“The realist in us”
By Amar Shahid

“The real is always in its place/if the symbolic is a set of differentiated elements, signifiers, the Real in itself is undifferentiated, it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces “a cut in the real”, in the process of signification: “it is the worlds of words that creates the world of things – things originally confused in the “here and now” of the all in the process of coming into being.”

-Jacques Lacan

Seeing the realist works of recent young contemporary artists reminds me again on the desperation that we all tolerated and manoeuvred on the visual surfaces: on objective representation, or mystified symbolisms. The contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius lead Jacques Lacan to come up with the observation of realism as an interesting, almost unique aspect of human cognition. While animals are attracted to superficial appearances; such as Zeuxis’ paintings of grapes that tempted and deceived birds, humans are enticed by the idea of that which is hidden. Human relates more to symbolism. The advent of photography reminded us of the false representation of ideas that westerns related with throughout the ages, and later we adopted. From throughout our times, Malaysian realist painters had their share of negotiating between the symbolist contents and the enticement of doing skilful realist paintings.

Thus comes the question : after exhaustive recycle and re-recycling ideas to fulfil the needs of fuelling the impulse of making and displaying skilful art pieces, what more can we learn and share from similar realist approaches, so far as literal aspect is concerned? What more can the young realist contemporaries offer, so far as technical aspect is concerned? Photography made the act of disciplined hand-painting of our perceived reality somehow ‘nominal’, which made western painting traditions rediscovering the importance and significance of symbolic aspects in visual-making. Of course there is no harm in enjoying a skilfully done painting, but Einstein reminded us that believing starts when the reasoning ends.

The common notion of defence regarding the quality of manually produced visuals is that it is virtually impossible to be reproduced, hence capitalising on the ‘humane’ and unique quality of traditional paintings. However, in recent century, new tradition of visuals that embraces unique reproduction of pictorial elements by means of digital scripting (again) throwing towards us the age-old question in art – How significant is the relevancy of unique and objective representations? Personally, I would say that visuals, be it representations or generations, would always be generic, unless it proposes to audiences a credible thought on symbolisms of visuals and their meanings. Relative to his time, Zeuxis had made a really great job in proposing these symbolisms.

That said, we are not to say that the established idea by Zeuxis deserve their ovation should the idea be replaying in today’s visual context. Approaching visuals through skills and technical mastery alone is not something that could easily please the appetite of recent understandings in art (should the audience are sincere in accessing the knowledge of art). This argument may be an exclusion for Mohd Azman’s mixed media drawings of charcoal and fluorescent spray paint. Unconventional technical approach in his drawings reminded us on the simple joy of picture making and the playful sense of experiencing visuals, which further pushed forward the available possibilities of picture-making and their experiences. Very often, the simplest ideas are the ones that bring more significant impact. To some extent, I believe the concept of “New Force” does evident in Azman’s works.

This further brings towards the significance of the works by other artists in the exhibition. The idea of realist picture making in the context of modern art is so saturated, to the extent that the only ‘real’ experience is the sense of satisfaction in the artists’ achievement of skilful mastery, or the ‘triumph’ of the observer managed to negotiate and mold themselves into the mindset of the artists’ proposals. More often though, the experience of an audience (or a collector’s) appreciating the visual and literal representations such as harmonies of colour or navigations of compositions is the ‘real’ experience often discussed. When I was given samples of works by the artists in the exhibition, I knew that technical mastery is not the ‘real’ experience that I would like to achieve, not because of the lack of it, for I had to admit that Madiawati’s still lifes did manage to fool me on my first impression of it. Rather, I was more curious into understanding the basic problem of identifying the direction of their works as a whole with the given context of the show.

Being an essentially debut show for some of these young contemporaries, throwing punishing questions such as “How does each particular distinction within the artists’ conceptual and contextual understanding contributed to the holistic idea of the show?”, or “How does this show contributes towards pre-existing understandings of realist movements?” may not be so appropriate. Still, it is an essential question that should had been discussed and ascertained among the artists. Rather, if these fundamentals are not the point of objective, we as audiences are left with choices of reality (or rather, realism) that we could be freely choose to approach; hence the coinage “the realist in us”. Most of artist or audiences would attempt escapism by implying that “art is subjective”, though it is pretty well established that subjectivity is the sign of failure to objectify.

With that point laid out, objectifying the works of Mohd Alif or Mohd Shamsuzzaman would not be such a feat. Certainly, animations in Mohd Aliff’s works provide sense of narrative illusions of reality that further compliments on his symbolisms of tradition-meets-pop-culture presentations of figures. Mohd Shamsuzzaman’s HDR presentation helps little to provide substantial clue to humanoid animal figures in his digital works. Perhaps, the tools he is using would be the reality that is in his interest to be proposed to the audience, even though the humanoid animal figures would be prevalent on stealing the attention of audiences’ judgements.

Like I mentioned before, the “realism” that we could really trust for now is the personal realist experience that we chose to embrace. As for artists, it is for the most part the joy of fulfilling artistic impulses. For casual audience, there is nothing wrong to trust your own judgement of the technical mastery and the literal symbolism of the works, despite of the much mysticism that could debunk your opinions. And as for collectors and would be buyers, well..you know which one you like. Essentially, there is no artwork that fails, except in the condition that it does not fulfil the intentions or proposals of the artist, should the work and the proposals juxtaposed and judged as so. For the most part, any work could be readily and meaningfully appreciated, through different angles of approach and understanding, which depends on the realist in us. Be realist in what you appreciate most about the work and trust your judgement, rather than succumbing to blurry concepts and not getting the satisfaction expected. With this, I hoped the works in “New Force” could further be appreciated in the most sincere of democracy.

Amar Shahid
Shah Alam, 2010