Naslov
Hyperrealism as the Mediator of Late Capitalism

Autori
Čović, Sara

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
International Interdisciplinary Conference on Art

Mjesto i datum
Beograd, Srbija, 08.05.2019. - 10.05.2019

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Recenziran

Ključne riječi
culture theory, hyperrealism, late capitalism

Sažetak
„Freed from the real, you can make things more real than the real thing: hyperreal. After all, everything started with Hyperrealism and Pop art, elevating everyday life to the ironic power of photographic realism. Today, this movement encompasses all forms of art and all styles without distinction, and they enter the transaesthetic field of simulation. "- Jean Baudrillard By looking back at the Western art tradition from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century it becomes clear that the main purpose of art was to overmaster the techniques in such a way to make works seem credible to reality. But it was not only the desire to make works seem as the true depiction of reality, there was something more. In the Renaissance period there was the desire to copy and to overcome the Greek masterpieces. In Baroque, as a request of The Council of Trent, there was a will to make brutally realistic and illusionistic works of art to mesmerise believers and to prepare them to that what was waiting for them in Paradise. Throughout the 19th century there were two styles that promoted realism. For Classicism the main purpose to make realistic artworks was to show mastery of technique. On the other hand in the Realism movement, with Courbet and Daumier as leaders, the main goal was to show reality as it is, especially misery and poverty, as a way to make an political statement. From then on art started to move in all kinds of directions and realism wasn't one of them. This introduction of realism in art was meant to emphasize how realism was always a way to imitate reality with a certain goal. Not until the crisis of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism in the sixties there was no need or desire to make realistic works. But there it was, at the end of the sixties that artists startet to produce photorealistic paintings and sculptures. It is no coincidence that that happened in those years because the end of the sixties are the period in which theorists specify the beginning of postmodernism or „the age of simulacra“ as Baudrillard would call it. So what was Baudrillard trying to say in his quote? His statement is that „the age of simulacra“ doesn't posses any reality but the reality that people perceive is nothing but reproductions and simulations that are multiplied infinit numbers of times as a reflection of the processes linked to late capitalism. In that sense Photorealism or Hyperrealism is just a mediator of the logic of late capitalism, multiplying reproductions of reality that actually doesn't exist. In this kind of understanding works of Hyperrealism are just as abstract as works of avant-garde art. The breakage between modernism and postmodernism is even more exaggerated in architecture. As Fredric Jameson explains, the Postmodern architecture is like a cannibal that swallows all the achievements of all previous styles in architecture and reproduces them in extravagant forms. Althrought there is no movement in architecture that can be called hyperrealistic, there are two possible ways to look at Postmodern architecture in the same way as Hyperrealism. First, there are buildings that imitate other buildings and architecture forms like complexes in Las Vegas or the Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans by Charles Moore for example. Buildings like that could be easily called hyperrealistic because they simulate and reproduce realities that shouldn't be part of a culture or a town in the middle of a desert, for example. On the other hand curtain-wall buildings could be seen as mediators of the same logic as Hyperrealism. Curtain-wall buildings were known before postmodernism but in postmodernism they started to accumulate self- contained worlds inside of them, meanwhile reflecting the surroundings on its surface becoming intangible and hyperreal in that sense. The purpose of this paper is to show a different seeing of hyperrealistic art, that which is often understood as the afresh start of the realistic tendencies of the 19th century. This understanding, that is shown in this work, is inspired by writings of cultural theorists on the postmodern situation in society that can also be applied to art.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Sociologija, Interdisciplinarne društvene znanosti, Povijest umjetnosti, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti

POVEZANOST RADA