​Context -about approach

Seminar on Realism and Montage by Dr Francis Summers 

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Francis reintroduces the idea of realism in the arts and montage as a tool to achieve it. He starts with Linda Nochlin’s definition that realism is to give a truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life”. He subsequently puts forward the argument that to present life as it is in a particular contemporary times, the form of realism is constantly changing and must be reinvented continually. The essence underneath his argument is that by presenting the world one has to observe, and thus realism is a question of fact.

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The act of observation is particularly important to achieve realism because the artist has to spot the remarkable out of the ordinary, out of the things we see every day. This leads to two further questions: how the everyday is and how to make it remarkable. For the first question, Bertolt Brecht argues that realism should not be linked to the good old days but to the bad new days, as the contemporary world is fast, incoherent and fragmented. In the course of art history, the depiction of the bad new days is in contrast to that of “past historical idealised life”. Regarding the second question, in his essay Understanding Brecht, Walter Benjamin points out that “‘represent’ does not here signify ‘reproduce’…Rather, the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say, to make them strange[verfremden].)” Paul Wood also suggested that realism is an orientation towards reality, rather than its direct connection. From here, there is a distinction between realism and realistic. Realistic can be treated as codes, as a way to make things look real, but not necessarily mean to represent life as it is. The key is to present it with the tools one has in their times. In this sense, Andy Warhol can be a realist, using tools of his own time to address pop culture and consumerism. This is also connected to Francis’ conclusion that to embrace the contemporary is to “constantly address its own means of representation to one that will do justice to the contemporary moment”.

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To me this is a reintroduction to realism because I sometimes think realism is a convention that lives in the past, but it actually emerges only in 1850 and was contemporaneous with that of photography. Realism as a sincere observation of one’s own time is always current and timely. The seminar reminds me that within the realm of photography, social documentary is not the only way to present the world as it is and to be “realistic”. In the age of social media and surveillance capitalism, my interest and enquiry about how images are presented and consumed in the internet is well situated with the idea of realism. Taking found images, screenshots and website interface as the tools from our contemporary, I aim to use the “materiality” of the internet to reflect on and present the internet age itself. 

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​The question is, who are the gleaners in the age of social media?

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