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Hyperrealism and the Philosophy of Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges a country creates an extremely detailed map that has a scale of one mile to the mile. In short, the map is the same size as the country with all the detail of the country. The map expands or retracts as the empire gains or loses territory.
But then one day the country collapses suddenly and with such rapidity that all that remains is the map. Yet this is not as tragic as it at first appears, for the map suffices in the absence of the country. The simulation is as good as the reality.
Although the story doesn’t go so far, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard imagines what could happen next. The actual country is forgotten, but the map carries on. The simulation now represents nothing. It is its own reality, and it can be manipulated or changed at will. It can be amplified or muted. [1]
Imagine a city that grows so fast it completely eradicates the natural world. As Joni Mitchell puts it, “They have paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Then one day the people of the city look around and decide that what’s needed are a few trees, some grass, maybe some flowers and shrubs. So they bring them in, dig holes in the pavement for them, grow them and nurture them.
Jesus and the Devil by Harry Sudman
Soon the people of the city begin to shape the shrubs and graft the plants. They are building their own reality, one that mimics the natural world, amplifies it, changes it. Their simulation of reality is more real than the nature it mimics. The actual natural world is long gone, buried under the pavement of the city, but the simulated world is vibrant and growing, and eventually loses its reference to the actual world it replaced.
This view is at the heart of the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard who asserts that in the post-modern world there is no such thing as reality, only the simulation of reality. In such a world objects have no actual meaning, since they have lost their original referent. Consequently, meaning is created through difference – through what something is not (so “bird” means “bird” because it does not mean -”frog “, not-”cow”, not-”stone”, etc.). The object becomes situated in a web of meaning. It is only understood in reference to other objects within the same web, and this complicates things. [2]
As man searches for meaning he becomes lost, confused, groping through a vast array of reflective referents. Eventually he becomes seduced, chasing one set of interpretations to the very pinnacle of its implications, which is itself a simulated version of reality. This intense focus on a single set of interpretations, a restricted yet overemphasized interpretation of meaning is what Baudrillard terms hyper-reality. [3]
In the paintings of Harry Sudman the philosophy of Baudrillard resonates. As with other hyper-realist artists, Sudman’s subjects appear so intensely real, so even beyond reality, that the viewer’s first reaction may be to take a step back with a feeling that they’ve been provoked. In a sense they have. The confrontational nature of hyper-realism is owing to the heightened concentration on a single version of the truth, a version we may not be entirely comfortable with, even though we are fascinated by it, seduced by it.
Baudrillard’s post-modernist world view is exemplified throughout modern culture. Wherever a restricted yet overemphasized interpretation of meaning is clustered around a subject that is vague or nebulous we are seeing it. From processed foods to overproduced music. From mega-churches to the news media. We are seeing a set of interpretations intensely and insistently applied – put forward as “the truth”- to a subject whose original referent is vague or elusive.
Baudrillard would say that, to their adherents, these versions of reality are real, more real in fact, than what they are trying to interpret.
Like the map that has come to stand in for the country, they are all that we have. Yet they are subject to manipulation and prone to distortion, and if we are not totally bought into their version of reality, they may cause us to take a step back for a moment, before we become seduced. ♦
Author and Client: This article was written by Malcolm Logan for Sudman Art.com
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Sources
1 Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulations. The Precession of Simulacra. European Graduate School.
2 see Baudrillard’s final major publication in English, The Intelligence of Evil, where he discusses the political fallout of what he calls “Integral Reality”
3 Wikipedia contributors, “Jean Baudrillard.”Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard Retrieved 2010-02-27
Image Credits
Jean Baudrillard, European Graduate School; Jesus and the Devil, Sudman Art
Hyperrealism: A Version of Reality Beyond the Photographic
Art that makes you stop and look again. That’s a good description of the striking genre of painting known as hyperrealism. A simple glance may make you think it’s merely a photograph. But let the eye linger a moment longer and you will sense something’s up. This is photographic reality, yes. But it’s something more.
Hyperrealism is distinguished from photorealism because it uses the photographic image as a departure point. While strict photorealists strive to imitate the photographic image1, hyperrealists build on it, creating a more sharply defined, meticulously detailed image, a version of reality that goes beyond the photographic.2
The hyperrealist paintings of Harry Sudman, like most other paintings in the genre, honor the philosophic thinking of Jean Baudrillard in striving to achieve “the simulation of something which never existed.” 3 His oversized panels blow up the original photographic source material ten to twenty times. His lighting and shading effects lend a tangible solidity and a striking presence to the subject matter. His use of fragmentation – breaking up the images into separate panels punctuated by squares of color – creates a pulsating affect, as if bursts of color and image have been stitched into the wall. Like most hyperrealist paintings, Harry Sudman’s paintings confront the viewer with a new sense of reality.
Confrontation is part of the thematic underpinnings of hyperrealism. Because photorealism grew out of the Pop Art movement of the 50’s and 60’s, those paintings tend to be acutely mechanical with an emphasis on the commonplace. 4
Hyperrealist paintings, by contrast, use the amplification of reality to provoke. Hyperrealist painters like Denis Peterson and Latif Maulan have tackled subject matter as harrowing as poverty and genocide. 5│6 Harry Sudman’s work gets at the idealization or eroticism, using the confrontational nature of hyperrealism – its heightened color and sharp definition – to peer through the soft focus of conventional eroticism to the stark, often disturbing reality beneath.
It’s art that makes you stop and look twice. It confronts and heightens. It takes traditional photography and uses it as a springboard to something more. Hyperrealism is a genre for our time, a way of reaching beyond the merely mechanical to a world of intriguing, arresting and sometimes frightening possibilities. ♦
Author and Client: This article was written by Malcolm Logan for Sudman Art.com
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Sources:
1 Chase, Linda, Photorealism at the Millennium, The Not-So-Innocent Eye: Photorealism in Context. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York, 2002. pp 14-15.
2 Meisel, Louis K. Photorealism. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York. 1980. p. 12.
3 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation”, Ann Arbor Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1981
4 New Britain Museum of American Art – Educational Resources
5 Robert Ayers, Art Critic, “Art Without Edges: Images of Genocide in Lower Manhattan”, Art Info June 2, 2006
6 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1992). ISBN 978-0-679-74180-0
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