"Artifice and Reality"

    The New Jersey Arts Annual 2010 theme is "artifice and reality" and provides the theme for this month's blog.  We will see if I get in.  Regardless, there are some things to say.

     “Reality and artifice” contrasts the waking and dreaming world, the world of what our eyes take in and what our minds give back.  Perception is reality; translation is always imperfect, whether visually, audibly or in writing.  Painters and sculptors are free within their media to exaggerate, invent, and change reality to suit their purposes.  The photographer—the realistic photographer, who seeks the contrast in the unmanipulated “real” world, is challenged to find this contrast in the subject itself.  Museums are obvious places to look where life imitates art and art imitates life.  Churches, a kind of museum in themselves, are another such place where mind and spirit meet body and physical space.  In the streets of the city, glass and water reflect—and therefore interpret—the realities they capture.  The discerning eye can see the artifice in the reality, and the other way around.

 

     The eight images here are from various themes covered in my peripatetic discernment of the urban environment.  In a Buenos Aires church, a sleeping cleric seems to be dreaming the figure of Christ before him.  Similarly, in Vienna, a woman in white seems as one of the angelic sculptures herself.  A face is reflected in the puddles of Millennium Park in Chicago—an image of an image, made larger than life.  In New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a man sketches a sculpture, itself a representation of, presumably, a live model—reality transformed to mythology and stone, and retransformed a century later to black and white lines on a piece of paper—and then captured yet again on a digital sensor.  A security guard seems half in and half out of reality in the Louvre, one foot vibrating as if she is trying to determine in which reality to exist.  Pristina, Kosovo, yields two images, each dichotomous of the real and the imagined.  Opposite the Turkish quarter, the modern glass wall of the Parliament Building—itself reflective of the brand new (2008) independent nation of Kosovo—the old is mirrored, as if painted as a mural on the wall.  Reality or artifice? More soberly, on one of the main shopping streets, the stereotypical “beautiful woman” in a bathing suit, advertising film, contrasts with the reality of the destitute woman.  One’s hand is on her thigh, the other extended in pleading.  One is artifice, the other, reality.  Finally, in Washington, D.C., a sculpture seems to watch a woman looking at a painting—art visualizing life visualizing art.

 

     So are we experiencing fact or fiction? Which is the reality and which the invented universe? Within the photographic frame, where both artifice and reality are themselves reinterpreted, what is left?

 

 

    
February 2010


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