • displayed in public spaces
    • Leninist movement, rejected by Stalin as too abstract for majority of populace to understand

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Screen shot from film Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929

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Types of Realism

  • Man with a Movie Camera
    • uses cameraman as mobile figure through whose roving gaze spectator sees urban life
    • Dziga Vertov: “spinning top”
    • reproduces real rhythm and pace of transforming Soviet life in physical and material forms
    • inspired artists to incorporate dynamic movement into their work as the true and real form of the Soviet ethos

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Types of Realism

  • Socialist Realism: classical pictorialist realism used in USSR to promote government ideologies under Stalin (from 1932), after Leninist avant-gardism is rejected
    • Didactic “official style” mandated by state
    • citizens depicted as happy workers in pictorial compositions using cheerful color palettes
    • other views and styles seen as disservice to state
    • Constructivists continued their abstraction in secret, at risk of imprisonment and death

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Lenin and villagers

Lenin, a man of the people

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Serafima Ryangina�“Higher and Higher”�(1934)

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Wedding on a Street of Tomorrow

Yuri Pimenov, 1962

Soviet stamp of 1975

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Types of Realism

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  • Poetic Realism: French film style influenced by Surrealism aand Constructivism that dramatized social conditions of working class, often by focusing on tragic antiheroes 

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Types of Realism

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  • Neorealism: Italian film style that captured untrained actors in urban ghettoes of Rome on grainy, black-and-white film in deep-space compositions

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Nights of Cabiria

Federico Fellini, 1957

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Struggles of

A working girl

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American Social Realism

  • Great Depression themes
  • Labor unrest, social concerns
  • Emotional
  • Overtly political content
  • Common activities of working class everyday life
  • “Naïve” pictorial realism
  • Regionalism

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American Social realism, 1920-50

William Gropper

Little Steel, nd

oil on canvas

33 3/4 x 44 1/2

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Portrait of Modesta and Inocita

Diego Rivera

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The Migration of the Negro, from the Migration Series

Jacob Lawrence

1940-41

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The Real of the Surface

Jackson Pollack

Number 5, 1948

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Action Painting

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Crags and Crevices, 1961

Jane Frank

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Bones #2, 1959

Agnes Martin

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Taoist

Minimalist

Reduction of form

To simple elements

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Yves Klein

Monotone Symphony, 1949

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Models

‘painted from

Life’ ?

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Yves Klein

Model as paintbrush?

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Anthropométrie de l´époque bleue (ANT 82), 1960

Body imprints--real through physical contact?

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Shigeko Kubota Vagina painting, from Target Practice, 1965

Photo by George Maciunas

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Yves Klein Blue TM

Ownership of a hue

As conceptual comment/joke

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Yves Klein

Surface as material

real

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Perspective

    • Perspective: set of techniques for depicting spatial depth within two-dimensional pictorial space
    • signifier of realism across different periods
    • suggesting physical depth not inherently more realist approach to organizing image field
    • single, fixed spectator position
    • signifying scientific progress rather than new ways of seeing

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  • Filippo Brunelleschi: picture as window through which sight is organized
    • first used instruments to measure distances accurately

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Annunciation, Simone Marti

1333

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Early Renaissance

  • Limited depiction of spatial depth
  • Not one unified system for representing space
  • Multiple representational systems in one frame

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Cestello Annunciation�Sandro Botticelli

1489-90

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Uffizi Gallery hallway

How is

perspective

used in the

architecture

to

emphasize

depth?

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Illustration from Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435

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Leone Battista Alberti, 1435

De pictura -- “I first draw…an open window through which I might look…”

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Perspective

  • Leon Battista Alberti: linear perspective as geometric system
    • perspective derived from nature itself

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  • Rationalism: knowledge of world derives from reason
    • space knowable through measuring with tools that correct human perception
    • perspective system displaces individual with mechanical device

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Filippo Brunelleschi�Florence Cathedral Baptistry

1415 depth illusion experiment. Standing in front of the unfinished cathedral, he painted a panel with a hole cut at the vanishing point. The viewer looked from the unpainted side and viewed a mirror through the hole, which held the image of the painting.

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Dome of Florence Cathedral, 1919-36

Uses of perspective

In architectural rendering

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Uses of perspective

  • Architectural rendering
  • Painting scenes in depth
  • Figural foreshortening
  • Creating of “worlds” (digitally)

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Foreshortening

Rendering the illusion that the object is receding in space by making parts diminish in size as they recede

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Perspective and the Body

  • Techniques for rendering space advanced at different pace from those for rendering body as dimensional

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  • Anatomical foreshortening: technique used to make the body appear to recede in space

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  • Potentially distorting or deceptive aspects of viewing systems have been understood differently over time

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Albrecht Dürer, Draftsman Drawing a Nude, illustration from The Painter’s Manual, 1525

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Perspective and the Body

  • Draftsman Drawing a Nude
    • could be critique of perspective as form of looking
    • perspectival grid better for depicting architectural space than human body 
    • grid’s precision can drain living body’s mobility and fluidity

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Andrea Mantegna’s 1480- Lamentation over the Dead Christ, tempera paint on canvas, 27x32 inches, Pinoteca de Brera, Milan

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The Camera Obscura

  • Camera Obscura: darkened chamber in which light rays bouncing off well-lit object or scene create an inverted projection on surface inside chamber
    • affirms empiricism’s basic tenets
    • found in artists’ studios as drawing instrument

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Johannes Vermeer, Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), 1662–1666, oil on canvas, 28 3⁄34 x 25⁄15"

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The Camera Obscura

What is one theory behind Johannes Vermeer’s lifelike paintings?

