NEO-REALITY: BEYOND THE WILDEST IMAGINATION

A little over a hundred years ago, when realist artists roamed the countryside and imagination was scared,
Oscar Wilde had to defend the art of lying, which was decaying under the reign of truth and accuracy. And today? It
is hard to believe that Wilde, using his inventive faculty to its full potential, could have imagined the success of his
defense – or the need to someday refute it! By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was reality rather than
imagination which needed to be rescued. Even film, that most deceptive medium, has recently and repeatedly
depicted as heroic the struggle to rebel against a simulated or constructed reality, from Neo’s efforts to escape the
matrix to Truman’s search for truth. Such films could be huge successes only in a world where imagination has
exhausted, in addition to itself, the artists commanded to produce it and the audiences condemned to consume it.
But film is not alone among the arts today in glorifying something more tangible, more concrete than the
imaginary worlds that the preceding few generations of artists insisted on fabricating. Consider the change which has
occurred over the past hundred years in sculpture, perhaps the most solid, most realistic art form. Back in the early
decades of the twentieth century, Umberto Boccioni applied the technique of Cubist painting, which flattened three-
dimensional objects in reproducing them on a two-dimensional canvas, to freeze moving things in stone and clay.
The result of these Futurist sculptures was the same as the one already achieved in Cubist paintings, namely,
“objects” so far removed from reality, so far distorted from their original forms, that viewers could hardly imagine
what they were seeing. No trail of bread crumbs showed the way back from these flat and frozen products of the
imagination to the familiar things which people previously expected of art.
Everyday objects like bathtubs and mattresses would return by the close of the century, however, in the art
of Rachel Whiteread, who used them as casts in order to convert space – the second least tangible, the second least
real part of reality – into masses. As for the least tangible, the least real part of reality – time – Whiteread managed to
give even it solidity, as her technique became a vehicle of memory, a means of remembering in a concrete form the
empty space of a place which would soon disappear, for example, her 1993 casting of an East-London terrace house
scheduled to be demolished. Even in its most unrealistic dimensions, reality – perhaps more solid and secure than
ever before – has thus been retrieved from the long-since imaginary world of art.
At the same time, however, as hard as it is to believe that Wilde could have anticipated the extent to which
artists would follow his plea for imagination, it is harder to believe that he would mind the return of this realism. The
main problem which Wilde had with the realist method in art was not so much how life-like its products were, but
rather how boring. After a hundred years of artists demonstrating an increasingly Wilder imagination than even
Wilde could have imagined, he probably would have recommended that artists turn to reality in order to produce
something new, in order to escape the tedium audiences must feel in anticipating yet another “creative” illusion.
Indeed, if boredom is the essential enemy of art, we might understand better Neo’s willingness to brave the search
for truth rather than go on suffering the monotony of his daily grind in the matrix. It is not, in other words, that
reality is superior to illusion, but rather that anything different, even reality, is superior to more of the same, habitual
illusion which one must endure everyday. And, as in Wilde’s time, so in ours, it is the daring artists who must lead
the way into this new world.