Claudia Moscovici 
Carole Feuerman‘s life-like–yet larger-than-life sculptures–are known throughout the world. During the 1970’s, she was a pioneer of Hyperrealism, along with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Her works have been featured at the Queens Museum in 1987, at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in 2000 and the travelling exhibit curated by Stephen C. Foster at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. They also have been exhibited at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia and at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy. Recently, she had solo museum shows at Markowicz Fine Art at Art Miami, in Palermo and at the Los Angeles Modern Auction, among others. Feuerman received countless awards for her art, including the Amelia Peabody Award and first prizes in the Austrian Biennale and the Florence Biennale. Famous politicians collect her sculptures, including former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Mikhail Gorbachev.
As an art historian, I can understand why Carole Feuerman’s hyperrealist sculptures are so sought-after. They are striking in their execution: a testament to the artist’s talent to not merely copy what she sees but to convey a monumental reality. Much like classical Greek sculptures epitomized athleticism and ideal beauty, Feuerman’s swimmers embody grace, youth, athletic prowess and repose for our times, presumably following athletic feats most people can only imagine. Interestingly enough, rather than highlighting the sport itself, Feuerman captures the athletes–usually beautiful young women–in repose. The body then becomes all potential energy, apparent in the lean musculature, the swimsuits still wet from the competition, the meditative poses of the swimmers, finally free to rest. I think it’s safe to say that Carole Feuerman’s sculpture represents verisimilitude at its finest.
Furthermore, as an aesthetic philosopher, I see a lot of value in the centuries-old tradition of verisimilitude that, with the advent of photography, some critics declared gone for good. As Carole Feuerman’s success indicates, fortunately, verisimilitude, so often avoided by critics nowadays, is making a comeback. I’d like to examine briefly the role of verisimilitude in the history of art to place in context the significance of Carole Feuerman’s sculptures in the art scene today. I will argue that in order to have genuine artistic pluralism in the contemporary art world—where diverse styles of art are perpetuated and embraced by critics, curators and the general public—it is necessary to value realist and hyperrealist art, such as the sculptures of Carole Feuerman.
Verisimilitude in Art
The aesthetic revolution that occurred during the twentieth-century is unprecedented in the history of Western art. Even the invention of one-point perspective and the soft shading that gives the illusion of depth (chiaroscuro) during the Renaissance didn’t change aesthetic standards as radically as the creation of non-representational, or what has also been called “conceptual”, art.
Since Andy Warhol’s pop art we have come to accept that brillo boxes and other ordinary household objects, if placed in a museum, are objets d’art. And since Jackson Pollock and the New York School of abstract expressionism we have come to realize that what may appear to be randomly spilled paint, globs and other kinds of smudges are not only artistic, but also considered by many to be the deepest expressions of human talent, thought and feeling.
Once art took a conceptual turn, it also became philosophical. As the art critic and aesthetic philosopher Arthur Danto argues, in representational art what constituted “art” was more or less obvious. The only question that was more difficult to determine was: is it good art? By way of contrast, Danto explains, conceptual art compels viewers to think about the very nature of art. The postmodern answer to this question is not only philosophical–namely, that art is a concept because it cannot be identified visually, just by looking at it–but also sociological. Art is, as Danto himself declares, whatever the viewing public and especially the community that has the power to consecrate it–by exhibiting it in galleries and museums, buying it, writing books about it, critiquing and reviewing it–says it is.
A priori, art can be anything. A brillo box, a toilet seat. But it isn’t everything for the simple reason that not everything is consecrated as art. What may seem, by older standards, to be art—such as contemporary Impressionist-style paintings–may not be considered art (but only cheap imitation) by curators and critics; while, conversely, what doesn’t seem to be art—a brillo box—can be perceived as the highest manifestation of artistic genius.
