The real is not “… the shared consensus of worldly perception but as that which cannot be symbolized.” This is taken from a review of an exhibition by the photorealistic sculptor, Evan Penny. The essay is written by David Clark. It’s excellent. I hope you’ll read it and take a look at the accompanying examples of his work. Extracts follow:
“Realism in the age of simulation is a convoluted project. What is realism when the real is unfixed? What Penny’s new work presents us with is not a positivist proposition of reality but the real as a double negative; a real as that which is not unreal; plausible deniability fixed to the fluctuating denomination of photographic realism.”
“… What was consistently pursued in Penny’s early works was the observational. We know that a real person posed for the artist; was seen by the artist, and was rendered with meticulous care by the artist. It was a realism that seemed to proceed from common sense. This is the trust that we gave over to the artist. He was our witness. He was our camera.”
“… Lurking in that work; however, was the impossibility of realism indeed the impossibility of the real? Realism was always overburdened with an impossible task. Jacques Lacan talks of the real not as the shared consensus of worldly perception but as that which cannot be symbolized. Realism suffered because it was a symbolizing practice. It gave us a code in which to refer to the world; a world we had all agreed was real. This work revealed that realism is a tautology. Our real, our personal experience lay outside a set of symbols. Penny’s work spoke to that real, that part of our experience that we had never given up to the world but held within our self; that “hard kernel of the real” that Lacan speaks about.”
“… The work is now addressed to the camera, to the photograph and to a world we see through the codes of photographic realism. This is a new type of contemplation, not a directly existential contemplation of our selves as bodies in time and space but as body images caught within a vast network of codes of representation.”
“… Here I think of the example of the snapshots given to the cyborgs in Blade Runner that stand in for a past that never existed. The point being that the value of the photograph is not through the referent but our investment in the value of the real.”
The name of the reviewed exhibit was “Absolutely Unreal”. No date is given, so I’m not sure when it took place.
-Julie
