The concept of Advanced Realism — or rather its name — comes from an off-hand comment that Marc Downie once made to me. The phrase itself immediately stuck, pinpointing what we were already after.

Marc was describing his wife’s deep interest in Georges Perec, whose major novel (Life A User’s Manual) could serve, he said, as Exhibit A for this category. (And we are now making a list of cases in point, to follow, where we’ll propose a few additional examples — & counter-examples.)

added later (1-27-08)

“Advanced Realism” was pronounced at least partly in jest — a play on the term “Social Realism,” the style of supposedly proletarian writing dictated to Soviet writers by the Communists.

What I was after was a name for the aspect of some artworks that I find particularly enjoyable (and the shared naming of things is vital in collaboration; make no mistake, this theoretical diversion is driven simply by the practical need to understand and articulate our own preferences). For example, in reading Georges Perec’s, Life A Users Manual, I was struck not only by the palpable trace of a hidden force organizing the diverse narratives that constitute the book, but also how this invisible hand doesn’t chill the “realism” of the book, but rather increases the density, the dimensionality and ultimately the charm of the novel. This trace of the present, but hidden force, should come as no surprise given how the book was authored — an elaborate set of constraints erected in advance governing and balancing the appearance of characters, props and intertextual references. But the results of these systems, both pleasant and meaningful, prompted further thought.

Additionally, I was searching for some language that could frame our ongoing relationship with notations and diagrams in our art — for example the our animated structures in how long …, the notations of Breath. That we kept coming back to a graphic language that, exploiting the conventions of circuit diagrams, charts and graphs, seemed to want to indicate quite plainly the algorithms that we deploy in the artwork while, at the sample time, stopping short of simple exposition. It seemed for a time as if I spent one half of my graphics engineering effort inventing supple and dynamic ways of assembling points, lines and arrows and the other half of my time inventing ways to blur them.

A rough stab at a credo: Advanced realists don’t place much faith in the point-to-point correspondence of fact to representation. But nor do we find that the free play of imagination takes one far enough either.

And a rough, provisional, stab at a definition: an advanced realist work of art gains this “excess realism” by hinting at the system-like, rule-based nature of the world and our relationship to it. And it often does so by containing its own systems and rules.

But advanced realism is not a mirror on some higher level, and nor do we encourage the positivism required to believe that an artwork could or should reflect the systems and rules of the world en masse. Nor is advanced realism the return of an experimental math-based aesthetics (the deeply mistaken faith that the widespread use of fractals, DNA and/or cellular automata throughout the artwork will guarantee its greatness and scientifically ground its merits).

Two important clarifications reveal this: firstly, by the system-like nature of the world I don’t necessarily mean anything fancy (nor anything familiar to engineers) — although we’re certainly interested in the more “sophisticated” cultural systems: the constraints of language, the descriptions of movement, the details of counterpoint, &c. But in addition to these high-cultural systems, you can’t fill a bath without first putting in the plug — the unavoidable contingencies in everyday life are saturated with rules and systems.

Secondly, the systems and rules explored by the artwork are not the systems and rules of the world itself, rather they remind us of them and provoke reflections upon them. The artwork’s systems of creation, or the evidence and traces left behind, intersect in the mind of the viewer with the systems that they themselves are engaged with. Thus we often end up describing our formal approaches as “game-like” forms, that are played parallel to their subject matter, to be taken completely seriously during the artwork and to be reflected upon only at a distance afterwards.

To call Peter Kubelka’s 1966 film Unsere Afrikareise (“Our trip to Africa”) a documentary is accurate but far from sufficient. It is the most complex examination of truth and its perception that I know of in film. It triggers more perceptions per second than most documentaries give in their full running time, and those perceptions do not give rise to the usual platitudinous conclusions.

Kubelka’s method in making the film was fastidious. He transcribed every sound recorded in 10 hours of field tapes, and he created a card catalogue for every shot contained in the two to three hours of footage, with notations of composition, offscreen reference, theme, and “tactile” sense (warm, cold, etc). Thus a visual vocabulary with synonyms, antonyms, and subtle associations, which he proceeded to commit to memory so that he when he composed the film, every possibility was at his fingertips.