As noted, what makes twentieth- and twenty-first century art conceptual is the fact that what makes it be “art” can no longer be visually discerned. We can’t easily perceive the aesthetic difference between the brillo boxes we discard and Warhol’s brillo boxes. Yet one is called trash and the other pop art. Clearly, it’s not the physical qualities of the object but rather the assumptions of a community that determine what is (good) art. I cannot dispute this argument—made in different ways by Pierre Bourdieu and Arthur Danto–because, given everything I observe is being called art, I see it as the most compelling explanation of the term “art” as it’s being used today. Having conceded the artistic nature and value of nonrepresentational art, however, I’d like to underscore the obvious point that just because nonrepresentational art is currently valued doesn’t mean that contemporary representational art should be dismissed.
To explain the conceptual revolution that occurred in art at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century, some art historians claim that photography eliminated the need for representational art, or the kind of art that tries to imitate “nature” by depicting what the eye can see. We can add in parentheses, as E. H. Gombrich observes in The Story of Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1995) that the notion of the representation of what the eye can see has changed throughout the history of art. Needless to say, visual reality is also shaped by social assumptions. Nonetheless, the difference between kinds of art that aims at faithful visual imitation of the three-dimensional qualities of physical objects and one that doesn’t remains relatively easy to discern.
For instance, even without reading the descriptive title of the painting, it’s clear to tell by just looking at Renoir’s Girl Bathing (1892) that it features a nude girl bathing. Without its explanatory title, however, it would be impossible to know what Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 1 (1911) is supposed to represent. The last thing that might occur to its viewers–were it not for the title–is that it features a nude.
The invention of photography had a lot to do with the move away from visual representation. To say that photography eliminated the need for representational art, however, is an overstatement. Undoubtedly, the invention of the camera encouraged artists to experiment with other means of representation in the same way that the invention of machines displaced hand-made crafts. The camera probably did for painting what the industrial revolution did for artisanship. But that doesn’t mean that artisanship–or hand-made beautiful objects–are no longer valuable. For what the human imagination, sensibility, eye and hand can create will always be somewhat different from what can be made with the aid of machines. Similarly, the texture, sense of color and vision that are captured by painters are not identical to those that photography can produce, even though photography can bring us closer to visual reality and even though photography can be artistic.
Verisimilitude, or the true-to-life physical representation of objects, was brought to life by classical Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, all of which rendered the beauty, movement and sinuosity of the human body especially palpable in their breath-taking sculptures. In classical Greek and Hellenistic art in particular, the human body conveyed (what was perceived as) the essence of beauty: the glorification of divine powers and aesthetic ideals were embodied in the human form. While Greek paintings and especially sculptures showed knowledge of human anatomy, movement and foreshortening, it’s Renaissance artists who discovered the two other key components of verisimilitude in painting: one point-perspective and shading, which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to two-dimensional painted forms. Gombrich and other art historians credit the architect Filipo Brunelleschi with the invention of one-point perspective as it was enthusiastically adopted by Italian Renaissance painters. Perspective entailed the application of geometrical principles to convey in painting the relative size of objects in terms of their distance from one another and from the viewer. (The Story of Art, 228-9).
The most famous Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci, added another dimension to making the objects represented in art seem almost real. His most famous painting, Mona Lisa (1503-1506), is said to deceive the viewers into believing that the woman’s eyes move, returning and even following their gaze. Likewise, many have speculated about the meaning of Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile, whose lips have a mobility that renders her at once impenetrable and expressive. Leonardo was able to achieve these complex visual and psychological effects through the technique called sfumato, or the smoky blurring the contours of the object depicted—especially the corners of Mona Lisa’s eyes and mouth—to leave their outline and expression open to interpretation.
The study and representation of human anatomy and of nature, foreshortening, capturing human movement and expression, one-point perspective and the creation of soft shadows which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to painted forms — all these techniques which took centuries to develop–have the magical effect of making objects represented by art come to life before our eyes. This kind of naturalistic art is not necessarily “realistic” in the sense of capturing human life as it actually is. For instance, some of the paintings of the surrealists were realistic in their anatomically accurate and three-dimensional representation of the human body, but fantastic in their rendition of reality.
