Like Life
Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, January–May 2018, and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, July–October, 2018.
Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, at the Met Breuer, New York, March–July 2018.
WHAT DO we mean when we say of an artwork, or even of a whole art form, that it is realistic?
Photography would appear to be the form that most obviously qualifies for this label. In its unmanipulated versions—sans Photoshop, sans collage, sans color intensification or wide-angle perspective or flattened focus—it seems to embody the most direct transfer between something real and something we perceive as art. The camera records what is actually there. It shows us objects that occupy space in the world as tangibly as we ourselves do.
And yet even with photography the case is not so clearcut. For one thing, it converts the manifestly three-dimensional into two dimensions. For another, it selects out its subjects and puts them into a frame, so that even an uncropped photograph can feel like a specific artist’s peculiar take on the world—indeed, feel like that, if the photo is any good. But this specificity of vision does not in fact contradict our sense of the photograph’s allegiance to reality. On the contrary: the more selective the artist is in choosing what to capture, or the more cunning at invoking a personal sense of design, the more likely we are to feel that some
