Honours Workshop Diary 8 – Gathering Information of Possible Arguments for the Proposal

Observational Art - Social Relations in Everyday Activities/ Depiction of Emotion in Art

     1. Overview

2D Art that reflects social situations and causes/expresses/creates emotions, feelings, atmosphere, mood

Influential Factors:    Topic/ Subject Matter, Personality, Gender, Age, Time, Social Background, History/Background (Story)

Triangle between:         Artist – Medium – Viewers/Audience

Empathy, Believability, Credibility, Exaggeration, Association (Audience capable to draw connections/relations), Art piece tells a story

Technical Aspects:    

·         Art style, scale, colour (themes/temperature), tone, value, composition, lighting, staging, distribution of shapes, form and function, work process, mood boards, floor plans

2D Artefacts as:         

·         Portrait, character interaction with   -> Other character(s)

-> Environment

·         Environment (creates social space/connection/association through environment design)

      2. Art History

Traditional Art & Digital Art

Impressionism -> Expressionism -> New Objectivity/Americanism

In reaction and opposition to French Impressionism, which emphasized the rendering of the visual appearance of objects, Expressionist artists sought to portray emotions and subjective interpretations. It was not important to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter, they felt, but rather to represent vivid emotional reactions by powerful colours and dynamic compositions. Kandinsky, the main artist of Der Blaue Reiter group, believed that with simple colours and shapes the spectator could perceive the moods and feelings in the paintings, a theory that encouraged him towards increased abstraction.

New objectivity then evolved from expressionism and opposed its introverted emotionalism.

Old Masters:

·         Rembrandt (Dutch Golden Age) -> first portraits to represent character

Impressionism:

Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes,open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), common, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movementas a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. (Wikipedia)

·         Monet, Claude

·         Pino, Daeni (Romantic illustrations with loose, but defined, brushwork) 

Expressionism:Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.^[1][2 Expressionist artists sought to express meaning^[3] or emotional experience rather than physical reality. (Wikipedia)
Wenn ich nun als gesunder Mensch so unbescheiden bin, die Dinge so zu sehen, wie sie sind, und nicht, wie sie sein sollen oder können, so möge man mir dies verzeihen, aber ich kann nicht anders."

New Objectivity:

·         Otto Dix (New Objectivity (in German:  Neue Sachlichkeit))

In one of his few statements, published in 1927, Dix declared, "The object is primary and the form is shaped by the object."^[4]

·        

            Jackson Pollock

New objectivism – subdivided into 3 parts: verists (political), classicists (idyll) and magic realism (surrealistic)

Digital Art

·         Campion, Pascal. (Paintings represent/express strong emotions in everyday activities)

(Loish)

Photography

New Objectivity:

·         August Sander

(New Objectivity (in German:  Neue Sachlichkeit)) -> rejection of romantic idealism of the expressionists (impressionists?!)

"...die Photographie hat uns neue Möglichkeiten und andere Aufgaben als die Malerei gegeben. Sie kann die Dinge in grandioser Schönheit, aber auch in grauenhafter Wahrheit wiedergeben, kann aber auch unerhört betrügen.....

 Diese Worte stellte August Sander 1927 in einem Bekenntnis zur Fotografie seinem großen Vorhaben "Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts" voran.

Man fragt mich oft, wie ich auf den Gedanken gekommen sei, dieses Werk zu schaffen:

Sehen, Beobachten und Denken

und die Frage ist beantwortet.

Nichts schien mir geeigneter zu sein, als durch die Photographie in absoluter Naturtreue ein Zeitbild unserer Zeit zu geben.

Praising Sander's "vision...his knowledge, and his immense photographic talent, " the writer Alfred Doblin said: "Those who know how to look will learn from his clear and powerful photographs, and will discover more about themselves and more about others."

documenting his contemporary society

He gives people props and photographs them in their own environment. With set up/extra lighting etc. but don’t want to focus on the technical procedure of photography.

