#which is a huge contributing factor to why she's canon. just from a narrative perspective...

[my-current-obsession]

To be fair, the whole, “I’ll come back to you even if you don’t promise to wait,” is a line pulled directly from OG FFVII. It’s mentioned late game by Cid (who hilariously went to see a showing of loveless in Midgar but fell asleep then woke up just in time to view this ending scene 😂). But if you wanna deep dive on the meaning of this line, it’s worth noting that a version of the line is used in FFVIII in reference to the main ship of that installment — Rinoa and Squall — who also happen to be another mage/swordsman pair. And if you wanna go big brain square enix energy, there’s also the famous, “I’ll come back to you; I promise…I know you will,” between Sora and Kairi in Kingdom Hearts when he goes off on another journey while she awaits his return. If you go down those rabbit holes, it seems square really has a type for their main pairs, no?

I don't remember that line in OG FF7, but it's been years since I played it so I'll take your word for it. But you're right that similar lines/sentiments pop up frequently in other FF and KH games, so yeah, Square has a type. I still think the conversation between Cloud and Aerith in KH2 is the quickest and easiest parallel to make here though, considering the same pair can have basically the same interaction, in an entirely different game. Yes, Cloud could also have this conversation in the play with T or Y. But only Aerith's would have the added depth of being a potential callback/reference to another moment the pair shared.

And considering this game liked to callback to several moments between Cloud and Aerith in the previous game (him remembering their first meeting being what snaps him out of Sephiroth's control, the "will you be okay getting back", "if I said I wasn't" in the ending...) I think it's totally reasonable to assume that Square might have subtly referenced at least one Clerith moment from outside the compilation.

[porcileorg]

Why Unrealism Now? – On the book ‘Unrealism: New Figurative Painting’

Author: The Bensplainer – Munich, February, 2020.

Book details: Introduction by Jeffrey Deitch; Contribution by Alison Gingeras and Aria Dean and Johanna Fateman; Featuring artists Nina Chanel Abney, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Sascha Braunig, Jordan Casteel, Mathew Cerletty, Eliza Douglas, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Janiva Ellis, Jana Euler, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Cheyenne Julien, Sanya Kantarovsky, Ella Kruglanskaya, Austin Lee, Tala Madani, Sam McKinniss, Ebecho Muslimova, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Jennifer Packer, Nicolas Party, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sherald, Avery Singer, Emily Mae Smith, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published by Rizzoli Electa, New York, 2019.

‘Unrealism: New Figurative Painting’—edited by Jeffrey Deitch for Rizzoli New York—has just been released in October 2019. It is a huge volume featuring the work of 26 international artists and deals with the general notion of the ‘figurative’ in contemporary painting.

As a survey, ‘Unrealism: New Figurative Painting’ is a courageous enterprise. At the beginning of the 20th century, the so-called ‘avant garde’ proposed a fundamental turning point in European visual culture, shifting the pictorial concept from imitation to transformation. Since then, a long tradition of modernist art writing has more or less privileged an abstract and superficially formalist canon in criticism and art history. Of course, this does not mean that all artists in the last century have worked in this way - or even within their own practice. Modernist writing on art was—and maybe still is, to borrow from Lyotard—its own ‘grand narrative,’ which frankly can become overkill.

Deitch’s Take on New Figurative Painting

The historical fact⁠ that ‘figurative painting’ continued to exist and be relevant even after the avant-garde break with representation⁠ is often recognized in Deitch’s and Alison M. Gingeras's essays. This is obviously a good starting point. Artistic practice should be here the case study. Deitch presents a visual essay about a ‘counter-history of figuration’ in the 20th-21st century, which features most of the usual suspects. So, yes, there is Francis Picabia and his very weird paintings after Dada; Giorgio De Chirico, who never gave a shit and always did what he wanted; and the German masters of New Objectivity as well as Balthus. I must add however (and sorry for bensplaining) that both of the authors seem to have forgotten the most obvious example of ‘contradiction in the modernist canon.’ This would be, of course, Kazimir Malevich, the discoverer of the ‘Black Square’ (1915), who is also responsible for the still mysterious and indefinable post-1927 parodying figurative painting. At least a few women artists get a mention, some of them key figures in the development of figuration, such as Florine Stettheimer, Tarsila do Amaral and pre-WWII Frida Kahlo, but the list, of course, is longer and tries indeed to cover the whole century with a non-gender biased approach. It's all good and we all agree with the spirit of the enterprise.

However, there are still concerns about the narrative that is put forward by the authors rather than the individual artistic practices that they discuss. For instance, Deitch's introductory essay on contemporary ‘Unrealism’ deals with some heated issues. He affirms that figurative painting is now “back in the vanguard.” My first question would be: figuration is back because of what? The artists featured in ‘Unrealism’ are all celebrities working with internationally recognized and powerful institutions and galleries. Is figuration back because of the market that establishes what is the vanguard, or is it merely fashionable at this very moment? Or what else?