There are several movements in contemporary art that perpetuate the tradition of verisimilitude for our times. Photorealism, pioneered by the American painter Denis Peterson, revealed human talent as a rival to what the camera can do. Hyperrealism takes photorealism a step further. Not merely copying reality, it provides a more compelling, monumental rendition of the real. It brings to life an image down to its finest details yet at the same time reveals it as created and contrived: unreal. For this reason, the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard called hyperrealism “the simulation of something which never really existed.” Hyperrealism is not a false reality or a lie, but rather a compelling illusion. Carole Feuerman’s sculptures–particularly those of swimmers, which are her main trope–reveal her as a master illusionist. Her realism isn’t merely an optical reality effect: namely what our eyes can see. While being an optical tour-de-force—in emulating the reality we see so minutely—hyperrealism also stimulates philosophical reflection on the nature of the reality it represents, and of reality itself. Perhaps this is why hyperrealism is the tradition of representational art that is most enthusiastically embraced by postmodern critics today.
Hyperrealist painting and sculpture seems to illustrate the concept of “simulacra” as elaborated by the French postmodern critic Jean Baudrillard in his seminal work Simulacra and Simulation (English translation by University of Michigan Press, 1981). In this philosophical treatise Baudrillard claims that symbols and signs—such as ads for beauty products, models, brand names—seem to emulate reality, but in truth they become the symbols of contemporary reality, or the hyper reality, that governs contemporary societies. The swimmers so perfectly represented by Carole Feuerman in different poses—down to their subtle smiles, the closed eyes perhaps relishing a recent victory; a tranquil pose resting after a challenging swim; the drops of water shimmering on their taut skin—show more than specific swimmers. They are the representation of athletic rigor and perfection; the symbols of aspiration; the symptom of endurance; the sign of the kind of victory contemporary society seeks not just in the athletic domain, but also in business, in law, in government, in almost every field. Success and winning, like beauty and athleticism, become the higher reality—or in Carole Feuerman’s art, the hyper reality–we strive for.
Verisimilitude, Hyperrealism and Artistic Freedom
In a contemporary context, it is all the more of an achievement that Carole Feuerman, aptly called “the doyenne of super-realism” by art critic John T. Spike, has managed to render her hyperrealist sculptures so palatable not only to the general public, but also to contemporary critics, who usually tend to favor non-representational forms of art. This is not only a remarkable feat for her own art, but also for perpetuating in a modern context the rich—and ever-changing—tradition of representational art in general.
Carole Feuerman’s hyperrealism, I’d like to argue next, makes an important contribution to artistic pluralism and, by extension, to artistic freedom. Artistic freedom and aesthetic value are interrelated. Art that is not considered valuable by the artistic establishment – art critics, museum curators and art historians – doesn’t even get the chance to be evaluated by the public. Such art doesn’t make it to museums of contemporary art like the Guggenheim. It also doesn’t get discussed in the art sections of influential newspapers and art magazines. Analogously, literature that is not considered valuable by the publishing establishment – literary agents, editors, publishers and critics – doesn’t get a readership because it never makes it into print. (Granted, the Internet has recently opened up possibilities to express more diverse points of view than before.)
So artistic freedom isn’t just about creating whatever one wants in the privacy of one’s home or studio without the fear of being arrested or shot for it. Although this basic freedom is very necessary, artistic freedom also entails a correlate liberty: namely, the public’s freedom to be exposed to a wide variety of artistic and literary styles. That way we can make our own choices and express our personal tastes. When there’s only one politician or political party to vote for on a ballot it generally means there’s no real freedom of choice in politics. When there’s only one artistic current or style displayed in museums of contemporary art it means there’s no real freedom of choice in art.
Artistic freedom requires an openness or pluralism in our cultural environment. It depends upon the artistic and literary establishments giving a variety of styles a fair shake. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that such an open-minded cultural environment exists in the art world in the United States today. Since the Modernist movement, verisimilitude in art has been looked at with some suspicion.
