Things have only gotten worse since then. "It looks like a home video," said a coworker of mine, apropos of a more recent HD franchise. She was referring to the fact that the movie had that mysterious "soap opera" visual look that is instantly recognizable, but whose technological explanation eludes the likes of me. The daytime drama look. Like it must have been shot on a glorified camcorder.
Then came the Democratic primary debates, which my parents watched on a new HD TV. My mom in particular was alarmed by the sudden prominence of everyone's teeth, and by the fact that you could now see every hint of an acne scar on people whose appearance would normally be shielded by distance and makeup. "If anyone had anything wrong with their teeth, you could see it," she said. "And Beto seemed to have all these splotches."
In short, it's unmistakable. We seem to be living now in the age of hyperreality. And the problem with this -- from the perspective of our culture's general visual hygiene -- is not that it shows us more truthful depictions of things. It's not just that we want to reserve our televisions for the purveyance of dreams and fictions. It's that hyperreality is even more real and detailed than the things we perceive with our own eyes.
This was my mom's main objection to the sight of the debates in HD. It wasn't just the teeth and the blotches. It was that the viewer was being confronted by something they wouldn't have to perceive even if they were in the same room as the candidates. "You could see more than if they were just standing in front of you," she said.
We seem to be experiencing a kind of "shock of the new" in reverse.
In the classic accounts of art history, it was the advent of the photograph that forced painting into new and more experimental directions. Once it was possible to create a perfectly convincing facsimile of a visual scene without the aid of pencil or paint, the old style of realistic illustration was otiose. Simply drawing things "as they are" was now unnecessary. The rationale for Impressionism was born.
Now, however, our dominant visual medium has gone so far in the photographic direction, it has taken us back to unreality again. The ability of digital cameras to capture the details of the world has surpassed the human eye. So will we see an art historical reversal in consequence? Will we need painting and drawing again to remind us of what the world actually looks like -- at least, to us, with our limited apparatus of perception?
This all occurred to me because I was reading John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing, and discovered that the great Victorian art critic and social reformer was already on the case. He would have diagnosed exactly the problem with HD technology. Writing to his students back in 1857, he warned them off the attempt to achieve hyperreality through detail in their drawings.
Partly, this was due to practical concerns. The person wielding a pencil or chisel cannot actually hope to depict every leaf of every tree, let alone every ridge of every leaf. The profusion of detail in nature is infinite, and only mounts as one tries to peer at it more closely and describe it more precisely. This is what Ruskin variously calls the "mystery" and "incomprehensibility" of nature.
It is a problem something like the classic mathematical brainteaser of trying to ascertain the length of the coastline. When we create an abstraction of the coast through lines and curves, it is possible to measure it. But if we were to try to outline it with absolute precision, we would find that it was composed of an infinitely receding series of smaller and smaller curves, down to the atomic level, and that therefore its true length stretches to fantastic distances.
So too, the illustrator trying to copy every curve of a leaf would find that the task has no end. They would never get past it to attend to the rest of the stem, let alone the whole tree or landscape.
Ruskin was not just trying to save his Victorian art students some time, however. He was also making a point about how the human eye actually sees things. We do not in fact visually process all the details of reality. As an object recedes from us, it becomes an increasingly indistinct blob. If we were watching Beto from across the room, he himself would be the splotch, and we would detect no profusion of them on his face.
"The form of a complete leaf is never seen;" writes Ruskin, "but a marvelous and quaint confusion [...] wholly indefinable and inextricable, part by part, by any amount of patience." Or as he puts the point even more directly later in the book: "[N]othing is ever seen perfectly, but only by fragments, and under various conditions of obscurity."
Therefore, leave it to Providence to number all the hairs on one's head, Ruskin seems to be saying. The artist should content themselves with depicting things not as they are, but as they appear to us. This -- according at least to the introduction to the Dover edition of Ruskin's book -- is what made him a somewhat surprising and unlikely influence on the early Impressionists.
The idea of varying degrees of abstraction in visual art is so familiar to us now, it's hard to imagine anyone ever objected to it. George Bernard Shaw's classic riposte to nineteenth century critic Max Nordau's book Degeneration, helps remind us of the early reception this idea received. The Impressionists' departure from the canons of verisimilitude was actually so radical that it was perceived by some - Nordau at least - as a diagnosable visual aberration, requiring medical attention, or at the very least spectacles (Nordau was a doctor, after all).
Well before the controversies about Impressionism and all the schools that followed it, however, here was Ruskin making the essential point that some degree of abstraction is inherent in any act of visual perception. We cannot number the hairs or the leaves any more than we can perfectly measure the coastline. We always reduce reality to certain ideas -- lines, shapes, curves, and blotches. This holds true as much when we see as when we paint.
Some of the only drawing advice I ever received illustrates Ruskin's point. At some point in college I was doodling, and I commented to an artistic friend that every human face I ever depict comes across as grotesquely grinning. "That's because you're outlining every tooth," she said. "You don't need to do that. Just draw the line of the row of teeth in one go." She was right!
