Planetary Realism: Art Against End Times

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of ＂planetarity＂ to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old ＂realist＂ tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society’s divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see--and feel--the planet?

Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art’s power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists’ urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art’s necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and political thinker. She has written on art in the neoliberal context of creative cities (No Room to Move: Radical Art in the Regenerate City, 2010), and more recently on the function of autonomous art within contemporary biopower (Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry, Sternberg 2018). She is Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London and lectures at Goldsmiths College. She edited London-based cultural politics magazine Mute for over a decade.