Art'S Realism in the Post-Truth Era: (Refractions)

Arguing for the necessity of taking art's contribution to contemporary realism seriously, this edited collection intervenes in contemporary debates about realism by demonstrating that the arts do not simply illustrate philosophical theories. The significance of art's realism in times characterised by the normalisation of fake, manipulated and distorted representations of reality can only be fully understood by attending to the ways that the arts mediate, visualise and even shape reality. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, the authors interrogate realism across media, from sound art, film, literature, and painting to video installation and scientific imaging.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Mediating Reality: Art’s Riposte to the Post-Truth Era - Maryse Ouellet and Amanda Boetzkes Part I. Typologies of Realism Chapter 1. Novel Realism as Speculative Verisimilitude in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Fiction - Monika Kaup Chapter 2. Cavell’s Realism. Toward a Theory of the Type - Markus Klammer Chapter 3. ‘Real Life Was the Better Director’: Arnheim, Chaplin and the Productive Limits of Satire - Ian Verstegen Chapter 4. The Real Sound of Music - Jocelyn Benoist Part II. Realist Intimacies Chapter 5. The Instant of Death, Site of the Real? The Thanatological Realism of Caravaggio - Itay Sapir Chapter 6. Carried by Currents: Intimate Beings Between First and Second Nature - Jeff Diamanti Chapter 7. Sounding the World: Three Perspectives on Sound Art and Realism - Pauline Nadrigny Part III. Remediations of the Real Chapter 8. Reoriginations of Realism in Contemporary Inuit Art - Amanda Boetzkes Chapter 9. Pattern Recognition: Art and Forms of Visualisation in Particle Physics - Jens Schröter Chapter 10. The Shape of the Blind Spot: Making the Frame of Reality - Dagmara Genda Chapter 11. Revealing Through Opacity, or How to Expose Truth in the Post-Truth Era - Maryse Ouellet

About the Author :
Maryse Ouellet is Research Associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Bonn. Her publications include: 'A Realist Aesthetic of the Sublime: Art, Environment and the Cultural Logic of the Anthropocene' in Liquidity, Flows, Circulation: The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization (Diaphanes, 2022); ‘Within Aesthetic Distance: Artistic Critique, From Activism to Eco-Realism’ (Konsthistorisk tidskrift, vol. 89, no.2, 2020); and ‘Par-delà le naturalisme: médiatisation du sublime dans les oeuvres d’Olafur Eliasson et Ryoji Ikeda’ (RACAR, vol. 41, no 2, 2016). Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), as well as coeditor of of Artworks for Jellyfish and Other Others (Noxious Sector Press, 2022) and Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). She has published in the journals Afterimage; South Atlantic Quarterly; Postmodern Culture; Art History; E-flux; Polygraph; and Antennae: The Journal of Nature and Visual Culture among others. Recent book chapters appear in Grey on Grey: Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics Since the 1960s (Duke University Press, 2021), Climate Realism (Routledge, 2021); Gray on Gray: At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), The Edinburgh Companion for Animal Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); and Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015).

Review :
Art’s Realism in the Post-Truth Era insists on art’s power to recapture the political and agentic potential of realism.　 Rather than promote realism as a mode of representing reality, the authors compellingly position art at the vanguard for realism’s potential to mediate new relationships to what reality conceals.