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How have some used Virginals with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson) to support this idea?

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Why is this view controversial?

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Challenges to Perspective

  • Human vision more complex than world organized around system of lines
    • eyes in constant motion when we look
    • sight is composite of different views and glances

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  • Many modern artists working after invention of photography defied perspective
    • Impressionism: painting style that depicts same scene many times to evoke changes in light over time
    • Cubism: painting style in which bent perspective lines and fragmented spatial planes suggest movement over time 
    • perspective as source of metaphor and symbolism

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Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914, oil on canvas, 27∕15 × 33½"

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Challenges to Perspective

  • Giorgio de Chirico’s Melancholy and Mystery of a Street
    • uses perspective to suggest anxiety about what may unfold in Italy’s civic spaces
    • refuses nostalgia and heroism associated with urban spaces and monuments
    • suggests foreboding
    • Surrealism forerunner

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How is de Chirico’s style similar to and different than that of Cubists?

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Left: Kasimir Malevich, The Reaper, 1912-13��Right: Kasimir Malevich, Woman with pails: Dynamic Arrangement, 1912-13��emphasizing materials, multiplying decenter and multiply perspective, emphasize material flatness of the canvas, reducing form in nature to pure forms (cylinder, cone, sphere).

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Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist compositions, 1915 and 6, oil on canvas��

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Fernand Léger (France), Nudes in the Forest, 1910, 120x170vcm

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Georges Braque (French Impressionist turned Cubist), Fruit Dish and Glass, 1912, collage and charcoal on paper

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,

Pablo Picasso, Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle 1914, Lent by the National Gallery, 1997, © Succession Picasso/DACS 2020

“By breaking objects and figures down into distinct areas – or planes – the artists aimed to show different viewpoints at the same time and within the same space and so suggest their three dimensional form. In doing so they also emphasized the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas instead of creating the illusion of depth. This marked a revolutionary break with the European tradition of creating the illusion of real space from a fixed viewpoint using devices such as linear perspective, which had dominated representation from the Renaissance onwards.”

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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism

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Pablo Picasso, (Spanish painter working in France from Impressionist period credited with launching Cubism). Left: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, 244 x 234 cm. Top center: 18x20 preliminary oil sketch study. Influences: Cezanne’ color and composition (bottom center), French colonial African mask collections, Barcelona brothel, ownership of Matisse’s Marguerite (1906, top right)

From Matisse Blue Nudes, 1950s

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Nadezhda Andreevna Udaltsova (Russian Cubist-Futurist, Suprematist), 1915

Udaltsova showed her work in 1915 exhibits in Russia including "Tramway V" (February), "Exhibition of Leftist Tendencies" (April), and ”The Last Futurist Exhibition” (December)

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Kazimir Malevich

Suprematism (Supremus no. 55), 1916. �Oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches. �Regional Art Museum F.A. Kovalenko, Krasnodar.

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Vladimir Tatlin, Complex Corner Relief, 1915

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Non-Euclidean geometries

  • Carl Gauss and Ferdinand Schweikart around 1818. Around 1830
  • Janos Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevsky treatises 1820
  • Bernhard Riemann -- geometry in terms of a tensor, allowing it to be used in higher dimensions, 1858
  • Einstein’s geometric space-time theory of gravitation, 1916

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Challenges to Perspective

Many modern artists questioned organization around Cartesian subject as fixed center of pictorial world

    • Cubism: show multiple standpoints on an object or scene within a single composition
    • Constructivism—show multiple standpoints in a manner that conveys the dynamic shifting standpoints of the human subject who experiences objects and scenes in a modernizing state where people and things are changing and in motion, as is the viewer

abstract expressionism: artistic style that records the artist’s emotions and physicality during painting process

    • conceptual art: artistic practice in which concept is more important than visual product

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Non-euclidean geometries

  • 19th c new ways of modeling space
  • Unseated the longstanding, unwavering true model of space: Euclidean geometry
  • Impact beyond math and science - broader epistemic shift
  • Curved space, space-time model after 1916

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�El Lissitsky 1890-1941 �(Lazar Markovich LIsitssky) �“GOAL-ORIENTED CREATION”

RUSSIAN PAINTER DESIGNER ARTIST PHOTOGRAPHER

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STUDENT OF MALEVICH, SUPREMATISM

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IMPORTANT FIGURE OF 20TH C GRAPHIC DESIGN

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�El Lissitsky’s “Art and Pangeometry”

“in the period between 1918 and 1921, a lot of old rubbish was destroyed.” – El Lissitsky in “Art and Pangeometry”

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Interest in physics and math (4th dimension, non-Euclidean geometry) among Constructivist modernist artists of Russia between 1917 (Bolshevik revolution) and 1924 (Stalinism)

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A new aesthetic and vocabulary of geometrical, non-mimetic, non-representational shapes, forms, and spaces imbued with the spirit of a revolution that embraced rapid technological advancement and innovation.