I've never forgotten it, and ever since I've known that depicting each tooth makes a mouth look less real than otherwise. Even though the human mouth has more than one tooth in it, we shouldn't see them all in a doodle. To trace each one out suddenly gives the teeth a degree of detail that exceeds everything else in the image. This thrusts them into the foreground, turning them into a disgusting rictus.
This is more or less what my mom was perceiving on the debate stage. We could see way too much of Bill de Blasio's teeth. It brought them forward to a visual prominence they would never have if we were just standing there talking to him.
Perhaps the next daring aesthetic innovation in our cultural evolution, therefore, will be the same move the Impressionists made, except in the photographic realm. Perhaps the boldest maneuver ahead of us will be to start using grainy, pixelated film technology again, and on much the same theory -- that the level of slight abstraction it confers, the loss of perfect detail it entails, is actually more faithful to visual reality as we perceive it - that it actually reflects, that is to say, a higher verisimilitude.
No doubt such a step would meet with the same opposition the early Impressionists faced. Why would we take a step backward, it will be asked. Having worked out so many techniques to achieve greater faithfulness to reality, why would we retreat now into vagueness and softness and sponginess?
To descend from hyperreality always risks being seen as a kind of disrespect or cowardice. What, can we not handle reality as it truly is? If we respect reality, if -- like Margaret Fuller -- we truly accept the universe, why should we eschew detail? Why would we leave anything out? Shouldn't we see people and things as they are? Maybe we shouldn't allow public figures to retreat behind makeup and cameras. They should stand before us in all their blotched and toothy glory.
HD technology, in short, is giving a new meaning to the phrase "warts and all."
But then, which is more disrespectful? The muddying and abstraction of detail? Or the accurate depiction of it, in all its ugliness?
This question of disrespect and abstraction comes up significantly in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. There, the character of Lily Briscoe is involved in painting a domestic scene of the Ramsay household, where she has been invited to stay. It is never entirely clear whether the piece she is producing is a work of outright Impressionism, or perhaps, some even more daring form of visual abstraction, but it is a bold enough departure from realism at any rate to arouse the mild alarm of her botanist friend William Bankes.
Bankes notices that Lily is painting a visual tableau that includes Mrs. Ramsay -- the incomparable Victorian matriarch -- reading a fairy story to her son. In other words, she is depicting a scene of domestic tranquility and maternal duty that ought to be handled with the utmost worshipful delicacy, according to the standards of the age.
Yet Lily chooses to draw the madonna and son as a "triangular purple shape."
Bankes, a broadminded gentleman, is willing to accept -- after some inward struggle -- that perhaps it can be respectful to depict people as blotches of color after all.
John Ruskin would have agreed with him. His Elements of Color is full of discussions about what to do with and how to position various colored "masses" in a painting -- questions that preoccupy Lily throughout the book. As we have seen, Ruskin recognized that abstraction is not an insult to visual perception, it is part of its very essence.
Ruskin's book was circulating in the Stephen household when Virginia was growing up, moreover, and influenced Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), who was the painter in the family.
The irony, however, is that Lily does in fact disrespect the Victorian maternal ideal. She refuses to get married, contrary to Mrs. Ramsay's wishes. She demands autonomy and the right to paint, and she pointedly fails to live out Mrs. Ramsay's matchmaker fantasy of pairing off her and the bachelor Mr. Bankes, so that they can form a household, and Lily can spend her time arranging flowers for Bankes rather than completing her own paintings.
Lily finds her work at last more important that marriage and children. The thought that she "has her work," that she loses herself in moving about purple triangles, fills her with a tingle of liberation. By relegating the madonna scene to a purple blotch in the corner, she is signaling her emancipation from the dread "universal law" of marriage and childbearing, as she calls it, which Mrs. Ramsay tried to lay upon her.
There is a still further irony, however, in the fact that Woolf's novel is no work of abstraction. This is not an Impressionism of prose. To the contrary, it is an effort to depict the thoughts of her characters as they come, in detail and without leaving out or idealizing the petty egotisms and jealousies and aggressions and everything else that will emerge in the process.
The book is thinly veiled autobiography, of course. The Ramsays are very much the Stephens. Mrs. Ramsay is Virginia's and Vanessa's mother. And Lily is the author. And the reader. And me.
And in portraying all of these characters based on her own family, Woolf did not display people as abstract blotches. She tried to capture the entirety of their mental operations. And she showed to us, in the effort, life as it really is, with its devastating losses and yet without finality. Lily and Bankes never have a love story. Mrs. Ramsay's matchmaker expectations do not come true. There is no Victorian plot to be resolved, either by marriage or inheritance.
Woolf's book is a kind of exercise in hyperrealism, therefore. It takes what might have been a handful of scenes in an earlier novel of action and plot, and shows them to us with a focus on each moment as it passes. It is the human mental process in HD.
Perhaps literary modernism is to the Victorian novel, then, what Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies are to his Lord of the Rings.
This, however, is to overstate the distance between Woolf and her protagonist. Lily rejects Mrs. Ramsay's value system by rendering her as a purple triangle. Woolf, meanwhile, does the same by showing her to us in extreme closeup -- virtually the opposite of the technique her protagonist uses in her painting, but with the same result.
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