Scholars who focus on contemporary art describe the liberating effect of “the end of art.” What they mean by this is that the elitist standards associated with the traditional art promoted by art academies and the salons, which made “good” art subject to very specific and rigorous rules, have died since the development of modern and postmodern art. In postmodern art in particular, they claim, artists can do whatever they please in a cultural environment where everything goes. Some scholars and art critics, such as Hal Foster (The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, The New Press, 2002) and Arthur Danto (After the end of art, Princeton University Press, 2014), celebrate this pluralism or interpret it as an inevitable cultural evolution. Others, like Susi Gablik, tend to be somewhat more critical or at least ambivalent about it:
“Modernism—the term that has been used to describe the art and culture of the past hundred years—appears to be coming to an end. As we live through the unsettling moral and intellectual consequences of what the American critic Irving Howe has called the ‘decline of the new,’ it has become harder and harder to believe in the possibility of yet another stylistic breakthrough, yet another leap into radical form… As long as we are willing to consider anything as art, innovation no longer seems possible, or even desirable.” (Has modernism failed, Thames and Hudson, 2004, 13)
Gablik regrets this trend in modern art much more so than Danto, who, as a philosopher, enjoys its conceptual moves. She’s more sympathetic to the general public who, she claims, tends to view modern and contemporary art as “a loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fraud or a hoax. …It remains one of the most disturbing facts about Modernism that a sense of fraudulence has, from the very start, hung round its neck like an albatross.” (Has modernism failed, 13)
Given that so many people still crowd into museums of contemporary art and that connoisseurs still pay millions of dollars for Modernist and postmodern art, Gablik’s claim may seem an overstatement. Yet her point remains valid in the sense that she’s not arguing that modern and postmodern art are no longer consecrated or that museums featuring such art are empty. Rather, she suggests that the consecration of conceptual art is regarded by the general populace with skepticism and even disrespect: the phenomenon of looking at the Emperor’s new clothes. Such skepticism is not incompatible with the social and cultural consecration of modern and contemporary art described, for instance, by Bourdieu. In fact, what the general public can’t appreciate is usually all the more revered by the critics and by the intellectual and artistic elite. The fact that mostly they are able to see its merit enhances its value even more (as well as theirs). We live in an aesthetically pluralist environment, many critics say. Anything can be art today.
I believe that this supposed artistic pluralism, or openness to diversity in art, is largely illusory. While it’s no doubt true that the hierarchy between “high art” or “good art” and “low art” or “bad art” has been seriously undermined (which is not necessarily a positive development), the kind of contemporary art that is displayed by museums of contemporary art or discussed by art critics and scholars who specialize in contemporary art remains strikingly uniform and even prescriptive. So while a pluralism in standards of value exists, it’s overshadowed by a simultaneous dogmatism in the kind of art that’s being displayed, discussed and taken seriously by the artistic establishment for the past forty years or so. If one visits museums of contemporary art and departments of Studio Art and Design, one is struck by the conformity of thought and by the homogenization of artistic styles. One notices that only or primarily the art that’s currently considered “cutting-edge” and “postmodern” is presented as a valid part of the contemporary art scene. By way of contrast, contemporary artistic styles that are more traditional in inspiration—especially those in the “Realist” tradition—tend to be ignored or dismissed as “antiquated,” “old-fashioned,” “kitsch” or just plain “derivative.” So much for artistic pluralism! The message of the current art establishment seems to be: everything goes (no matter how bad it is), as long as it’s not traditional, realist or resembles what the general public conventionally views as “art.”
If all or most contemporary artists created in a postmodern style, then the conformism would not be the direct result of any kind of dogmatism imposed from above by the artistic establishment. Similarly, if the public only liked postmodern installations and ready-mades, let’s say, then the fact that museums of contemporary art predominantly display such art would also be a reflection of the public taste. But that’s not what actually happens in our culture today. If anything, there seems to be an inverse relation between the art that the public prefers and what critics, scholars and museums curators consecrate. While the public tends to prefer and buy works in the realist tradition, this kind of art is rarely featured in museums of contemporary art or discussed by art critics and scholars today. I find this automatic exclusion of certain artistic styles and dogmatic valorization of others a disturbing cultural phenomenon in a supposedly free and democratic society. The contrast between the kind of art that people enjoy seeing, buying and displaying in their homes or offices and the kind of art that critics praise may be a symptom of the fact that since the nineteenth century (more specifically, since Théophile Gauthier’s notion of “art for art’s sake” gained popularity) art has made certain claims to purely aesthetic value. Since then, critics have maintained that artistic value lies not in how well art sells (or its market value), but in its purely “aesthetic” qualities. The influential twentieth-century art critic Clement Greenberg, who popularized Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism in general, made the strongest case for this understanding of “pure” art solely on its own terms.
