Art's Realism in the Post-Truth Era - (Refractions) by Maryse Ouellet & Amanda Boetzkes (Hardcover)

About the Book

An edited collection intervening on comptemporary debates about realism, arguing for the signifcance of art's realism in times characterised by the normalisation of fake, manipulated and distorted representations of reality.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

How does art transform our understanding of realism in the post-truth era? Arguing for the necessity of taking art's contribution to contemporary realism seriously, this edited collection intervenes on 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. Each chapter features a different approach to realism and its aesthetic dimensions not only in the visual arts, but also in sound art, film, scientific imaging and literature. Maryse Ouellet is Research Associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Bonn. Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph.

Review Quotes

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.--Jennifer Friedlander, Pomona College, USA

About the Author

Maryse Ouellet is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Bonn. Her publications include: 'Redefining the Sublime in the Anthropocene: From a Postmodern to a Realist Aesthetics in Contemporary Art' 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).