Social documentary photography is the recording of humans in their natural condition with a camera. Often it also refers to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.

-> created a new style with photographic documentation of social problems

Photojournalism:

o   Timeliness — the images have meaning in the context of a recently published record of events.

o   Objectivity — the situation implied by the images is a fair and accurate representation of the events they depict in both content and tone.

o   Narrative — the images combine with other news elements to make facts relatable to the viewer or reader on a cultural level.

·         Time (Magazine) and Life (Magazine/now Photo Channel)

Animation & Cinematography

·         2D animation (Disney)

·         3D animation (Pixar)

·         Silent Film (Chaplin, Charlie. Murnau, F W (Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans)...)

Black and White films (study value, tone, composition, lighting... ) -> portray emotions without speech

Contrast between impressionism (common subjects -> snapshot, momentary action, capturing movement), expressionism (the subjective perspective -> distorting, express meaning or emotional experience) and new objectivity (=Americanism. plain truth, hard facts, complete objectivity -> no idealism)

Expressionism, to Dadaists, expressed all of the angst and anxieties of society, but was helpless to do anything about it.

Counter pieces

Physical reality – emotional experience

Impressionism, Expressionism,

New Objectivity (Painting and Photography)            

Social documentary Photography, Photojournalism

With the invention of photography the art world changed forever. The depiction of realism was in the centre of interest up until this point and now it became completely irrelevant due to photography. So artists had to search for what makes their art different and many art movements originated. Does history repeat itself with the transition of traditional to digital art?

Questions:

Is the topic too old?  -> 1870-1933     plenty of methods evolved from these early stages  ->

So how do I justify this time period as a relevant subject matter?

The objectivity of the art is in a way counterproductive to the proposed research topic. New objectivity can be considered as a very cold and observational art movement. It is a form of art returning to realism without the idealistic touch, yet still quite intertwined and influenced by expressionism, a very emotional expressive art movement. In summary “new objectivity” wants to show emotions through the plain truth.

This German art movement attempts to display real people of the time without deception. The integration of truthful depiction could be a valuable aspect of the honours project. The artwork is not uninfluenced by the artist though, as it is far more like an illusion of reality being captured in its hard truth. The staging and subject matter plays an important role of the artwork. August Sander e.g. equips each subject with props and specific poses displaying their personality and social background.

Therefore new objectivity can be implemented to train observational skills, as well as to learn from current society. The combination of detailed character observation, veritable depiction and further enhancement of emotions through other art theory could be a way to create powerful and meaningful imagery. Key will be finding a good balance between truth and exaggeration.

The power of capturing the moment -> Impressionism and photography

Expressing emotion (not the self introverted type as in expressionism, but telling a message to others) -> new objectivity, social documentary photography

Digital age examples are e.g. Pascal Campion, Time Life.

A blog-post I found on photography and capturing the moment:

What separates a simple snapshot from a masterpiece is the story the image portrays. The more emotional the shot is, the more it appeals to our senses. But how does one go about capturing emotions? 

The same scene can evoke different emotions in different people, hence emotions are subject to personal bias. From my experience, my best pictures depicting emotion have ‘just happened’. I don’t remember meticulously planning for them. Does that mean the photographer has no role to play in this? Far from true. As far as I'm concerned, the one most important rule of capturing emotion is to first feel the emotion yourself. Then, you have to click at just the right moment.

1. Feel the emotion you’re trying to capture.

2. Be at the right place at the right time.

3. Don’t draw the attention of your subject. Be as unobtrusive as possible.

And finally, some last questions that arose:

Is it too much art history and too broad? -> Must I explain terms such as impressionism/expressionism in the proposal in full detail, or is a broad overview enough (one sentence describing the key factors)?

Progress into technical aspects such as lighting, composition and colour theory or focus on the formation/development/evolution of the Weimar republic (socially, politically) and its art movements?