Preface: essays in honour of Alex Potts
Introduction: realism then and now - Andrew Hemingway
PART I: THEORY
1 The transactions of detail - Briony Fer
2 Realism’s credibility problem - Joshua Shannon
PART II: SCULPTURE
3 Attending to the veristic sculptural portrait in the eighteenth century - Malcolm Baker
4 Elasticity and sculptural form - Caroline Arscott
5 A portrait of the artist as a dead man - Jon Wood
6 Death metal - Anne M. Wagner
PART III: LANDSCAPE DESIGN
7 Recurrent dialogues in the history of Chinese and English garden design - Martin J. Powers
8 Traditional views: conservative anti-naturalism and landscape aesthetics in France around 1900 - Neil McWilliam
PART IV: PAINTING, PHOTOGRAPHY AND MAKING STRANGE
9 Willem Kalf on Reflexykonst: the aesthetics of transformation in still life - Celeste Brusati
10 Democratic light: phenomenology and the worldliness of painting - Brendan Prendeville
11 Body and soul in the work of Thomas Eakins and F. Holland Day - Rebecca Zurier
12 From Menzel to Burtynsky: episodes from an imagery of capitalism - T. J. Clark
PART V: PHOTOGRAPHY AND CINEMA
13 Constance Stuart’s war: women and documentary’s excess - Tamar Garb
14 Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966): photography and film - Lisa Tickner
15 ‘Dirty realism’: documentary photography in 1970s Britain – a maquette - Steve Edwards
PART VI: POST-MEDIA/CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES
16 The roots of Mike Kelley’s Realism: subterranean homesick blues - Thomas Crow
17 The moment of guerrilla art - Alistair Rider
18 Every day, something happens to us: realism at the crossroads - Gail Day
Coda: on Margate Sands… - Adrian Rifkin
Index

Art as worldmaking is both a tribute to the distinguished art historian Alex Potts and a searching response to his important work on realism as a critical aesthetic, most notably the 2013 book Experiments in modern realism.

The collection comprises twenty original essays by leading scholars in the field, written from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives. They test Potts’s recasting of realism, developed primarily through interpretations of European and American postwar art, against art produced in different media, places and periods, from eighth-century Chinese gardens to twenty-first-century video work by the Russian collective Radek Community. Individual chapters offer novel readings of classic instances of pictorial realism by Menzel and Eakins, and reconsider the question of nineteenth-century realism’s historical antecedents. Overall, though, the volume has a contemporary orientation, in that it is concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm.

Featuring contributions from T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Lisa Tickner and Anne M. Wagner, along with other established and emerging scholars, Art as worldmaking is a bold contribution to a central question in art theory and history. It is compelling reading for anyone concerned with art’s truth value, or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.