“Imagine art practices you can’t document with a camera because the artwork requires more visual ability than any camera can offer. You can’t upload the image to facebook because of the limitations of a computer screen. Some painters paint images that a camera can make: Good for them. Many of these artists can promote themselves and their art, make a living and provide stimulating visual media because of the flexibility of their chosen visual language.”

Real Perspective works with this kind of art: new, crazy, multimedia, exciting art that challenges the somewhat “disaffected” art scene with new concepts. Tony Curran, who runs the organisation, helped us with the Throw Shapes launch party and got us interested in what he does.

“It is a unique artistic and curatorial ideology,” says Tony. “It involves new and innovative methods and beliefs in describing the world around us through attempts to develop accessible media which fills the gaps of contemporary visual culture’s representation from a photographic perspective. There is no attack on photography from Real Perspective but there is a strong belief that photographic media is as distorted as any other visual medium. Unlike post-modern discourse, Real Perspective believes that culture can progress to find new and innovative ways to represent what it sees by questioning how it sees.”

Real Perspective’s show at our launch party (for you suckers who didn’t come) involved a multi-sensory input which produced a selection of images as output projected on to a wall. Sure, it didn’t quite go as planned but it still functions as a good example of what Real Perspective is all about. The gallery space, the methods of displaying work and the work all combine to become the artwork itself – a conglomerate of all parts of the art process that were previously seen as peripheral.

The artist and the artwork have often crossed over, as have the artwork and the audience. But for Real Perspective it’s the art space and the art curation that can now be part of the artwork as well. Which leaves not much as Not Art, but that’s OK. “What this means for the art world is a new direction for contemporary art which invigorates new gallery audiences without alienating them from the artistic process, substance, skill and reliability of the artworks integrity,” says Tony. “It does this because the only way to interact with the image is to interact with its physical presence.”

In a way, Real Perspective is hard to document. The very mediums that it shuns tend to be the only way it can be kept track of. But don’t take the blog at face value – the best way to get some Real Perspective is definitely by going to an art event that they are a part of.

Check out WATCH THIS SPACE – a “poly-venue artist run space” and keep your eye out for some Real Perspective shows. Who knows where, when, or what they might be – but we promise they’ll be interesting.

Posted by amelia in Art, Features

Tags: Art, real perspective, Tony Curran, Watch This Space