By “every possibility” he really meant it: for he had in mind the most sophisticated system of montage imaginable. Each shot was to relate not only to the preceding and succeeding ones, but also to every other shot in the film. And likewise each sound. And likewise the counterpoint between every sound and every image in the piece.

In film, the usual use of off-screen space is typified by the following kind of cut: a figure will look at or point to or mention something unseen, and the film will then cut to it. The soundtrack typically works to the same end: to evoke and articulate the space outside the frame, which is treated as continuous.

Kubelka turns these devices on their head. A gesture carries over to the next shot or sound, but produces not a confirmation of continuity, but rather a disjunction, a shock. One gets the extraordinary sense that each image and sound exist in a complex and discontinuous “off-screen” space and time, intricately linked together not by principles of proximity and simultaneity but rather by rhythm, reference, and theme.

Essentially Kubelka took Eisenstein’s idea of a montage of “collisions” to an extreme.

From an interview with Jonas Mekas in Film Culture Reader, Praeger: 1970.)

You hear the shot, and it makes a “puff” and misses the crocodile. But a bird flies. And then the man says: “Geh!” He is disappointed and amazed, you see. Then it makes again PUFF — and then he hits, you see the crocodile is hit, and he says “Na also!” that is, “Oh, finally!” “Nun also,” Na also,” which could mean, if translated, “Finally you did it.” And he says it in a very … it could be meant for a completely different event. Like, for example, the zebra is hit mortally, and you hear a woman’s voice who says “Auu!” as if a mosquito had just given her a little bite.

To what end?

My films have a function have a function … – I play with the emotions and try to tear the emotions loose from people, so that they gain distance to their emotions, to their feelings.

It’s tempting to discuss Kubelka’s film in purely formal terms, for its formal achievement is staggering. But of course this film is also a deep meditation on its subject, this safari in Africa, where the voyeuristic white hunters can touch the people and the animals only with their lenses and their bullets.

Peter Handke can serve as both exemplary advanced realist & the opposite. The two sides are revealed in two vastly different books by him:

1. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. In this masterpiece (to which I owe more trivially the expressive use of small caps), Handke conveys the course of his mother’s sad life, which eventually concluded in suicide. His prose, even in translation, is a model of precision, tying the constricting circumstances of her life to the constricted words with which her language (and ours) framed it. Here his intense linguistic self-consciousness works to his advantage, for how to interpret language is as much in question as how to render the facts of her life. For example in this passage describing her move from country to city poverty, right after wwii:
   

   A masklike face — not rigid as a mask but with masklike immobility — a disguised voice, which for fear of attracting attention not only spoke the foreign dialect but mimicked the foreign turns of phrase —”Mud in your eye!” — “Keep your paws off that!” —”You’re sure shoveling it in today!” — a copied posture, with a bend at the hips and one foot thrust forward… all this in order to become, not a different person, but a type: to change from a prewar type to a postwar type, from a country bumpkin to a city person, adequately described in the words: tall, slim dark-haired.

   In thus becoming a type, she felt freed from her own history, because now she saw herself through the eyes of a stranger making am erotic appraisal.

   And so an emotional life that never had a chance of achieving bourgeois composure acquired a superficial stability by clumsily imitating the bourgeois system of emotional relations, prevalent especially among women, the system in which “So-and-so is my type but I’m not his,” or “I’m his but he’s not mine,” or in which “We’re made for each other” or “can’t stand the sight of each other” — in which cliches are taken as binding rules and an individual reaction, which takes some account of an actual person, becomes a deviation…

2. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia. In A Sorrow, Handke’s presence as both writer and grieving son is always clear; the book is all the more penetrating because its viewpoint is explicit but also continually questioned. In this later book, Handke gives in to his own subjectivity, having us take it on trust that the artist’s superior instincts are a sure guide to truth. Lawrence Weschler lances Handke’s arrogant intuition:

“Revising Serbia” (NY Times 4-6-97)

Much of the rest of the time, Mr. Handke is lost in a pastoral-poetical fog of romantic projection. Of the passersby on the streets of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, for example, he notes a very special courteousness that did not display itself but simply suggested itself through a manner of walking that excluded jostling, even when hurried, or through a similarly harmonious way of speaking, which seemed to leave room for others, without the yelling out, whistling and showing off common in comparable pedestrian zones. (Believe me: I’ve been there, and I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about.)