on my way to vilnius to talk about this in the series “New Realism in Contemporary Art”:
Adopting a semiotic model, one could differentiate between three regimes of realism.
Firstly a realism of the signified (predominant in 19th century literature and art),
trying to depict reality, understand it and thereby also change it; secondly a
realism of the signifier, implying a (lacanian or traumatic) ‘real’ that always
remains inaccessible and can only be approached via the most rigid procedures of
abstraction (like seen in much of 20th century art); finally, today, what’s at stake
could be called a realism of reference.
Even without being able to firmly define such a realist approach, one can still make
some distinctions and pose relevant questions: what if only speculation grants
access to reality? Are there any alternatives to the ‘perceptual and psychological’
which David Joselit described as the two sole modes of connecting work of art and
person in the last decades? Is it possible to get rid of aesthetics and its
hyper-correlationism?
(http://www.spekulative-poetik.de/termin-kalender.html)