contemporary monkey

I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye.  Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art.  To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and enormously patient at your special ability.  But that also describes people who make Ferraris.  You’re proving your own virtuosity. Although you could be having a laugh at fooling other people.  Like the roadrunner and coyote in Warner Brothers animation, where the coyote paints a tunnel on a solid face, only for the roadrunner to make the trick a reality.

This week I made my way to see this sort of thing firsthand in Sheffield.  I’ve never been to Sheffield before, itself a trompe l’oeil of English pastures from the Victorian era.  The show was called “Out of the Ordinary” at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, and focused on craft usage in contemporary times.  Among the handful of artist was a Japanese person called Yoshihiro Suda.  The short biography of him is, “He creates hyper-realistic flowers and weeds from wood.”  I get the irony, but isn’t that like carving the perfect pebble from a rock.  Or to use the Ferrari analogy, making a car out of a new refrigerator.  His flower “sculpture” was protected by walls and a security rope where you couldn’t get any closer than about 12 feet.  I was beginning to doubt the quality.  How good can it be if I’m standing across the room to look at it?

Yoshihiro Suda

Trompe l’oeil comes up in the Autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine as well, where a section of the magazine is devoted to the history of fooling the eye, back to the early 15th century.  Back then the point was to make it as realistic as possible because until then, I guess, nobody did it.  The article continues to 20th century artists like Rene Magritte, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol.  I remember seeing my first Duane Hanson “statue” of an overweight tourist.  It was more creepy than sublime, but nonetheless it made me flinch, which is what good quality art is supposed to do.  Let’s add that to the list of results from trompe l’oeil: in addition to be impressive by way of its craft quality, it can creep you out too.

In the same article is a reference to a work at the Venice Biennale: a mural by Thomas Demand called “Clearing”.  It’s a very large photograph of the very thing it’s supposed to hide: the forest behind it.  This one goes one loop further though; it’s a photograph, of a sculptural stage, of a photograph of trees.  A long way to go, right?  The sculpture is made from 280,000 separate pieces of coloured paper, constructed by 30 people working for three months.  That IS a long way to go.  Apparently not only do you need the technical mastery to do these things, you have to have a lot of friends, or a lot of money.

Thomas Demand: Clearing

Discoveries this week are this: trompe l’oeil requires loads of patience, technical ability, friends, money and a sense of humour.  All this work to prove one thing: you can do something better than anyone else.  Just like making a Ferrari.