Deitch offers the following as explanation:

First of all, as we are all living in a ‘post truth’ epoch, artists deal with the ‘unreal,’ thus the label: ‘Unrealism.’

If I may speak figuratively - ha!

As is common in today's art jargon, Deitch's contextualization is sociologically determined. He lists: the loss of hierarchies; borrowing from low brow or vernacular culture; hybridization; post truth politics; heteroformity; and finally, the pervasive use of social media. But aside perhaps from social media, haven’t most of these factors been in play since the beginning of modernism? Hasn't “vernacular” culture already played a fundamental role in the most heroic phase of modernist narrative, this damned avant-garde? Technology has changed of course⁠—but the artistic approach to technology has always been more skeptical than enthusiastic. An artist does whatever he or she wants with technology, this action/potential reveals an exchange of interests, an ‘indirect interaction of objects,’ as Graham Harman would put it.

The book's reasoning is still biased I think, by the old-fashioned art historical idea of ‘influence.’ An influence in itself doesn't really exist, unless one insists on a formalist-psychological approach à la Harold Bloom. But influence still seems to be appealing as the lazy option. Especially as it fits the capitalist narrative of the ‘new’ and is thus easily absorbed by the market. So is ‘influence’ really at stake here? All the essays included in ‘Unrealism’ insist on the idea that figurative painting today refers to, or is influenced by, a disconnected canon. Are we still insisting on an old-fashioned art historical approach?

Gingeras’ Take on Wrongness and Black Sheeps

Gingeras' essay has an art historical approach that is more refined, even if it concentrates on sociological issues to focus on the notion of ‘wrongness,’ that is, on being eccentric and not of your own time, to the point of being blatantly misunderstood or even censored. Her case studies are: William N. Copley (CPLY), Bjarne Melgaard, and the feminist pleiad of ‘black sheep,’ Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins, Evelyne Axell, and Christine Ramberg. It’s all very interesting from the art historical point of view, but not really from the theoretical one.

Fateman’s Feminist Take

Perhaps not by coincidence, the more interesting essays are the ones by artists/writers, even though these also insist on a sociological point of view. The very well written—finally!—essay by Johanna Fateman begins with a fascinating theory by LeRoy McDermott, who claims that the Venus of Willendorf is not a synthetic view of prehistoric female body, but rather is a depiction by an ur-female artist of her own body seen from her actual perspective. I love this interpretation! But then, Fateman starts another grand discourse about patriarchy, gender, and white male perspective in relation to the artists of her choice. These issues could well play a role in art practice, no one would disagree. Yet it leaves one with the question: why are the paintings that Fateman picks so relevant now? Because of the issues they address? Fateman quotes artist Christina Quarles: “If you're using a medium or a language that has existed before you, people who identify similarly to you,” can “totally change what it looks like and how it's received by people.” That's right and it gets to the point—a point already mentioned by Ortega y Gasset in 1925: figurative painting is not ‘dehumanized,’ i.e. it is not detached from speaking to actual people. And again a quote by Tschabalala Self: “My work does not comment on stereotypes and generalizations about the Black female body, […] my practice absorbs these fantasies.” Again, a powerful statement, but what artists-critics hear, as Fateman does in a Schillerian way, is—yeah, what your practice really addresses are the sociological questions of race, gender, class and sexuality. How could the artists' words be so misinterpreted?

Dean’s Take on Polarity Real-Virtual

Aria Dean's essay takes a more challenging and formal approach, i.e. investigating the interactive relation between painting and internet visual culture as a means of defining them both. She asks a very fundamental question: “What does representational, figurative painting ‘do’ in a world that is so aggressively structured by the Internet—more specifically, in a world characterized by widespread image circulation paired with an accelerated fragmentation of a cohesive public and subsequent fragmentation of a shared reality?” Explicitly borrowing from Brian Massumi, Dean doesn't see reality and virtuality as a duality, rather a polar play between the ‘sensuous’ and the ‘nonsensuous,’ i.e. if I do not misunderstand, the analog and the digital. But she doesn't really follow through this powerful statement and prefers to finish her essay with some psychological jargon about Caravaggio and Narcissus.

Impressions, in random order

(1) So many words are used for contextualizing a painting, because there is no need anymore today to find the specific words appropriate to a particular painting;

(2) everything is hyper-ideologized, as long as the artists themselves do a visual essay on ‘something else,’ shifting from narrative to personal narrative;

(3) this whole need to ‘explain’ the reasons behind a painting makes me think if this is also an inherent vice of contemporary efficiency. A painting as a refinished product, ready to be exchanged;

(4) I mean, obviously in figurative painting the subject matter—‘that’ reason behind the painting—plays a more prominent role than in abstract painting, but does it really?

(5) the poor state of criticism: even Aria Dean failed to address the consequences of her own words!

The ‘bensplaining’ impression:

Maurice Denis’s words still resound strongly: “Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.“ Which is relevant for all painting.