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After Critical Realism

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Published Nov 2026

Fiona Allen, Simon Constantine, and Luisa Lorenza Corna

Volume Editors: Fiona Allen, Simon Constantine, and Luisa Lorenza Corna
Borrowed from the critic Georg Lukács, the term critical realism first came to prominence in the artworld during the early 2000s with the emergence of the documentary and social turns. Although many of the political and aesthetic commitments that characterised this moment continue to shape contemporary forms of realism, today, many of these practices have become increasingly journalistic or evidence-based. Bringing together new essays from an international group of scholars, After Critical Realism offers a reassessment of the aims and stakes of critical realism, whilst also examining the new wave of challenges that have begun to plague the field, from the emergence of a post-truth media climate to the professionalisation of research-based art. The outcome is an account of critical realism as a crucial, yet ultimately unstable term for Marxist art history.

Biographical Note

Fiona Allen is Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Her research has been published in various journals and edited collections, including Selva, Oxford Art Journal and Southeast of Now.

Simon Constantine is Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds and Editor of Philosophy of Photography. His writings on street and documentary photography have been published in the Oxford Art Journal, Arts and The Burlington Magazine, among others.

Luisa Lorenza Corna is Lecturer at UWE Bristol. Her research has been published in various journals and edited collections, including Selva, Oxford Art Journal and Radical Philosophy. She is a regular contributor to Art Monthly.

Readership

After Critical Realism will be of interest to academics, artists and students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, working in Art History, Critical Theory and Film Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Figures vii
1 Introduction: After Critical Realism 1
Fiona Allen, Simon Constantine and Luisa Lorenza Corna
part 1
Variations of Realism
2 Realism Critical Social 29
Alex Potts
3 Enemy Painting in the Trump Years: Or, Nicole Eisenman’s History 54
Daniel Spaulding
part 2
Documentary’s Afterlives
4 Reverberations for Realism: Feminist Documentary Strategies in British
Film and Video Art, 1979–1992 83
Amy Charlesworth
5 Mishka Henner’s Paranoid Realism 117
Ben Burbridge
6 Allan Sekula’s Critical Realism Today 139
Andrew Fisher
part 3
Combined and Uneven Realisms
7 Critical Irrealism in Contemporary Cinema: Peripheral Visions of the
Capitalist World-System 169
Alex Fletcher

8 Reverse Shots and Acoustic Ecologies: Marwa Arsanios’s and Nida
Sinnokrot’s ‘Fighting Realism’ 198
Elisa Adami
9 Oblique Logic / Oblique Labour: Huillet and Straub, Europe,
Punctuation 231
Nicolas Helm-Grovas
Index 269