Realism and Perspective

To start off my blog, I am going to answer the following assigned questions.
In what way can approaches to and appreciation of realism in art have political implications?
What constitutes realism in a given historical, geographic, or natural context can be a charged politcal issue. Realist approaches have often been put forward as a direct means of politcal expression, sometimes to challenge the status quo of realist representation. The question for us is not which approach to realism has resulted in the most accurate representations of the world at any given time, but what do the different approaches to realism that we find in art and visual culture tell us about the culture and polotics of a given social context.
What is the realism represented in cubism?
Cubists were interested in creating not fantasy worlds but new ways of looking at the real. John Berger has written, "Cubism changed the nature of the relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing it expressed a new realtionship between man and reality." According to cubists, cubism is a way of depicting the restless and complicated process of human vision.
What does avant-garde mean and what are some examples given in the reading?
Avant-garde is a term imported from military strategy(in which indicated an expedtionary or scouting force that takes risks)into art history to describe movements at the forefront of artistic experimentation, leading the way toward major changes. Avant-garde is often associated with modernism and formal innovation and is frequently contrasted with mainstream or traditional art that is conventional rather than challenging. Examples from the reading include, 4.21. Thise stlyes that seem in the context of European American art to be particularly modern and forward looking were influenced by art traditions that had much longer histories of abstraction and that also has had long histories of defying or simply not observing the conventional codes of perspective.
How does perspective fit into the episteme of the Renaissance?
Each period of histry has a different episteme, that is a different way of ordering things or of organizing and representing knowledge about things. Perspective is a techinque of visualization that was popularized in Italy in the mid 15th century that is embelmatic of the Renaissance interest in the fusion of art and science. To use perspective to create a painting a painter would use a geometric procedure to project space onto a two-dimensional plane.