REVIEW: Tim's Vermeer (2013, Dir. Teller)

In Grade 2, I drew a picture of Mickey Mouse that had my classmates convinced I was the school's greatest artist. It didn't matter that I copied the picture. Copying was within the scope of excellence in primary school art. All that mattered is that I didn't trace it. Somehow tracing stepped over the line. Tracing was cheating. So I took the glory. Inside I felt like a fake but I took it. That's not to say there weren't allegations of tracing. There were, and they hurt.

Even at that young age we understand, either instinctually or through conditioning, that there are limits of artistic creativity. Cheating in art is inexcusable. So it is no surprise that when artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco put it out there that some of art's most celebrated practitioners were cheaters, there were a lot of art historians and artists lining their arses up to take a big dump on the proverbial fan. Cheater is a strong word. Hockney and Falco were merely theorising that celebrated Western artists since the Renaissance had been using optical technologies styled on the camera obscura (or more correctly a camera lucida) to produce their pre-photo photo realistic art. The problem is they had no documented evidence beyond the art itself.

Enter Tim Jenison, tech engineer, computer animator, inventor and self-confessed non-artist, who has an obsessive fascination for everyone's favourite 16th Century Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer. Captivated by the Hockney-Falco theory and similar theorists who'd followed in their wake, Tim fixates on Vermeer's process to the point that he decides that he'll pick up a paintbrush and attempt it himself. He engineers (as engineers do) a rig of mirrors and lenses, reconstructs Vermeer's 'The Music Lesson' and gets to work.

As luck would have it, Tim is best friends with moderately prominent bullshit-caller Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller fame, so he gets to document his fastidious journey into forensic art recreation from day one. Artistic fakery, jiggery pokery and academic controversy put Penn (who fronts) and Teller (who directs) in their sweet spot and Tim's Vermeer certainly carries the tone of their usual television exposés, yet it shouldn't be dismissed on that count. The inclusion of Hockney, one of Britain's most influential artists, and Professor Philip Steadman, author of 'Vermeer’s Camera', gives some semblance of academic gravitas to the whole investigation and it ensures it is repeatedly astounding.

But it is not the theorising that intrigues here. Tim's process is the fascination. He is an unapologetically artless soul, one look at his back-mounted rollerblade fan is proof of that. He is not setting out to paint a Vermeer, he is setting out to investigate how Vermeer could paint a Vermeer. Tim is an engineer and he approaches art with a problem-solver's mind. How could Vermeer capture light as if it has been snared by a high definition video camera?

Watching the evolution of Tim's solution, the lengths he will go (and the money he will spend) to put his ideas into practice, and the remarkable substantiating evidence he manages to accrue in going through the re-creation is convincing in and of itself. Hockney puts it more succinctly when he says, Tim's Vermeer, that is, his version of 'The Music Room', is an evidential document all on its own. If that is the case, Tim's Vermeer, the film, is an exhaustive and suitably worthwhile set of explanatory notes.

Contrary to much of the controversy that has surrounded the theories of Hockney, Falco, Steadman and our Tim (and which raged around this film even before its release), Teller et al don't set out to convince that Vermeer is any less of a master because of the posited process. If anything, they revere Vermeer, and like any fanboys they just want to understand more about him. Unfortunately, in doing so, they tap the the "art-cheat" nerve and incite critical backlash, not unlike my primary school detractors. Many would like art and artistic inspiration to reside in the enigmatic, as if the ability to create can only be bestowed upon artists by divine touch. Tim wouldn't necessarily disagree, he is up front about Vermeer's soulful genius, his stirring compositions and his deft humanity; he just wants to give our view of the artist a pragmatist's consideration. Adore his art by all means but don't forget to marvel at his technological ingenuity.

And so, thinking back to my Mickey Mouse and all that primary schooler artistic adulation, I wonder if perhaps we all had it wrong back then. Perhaps "cheating" in art, especially in this era of ready reproduction, shouldn't be seen as a reason to dismiss but as the resourceful use of another tool in the artistic arsenal. Perhaps I should have kept Mickey and put him above my mantlepiece, just as Tim did with his Vermeer, not as a work of art but as a proof of point. Q.E.D.

★★★☆

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