Realism Today?

While much attention has been paid in recent years to philosophical realism—especially to speculative realism—and its implications for contemporary art, this roundtable purposefully aims to broaden the discussion to account for more “traditional” and art historical forms and modes of realism, which one can still find at the centers and margins of contemporary artistic and aesthetic debates. Without necessarily favoring or promoting any particular direction—be it mimetic, figurative, social or socialist, critical, or speculative—we are inquiring whether today the renewed interest in various modes of realism is simply another postmodern citation of what the Russian Formalists would have called an “automatized” and outdated historical device, or if it is an indication of the potential for a radical transformation of realism that is taking place at the crossroads of progressive art, culture, technology, and critical theory. We invited our respondents to reflect upon both the history and the present of realism, asking how its various revivals might be regarded as part of a long trajectory of “Western” art and aesthetics, and how such revivals might be triggered by discourses outside of contemporary art. If a new aesthetics of realism were possible, how would it differ from its multiple historical antecedents? Is realism in its various modes an obsolete artistic form or style of the past (like baroque painting or modernist collage) that as such is incompatible with the modes of production and the augmented social reality of late capitalism

Transition in Post-soviet Art: "Collective Actions" before and after 1989

<p>For more than three decades the Moscow-based conceptual artist group "Collective Actions" has been organizing actions. Each action, typically taking place at the outskirts of Moscow, is regarded as a trigger for a series of intellectual activities, such as analysis, interpretation, narration, and description. The artists have systematically recorded and transcribed these activities, collecting and assembling texts, diagrams, and photographs in a ten-volume publication entitled "Journeys Outside the City." Five volumes of this publication concern the activities of the group before, and five after, 1989. Over the years the "Journeys Outside the City" became an idiosyncratic, self-sufficient aesthetic discourse arrayed along a constellation of concepts developed by those engaged in "Collective Actions." In its elusive hermeticism and self-referentiality the aesthetic framework constructed by these artists formed a closed system, gathering bundles of signs that seldom referred to anything concrete outside the horizon of Moscow Conceptualism. It is in this regard that the early volumes of the "Journeys Outside the City" can be compared to the similarly closed ideological discourse of the Soviet Politburo. After 1989, however, with the transition from socialism to capitalism, the aesthetic and artistic language of this group began to change as its text-based self-sufficient system began to open up under pressure from new socioeconomic conditions introduced by the processes of democratization and liberalization. </p><p> My dissertation "Transition in Post-Soviet Art: `Collective Actions' Before and After 1989" is neither a history of nor a monographical work on "Collective Actions," but rather an analytical exploration of aesthetic, artistic and institutional changes that have transpired in the "Journeys Outside the City" during the transition from socialism to capitalism. As the artists migrated from one art historical category into another (from the status of "unofficial artists" to that of "contemporary artists"), their aesthetics and art revealed a series of stylistic, technical, formal, textual, and aesthetical transformations and metamorphoses that paralleled broader cultural conversions taking place in post-Soviet and Eastern European art during the transition to capitalism.</p>Dissertatio

The 1990s -Jayce Salloum : There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments]

"Jayce Salloum’s installation كان يا ما كان There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments] is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the 1990s. The photographs, newspaper clips, scholarly and other texts, books, postcards, Polaroid shots, and videos – which Salloum, a Canadian-born artist of Lebanese parentage, collected, made, or recorded during his time in the Middle East in the late 1980s and early 1990s – compose one large document, which we consider here as a record of the 1990s." -- Publisher's website

Body and the East : From the 1960s to the Present

This catalogue for an exhibition focusing on body art from Eastern Europe since the 1960s features essays on eighty artists from fourteen countries. The artists are organized by country, and an essay on the historical and cultural context of each country introduces them. The book highlights artistic expression in opposition to political repression. Includes brief bio-bibliographies for each artist. Bibliography 1 p.; 78 bibl. ref

An Open Interview and Lunch : Fuse Magazine - 16 Beaver Group

This unbound document contains the results of an unconventional conference in which at least 87 identified artists/writers participated from different locations. A series of questions and answers pertaining to collaborative work, artist’s organisations, possible models for the future, and the relationship between art/politics are presented