Critical Analysis Of Eleanor Heartney's Perception Of Reality

With this article art critic, Eleanor Heartney, discusses contemporary artists whose works forward a postmodernist view of reality, which holds no one perception of reality is any truer than another and that all realities are merely constructs of our individual minds and imaginations. Whether the works were crafted with the photographic lens alone or in combination with other media, the artists reviewed in this chapter often pair representational and abstract formalisms in commenting upon the subjective nature of truth and reality. In this respect, Heartney claims Vija Celmins and Chuck Close both dealt with precision, and extrusion in commenting upon the eye and mind working together to construct individual realties. Other artists like Vik Muniz and Malcolm Morley combined painting and the photographic images in

Hanne Darboven, for example, arranges her collection of random images into sorted displays in demonstrating their relationships to one another. Her work, Kulturgeschiechte 1880-1983, 1980-83, however, suggests that any such effort will always fall short of perfect completion. Matt Mullican’s collections of signs, symbols and pictographs shows viewer that our visual attention is selective in that we pay various levels of attention to signs depending on our individual needs at the time we pass them by. Similarly, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, a forty-year-old collection of found and artist-generated images of every sort you can imagine, collected as source materials for paintings are displayed as evidence of the way biases inform the images we choose to construct our realities from, and, logically, that there are as many realities in the world as there are people to perceive them (2013 Pg.