Platonic Views

Recent Images by Christopher Newberry

According to Plato the real world is a shadow of the Ideal World. It is a copy.

Everything in the real world is an imperfect, pale imitation of its perfect counterpart in the Ideal World. This applies to everything. Beauty. Justice. Nature. Geometry: The straight line and the perfect circle. Also according to Plato, while the real world is an imitation of the Ideal World, art is an imitation of the Real World. It is the copy of a copy.

Art is a copy of a shadow.

The ancient Greeks, though they understood the concept of the straight line as the shortest distance between two points, had no means of actually making one. In the Greek world nothing was straight, smooth, circular, transparent. It wasn’t until 1864 that a French army officer by the name of Peaucellier devised a way to draw a perfect straight line. By perfect straight line, we mean that the line does not deviate by more than one millionth of a millimetre per metre. That’s a nanometre. Plato had no idea about nanometry or microscopy. In Plato's time, the straight line of the real world was a very pale imitation indeed of the ideal. And art as the imitation of the real world was even further away from the ideal. In Plato’s day they didn’t know how to shade a painting to give it volume, they didn’t know about the laws of perspective, they had a limited number of colours at their disposal.

If, as Plato says, the aim of art is to imitate the real world, then our contemporary techniques are very close to that goal. Photography, for example, directly picks up the light reflected by the real world – the same as our eyes -, and is therefore a very faithful rendition of the real world. Even in sculpture, where they excelled, the Greeks had no possible way of rendering reality as faithfully as we can today. What would Plato make of the modern real world and modern art? Would he consider our world to be closer to the Ideal World than his world was? Perhaps we are no closer to the ideals of Beauty, Justice and Nature, but surely he would be astounded by how close art is to reflecting the real world. Furthermore, if he saw our ability to produce the straight lines he only saw in his imagination, he would be astounded by how close our physical, man-made world is to his Ideal World. At this moment in time, seen through my contemporaneous eyes, art is very close to perfectly imitating the real world. That being true, I have chosen to skip a step. My photographic compositions are a copy, not of the real world, but of Plato’s Ideal World. It is a world of balance and symmetry where lines are straight, curves are smooth, circles are perfect and the grass actually is greener.

Christopher Newberry