Yet in an era of supposed cultural pluralism, it seems somewhat suspect to assume that the kind of art that the general public prefers must necessarily be of poor quality. It’s also elitist and dogmatic to assume that only the art that critics and museums of contemporary art favor has “real” aesthetic value. Although the process of artistic consecration differs in the West from how art gained value in Eastern Europe during the communist era, the end result is, unfortunately, strikingly similar: artistic uniformity and conformism. Under communism, such uniformity was imposed from above by the state apparatus, through ideological indoctrination and censorship. In the United States, it occurs in a more complex, or “over determined” manner, through what the French sociologist of culture, Pierre Bourdieu, calls the processes of “consecration” in his seminal work, Distinction (Routledge, 1986). Distinction is the process that endows art with its significance and “cultural capital”: most notably, the institutions that study, display, discuss and disseminate contemporary art. If art were truly democratic and the field of cultural production were truly pluralistic, as some critics maintain, wouldn’t a wide range of contemporary styles of art be granted value, or at least given the benefit of the doubt, provided that they were well executed? If I keep the qualifier—if they were well executed—it’s because, in my understanding, cultural pluralism doesn’t imply that all art is necessarily equal in quality. For as long as people will have standards of taste and value, by definition, not all art will be regarded as equally good or equally bad.
In my estimation, genuine pluralism entails a democratization of art, where a wide range of diverse and distinct artistic styles are given a real chance to be considered by the general public: by being displayed in museums, taught in courses and discussed by art critics. On the other hand, pluralism in the sense that some postmodern critics use the word today–i.e. as the dissolution of the difference between “good art” and “bad art”—strikes me as dangerously similar to what occurred under the reign of Socialist Realism. All Socialist art was by definition “good”: declaring that some artists were more talented than others was regarded as an old-fashioned and elitist bourgeois distinction.
Whatever the roots of the distinction between good and bad art may be, I think they’re worth preserving. A meaningful cultural pluralism doesn’t automatically do away with artistic standards. Instead, it multiplies the choices offered to the public. When a culture eliminates artistic choice and the standards by which people can evaluate different styles of art and presents only a few styles of art as valid—which is what I believe is happening in our country today–the result is the flattening of art to ideology.
This creates a dull conformism that, no matter how much it’s justified or hailed by the artistic establishment, leaves the public feeling deeply skeptical about the value of contemporary art. As the New York art critic Suzi Gablik states, the general public tends to view contemporary art “as a loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fraud or a hoax…” (Has Modernism Failed, 13) For art to be vibrant and alive in a culture, it has to be taken seriously—or at least enjoyed with pleasure—by the viewing public, not just by a small elite of critics, artists and scholars who appear to many of us to be praising the Emperor’s new clothes.
Aesthetic Value and Artistic Pluralism
In most of his work, the aesthetic philosopher and art critic for The Nation, Arthur Danto explains the rise of conceptual art, which has influenced postmodern art today. He champions the works of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, who had a marked influence on contemporary art and aesthetic theory. Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s brillo boxes, Danto argues, are not artistic in their materiality. There’s nothing intrinsic to these objects that makes them different from ordinary household objects or commodities. Nor is there any identifiable sign of artistic talent involved in making them. When Duchamp entered his infamous urinal, which he facetiously called “Fountain,” in the 1917 Independent Expo, he labeled it an “assisted readymade.” The urinal was a common piece of industrial porcelain manufactured by a company called Mott Works. Reflecting common sense opinion, the Society of Independent Artists rejected it on the grounds that they could see absolutely no reason why a urinal should be called a work of art. George Dickie, however, one of the most influential critics of the time, begged to differ. He defended “Fountain” as a work of art that, he maintained, created a new thought or concept for that object. Instead of thinking of a urinal in terms of its utilitarian function, he argued, Duchamp compelled viewers to think of it as a piece of white porcelain. We’re meant to contemplate its fluid shape, its curves and other aesthetic properties and, more generally, to ask the question, what is art? Of course, this becomes a very relevant question for “works of art” that can no longer be described in terms of their aesthetic properties or in terms of the artistic talent that goes into creating them.
