Overview
This project examines artistic engagements with reality and concepts of reality against the backdrop of social processes of abstraction. It has become a commonplace in both popular and scientific discourse that our world that our world is less and less limited to the realm of the visible. Numerous phenomena accompanying the post-industrial capitalist dynamics of cultural production - financialization and global digital connectivity, but also cloud computing and information disorder - seem to confirm such intuitions. However, various Marxist and other social theories have shown that processes of abstraction have always been essential to the world as shaped by capitalism. They understand abstraction not so much as abstraction from material reality but rather as abstraction that is operative in material reality or indeed produces it: as social practices of real abstraction. If abstraction is constitutive of reality, this must have serious consequences for the notion of artistic realism. This observation is the point of departure of our project. We see its significance in redefining artistic realism by confronting the latter’s history with theoretical accounts of social abstractions. Although questions of realism are currently on the agenda of artistic practice, art historical research and philosophy, a systematic inquiry into realist approaches to social processes of abstraction remains a desideratum.