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Tatlin, Malevich, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner, and Wassily Kandinsky

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Catalysts: Einstein’s theories of relativity; art form as a matter of time, not as a constant but relative to speed and gravity

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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El Lissitzky, Proun P23, no. 6, 1919. Collectie Van Abbemuseum

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Proun: design for the confirmation of the new and the plane where one shifts from painting to architecture

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Kazimir Malevich

Plane in Rotation, Called Black Circle, 1915. Oil on canvas, 31 1/8 x 31 1/8 inches. �Private collection, Galerie Gmurzynska, Zug.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Naum Gabo, Cardboard maquette for Constructed Torso, c. 1916-17, 46 x 36.6 x 19.7 in. Berlinische Galerie

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Vladimir Tatlin, Complex Corner Relief, 1915

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Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), Sketch for the monument to the Third International

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Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), model of the monument to the Third International displayed in Petrograd and Moscow 1920

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Communism – Soviet timeline: art and film movements

  • 1918 “Red terror” -- destruction of imperial public monuments and religious icons
  • 1917-22 Russian Civil War bet. Bolshevik Red Army and White Army (mixed group representing capitalism, socialism, and monarchy interests)
  • 1922 Soviet Union created as a Bolshevik state, promulgation of full-blown agit-prop trains with filmmakers going to under-developed countryside and emergence of “film-truth” style and propaganda (Vertov) and montage theory of continuity by Eisenstein
  • 1924 Lenin (at 54) has a stroke and dies, and his secretary Joseph Stalin assumes power, ruling the country for 30 years.
  • Early 1930s Stalin-imposed mandate for a return of artists and filmmakers to realist to accommodate peasant sensibilities and legibility of form for purpose of state propaganda quashes the avant-garde movements. Eisenstein goes to the US and takes up with Walt Disney and other budding luminaries of the industry. Many Soviet artists are censored, banned, exiled, or worse.
  • 1950s-70s “Apartment exhibitions” of underground abstract art

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cultural reform in brief Leninist period after New Economic Policy (1921-4): Agitprop

  • Dialectical materialism applied to cultural production methods – see next few slides
  • Film (image in motion) regarded as part of rapid industrialization
  • Technological advancement a reflexive theme of form

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“Montage theories” and “the dialectic”

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Hegel’s dialectic

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Marx’s dialectic

“stands Hegelian dialectic on its head”

Stresses disjuncture and opposition, not unity, clashing as a means of catapulting forward into future progress

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Engels’ dialectic

The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa

The law of the interpenetration of opposites

The law of the negation of the negation

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Lenin’s dialectic

Emphasis on process and practice: The thing itself must be considered in its relations, its development – “Its own movement, its own life”

In considering unity, stress the struggles, the contradictory strivings

Not just the unity of transformation of every feature, every elementopposites, but the

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Lenin’s avant-gardism

  • “Reading Hegel materialistically”

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  • The dialectic is a dynamic, revolutionary law of development, not a set form of thought or a fixed model

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  • A logic intrinsic to all reality, in its form and process – not a reflection, the dialectic springs from the object/material itself

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  • Knowledge does not reflect on experience, it is made and its making constitutes experience

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  • A logic of survival and development -- Bolsheviks will guide the proletariat through the scientific laws of the dialectic, in order to cease power

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  • Workers cannot effect the dialectical revolution without a strong elite leadership (an avant-garde)

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  • Avant-garde (elite leadership) required in all areas: base (politics, economy) and superstructure (arts, culture, education)

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  • The struggle of content within form and conversely

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  • The repetition at a higher stage of forms found in a lower stage

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Perspective in Digital Media

    • “Player” connotes embodiment, interaction with active world beyond limited experience of looking 

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  • Digital imaging presents multiplicity of perspectives in multiplicity of virtual worlds within same screen
    • isometric perspective: technique that renders forms as flattened and scenes without vanishing points
    • virtual: breaking with conventions of representing what is seen
    • virtual reality: a simulation of reality in which users feel physically incorporated into the world on all sensory levels

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Jon Haddock, Wang Weilen - Screenshot Series, 2000, edition of 3, chromogenic print,

22.5 × 30"

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Perspective in Digital Media

  • Cartesian space: a physical, three-dimensional space that can be mathematically measured

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  • Virtual space: an electronically constituted space that resembles physical space but cannot be measured

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.