As Arthur Danto elaborates, since Duchamp “What we have is the giddy spectacle of a concept—the concept of art—which has bitten off more than it can chew, like a hapless python with an unswallowable lump in its suddenly inadequate gullet. … In any case., what “Mr. Mutt” is claimed to have created is a new thought for that object: so that the work must be thought cum object, taken together, and the object, accordingly is only part of the work… and so appreciation remains in suspense, pending the outcome of interpreting.” (The philosophical disenfranchisement of Art, Columbia University Press, 2004, 34-35). In other words, when we look at a urinal placed not in a bathroom where we believe it belongs but in a gallery or museum, we begin to wonder what’s going on and what makes it an aesthetic object.
At the beginning of the twentieth century when Duchamp exhibited his urinal, these may have been provocative questions. However, if we ask ourselves the same questions every time we see functional objects become “assisted ready-mades” when they’re displayed in museums, how deep and interesting do our inquiries remain? The public has become jaded long ago to the fact that contemporary art aims to provoke viewers. Instead of being moved to wonder about the nature of art by yet another assisted readymade, fecal matter installation or pickled shark, the contemporary public is more likely to be induced to yawn. We’ve seen these things before, all too often. Even their shock value is gone. If contemporary artists really desire to provoke the public and generate fresh ideas, they’ll have to find inspiration in other artistic traditions, not just in the traditions of modern and postmodern art we expect to find in museums of contemporary art.
Carole Feuerman’s hyperrealist sculpture plays an important role in the discussion of aesthetic value and artistic freedom by significantly contributing to a real pluralism in the contemporary art world. Pleasing both viewers and art critics/curators of museums, Feuerman’s artwork embodies both tradition (the longstanding heritage of representational art) and postmodern innovation (the embodiment of Baudrillard’s simulacra, a reflection on contemporary objects and society). Through her hyperrealist sculptures, Feuerman manages the render tradition new again, to innovate, to provoke viewers into thinking about contemporary society through sculptures that incorporate centuries of discoveries in the art world: the study of human physiognomy considered so important by Renaissance artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo; the close study of human expressions that became so important during the Romantic era; the verisimilitude treasured by Realist artists during the nineteenth-century.
As Pablo Picasso, perhaps the most modern of all modern artists, once argued, to remain fertile and innovative, art needs inspiration from a multitude of artistic traditions. In other words, originality can’t exist in the absence of time-tested aesthetic standards:
“Today we are in the unfortunate position of having no order or canon whereby all artistic production is submitted to rules. They—the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians—did. Their canon was inescapable because beauty, so-called, was, by definition, contained in those rules. But as soon as art had lost all link with tradition, and the kind of liberation that came in with Impressionism permitted every painter to do what he wanted to do, painting was finished. When they decided it was the painter’s sensations and emotions that mattered, and every man could recreate painting as he understood it from any basis whatever, then there was no more painting; there were only individuals. Sculpture died the same death. … Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must recreate an entire language from A to Z. No criterion can be applied to him a priori, since we don’t believe in rigid standards any longer. In a certain sense, it’s a liberation but at the same time it’s an enormous limitation, because when the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains by way of liberty he loses in the way of order, and when you’re no longer able to attach yourself to an order, basically that’s very bad. (My life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot, 21)
True artistic innovation finds its roots in artistic traditions such as the rich history of representational art that Carole Feuerman finds inspiration in—and transforms—for contemporary critics and viewers.
Ann Arbor, December 6, 2018
