Wreck CFP 2025: "Realisms"

Wreck Call for Papers 2025: “Realisms”

In a world where reality is perceived very differently by different interest-groups, where there is a constant process of struggle against hegemonic definitions of what the world is like, ‘realism’ is always going to reverberate beyond some bare conception of ‘styles of art.’

—Paul Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars

Realist art might either corroborate or subvert the world it addresses. It may serve as a colonial strategy, as a method of subsuming cultural traditions under a domineering ideal. On the contrary, the politics of resemblance at the heart of realism can provide a mode of resistance by pointing out the injustice of one reality attempting to displace another. The present-day critic has ample proof that the term “reality” has become increasingly contested and seems to offer an unconvincing connection between sensing and knowing. We therefore ask: does “realism” have political legs to stand on? Can realism still be understood as a means of thinking past appearance, of critique beyond resemblance? Or does it entrench the dominant norms and values of the oppressive systems it depicts? Does realism solidify capitalist dogma or deride it as tentative and contingent? What does it offer and what does it take?

The dialectic between reality and representation, between image and fact, guides this issue of Wreck. We are interested in papers addressing the particular and peculiar vicissitudes of “realism,” whether as an artistic movement, a literary genre, or a political strategy.  All time periods, geographic areas, and mobilizations of the term will be considered, such as:

• Realism and the politics of the everyday: Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet, Émile Zola
• Roberto Rossellini and 20^th century cinematic Neo-Realism
• Abstraction: Kasimir Malevich’s Red Square, or Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions
• Single-point perspective: Its use and rejection in early modern colonial contexts
• Speculative realism and contemporary Indigenous art in the Americas
• Symbolic (un)likeness in portraiture: from Roman Verism to Cindy Sherman
• Reappropriating realist genres: still life and landscape in struggles against dispossession and alienation
• Reality redevised in the photoconceptualist tableaux
• The Lacanian “Real,” the psychoanalytic unconscious, and non-representable reality

Wreck is the graduate journal of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.The editors of Wreck share an apprehension about the ceaseless circulation of academic fashions and question the abandonment of valid ideas before they are fully realized. Submissions will be accepted in the form of abstracts on a rolling basis throughout the semester, with a hard deadline of March 14, 2025. Please send your submissions to ahvagraduatejournal@gmail.com.