| This study responds to the recent reappearance of realism as a viable, even urgent, critical term in contemporary art. Whereas during the height of postmodern semiotic critique, realism was taboo and documentary could only be deconstructed, today both are surprisingly vital. Nevertheless, recent attempts to recover realism after poststructuralism remain fraught, bound up with older epistemological and metaphysical concepts. This study argues instead for a "critical realism" that is oriented towards problems of ethics, intersubjectivity, and human rights. Rather than conceiving of realism as "fit" or identity between representation and reality, it is treated here as an articulation of difference, otherness and non-identity. This new concept draws on the writings of curator Okwui Enwezor, as well as German critical theory, to analyze the work of three artists: Ian Wallace (b. 1943, Shoreham, UK), Jeff Wall (b. 1949, Vancouver, British Columbia), and Allan Sekula (b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles). Placing their art in a critical-realist framework not only offers an original perspective on three established artists whose practices have long been seen as mutually divergent, but connects their accomplishments to broader themes in modernist historiography, particularly anti-theatricality, commodification and utopian longing. |
