Optics and murals

In the last decade, many murals have been painted on walls in Melbourne and internationally. One of the reasons for the current spate of murals is the currently available technology for mural painting. A quick look at YouTube demonstrations of these new digital resources, like the Da Vinci Eye App or Mural Maker App, will explain why so many of these murals have a photorealistic quality.

Art is a combination of technology, media, resources, and not simply the desire or skill of the artist. The general public is unaware of the influence of technology on the history of painting. David Hockney, in his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (Thames & Hudson: New York, 2001), revealed what was an open trade secret of how to make photorealistic paintings from the Renaissance onward.

The myth of the optics-free artist producing photorealistic details was never true. It was a lie created with pigments and the myth of the artist. The story of the relationship between art and technology was further muddled in the nineteenth century by painterly reactions to competition from chemical photography. Painters from Whistler to the Impressionists, whose paintings looked like paintings and not photographs, didn’t use optical technology. To his critics, Whistler had thrown a paint pot and gotten away with artistic deception. 

In part, these avant-garde art movements of the nineteenth century were a response to not just chemical photography but the optical realism of academic painting. For optical realism can create sizeable sentimental kitsch and other photoshopped fantasies. The same problems can be seen in current murals and nineteenth-century academic paintings; both are full of meaningless details in perfect focus.

You can touch the bottom down the shallow end of the culture pool, where kitsch and other schmaltz swim. There is no depth, no ambiguity; everything is effortlessly recognisable, as easy to interpret and to touch emotions as the kitten photographs that dominate the internet. The content of the mural is more important than the image-making technique.

However, the content of most murals is either propaganda or advertising. Very rarely are they allowed to be just art. Propaganda is sometimes called educational or historical, but presenting only a positive view is neither an education nor a history. They are all about sentimental images with the correct message.

Is it just kitsch and geegaw? Consider the many murals around Melbourne of birds and native animals. Is it appropriate to decorate inner city walls with images of animals who can no longer live there? Is this massive greenwashing for a population that has consistently voted for more coal mines, cars and logging?

There are other reasons besides improvements in optical technology for the increase in murals. For example, council awareness of cheap, urban renewal projects using ugly walls. But many of these existed before the current digital technology. It wasn’t that Geoff Hogg or Harold Freedman in the 1970s or Megan Evans in the 1980s weren’t as good as contemporary artists in Melbourne, but the available technology did not support them. Gridding up a wall to enlarge a drawing takes much more time. A slide projector is far more difficult and time-consuming to create images, adjust, set up, and supply power than the current technology. Not that some artists, like Keith Haring or Ash Keating, even need to use optical technology or a gridded wall.

Before I could post this, I needed some photographs to illustrate it. I didn’t have any of the current photorealistic style of murals, so I took a very short bicycle ride to the Coburg Dental Group, but because the style is so prevalent, I encountered a couple of more examples before I got there.

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