Art, Dreams and Reality

Plato suggested that if you wanted to imitate life, nothing did a better job than a mirror. Modernism has shown us that all art does not have to be representative; photography does that much more effectively. Now, there's more to art than just imitating nature, so that definition hardly fits all art. Duchamp destroyed the traditional notion of beauty in art, and Warhol showed us that almost exactly reproduce things in the world around us. Jackson Pollock sought to portray the act of painting rather than anything one might see out a window. Anything was possible, leaving us struggling to nail down an accurate definition of art. 

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905

This revolution began in Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century in the studio of Pablo Picasso. His Les Demoiselles d'Avignon portrays a group of prostitutes not as they physically appear but their reality in Picasso's eyes. This painting told the "truth" in a personal way rather than objectively. In 1905, Henri Matisse painted his wife in Woman with a Hat, but he did not portray her as the lens of a camera would have. Instead, he attempted to show her character traits rather than simply her visual ones.  

The European concept of abstraction held that there remained a path back to nature, that the paintings started from visual reality initially. Things changed as the movement crossed the Atlantic to America. When Hans Hoffman insisted to Jackson Pollock that abstraction comes from nature, Pollock declared, "I am Nature." The break with objective visual reality was complete. 

Released from the constraints of visual reality, German artist, Joseph Beuys believed that anything could be art and tested his theory by produced work from mounds of fat and felt blankets. But while these materials may seem arbitrary, they held deep meaning for Beuys. In World War II, his plane had crashed, and villagers nursed him back to health, slathered in fat, and wrapped in felt blankets. A more powerful reality was being depicted. 

Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

By the mid to late twentieth century, art was dealing with inner truths beyond superficial ones. In 1915, true to his Dadaist principles, Marcel Duchamp rejected the idea of beauty in art. He detested the notion of art that pleased the eye and instead pursued art that challenged the mind. Duchamp took everyday objects and lifted them up as works of art. He took urinals and bicycle wheels and displayed them in a manner in which their original uses vanished, and the viewer was forced to see them in a new light. Art was no longer restricted to only that which was beautiful.

Warhol, Brillo Box, 1964

1964 saw Andy Warhol also take the mundane to new heights when he produced almost exact replicas of Brillo boxes and placed them on a gallery pedestal. Warhol ripped another hole in the barrier between art and reality with what were, in effect, three-dimensional photographs. He had subtracted the perceptual differences between art and reality. These boxes were not just some gimmick, though. Warhol's obsession with common consumer goods could be expected from someone who grew up in poverty and whose mother was the most influential person in their life.

Danto maintains that art can be like a dream, it is not necessarily the truth, but it points to the truth. Dreams are universal and made up of experiences, but they are not necessarily experiences of reality. Art stands at a distance from reality, but it aims to reflect the meaning of the real world.