Planetary Realism

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.1) Planetary Realism—An Introduction
2) Petrofaction, or How to Decarbonise the Imagination
3) Mending the Aesthetic Rift
4) Escape from Prison House Earth: Free Movement and the Marvelous
5) Afterword"Planetary Realism is a deeply necessary book to add to our toolkit of struggle against a corporate world intent on destroying our planet for nothing but profit. Berry’s book is a wake up call to artists and all those whose imaginations have not been destroyed by the consensensual silence surrounding the life or death issue of climate catastrophe. She dismantles the concept of art’s autonomy to describe how artists all over the world are becoming artworkers for Planet Earth."
—Peter Kennard, Emeritus Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art

"Through this superlative and vigorously argued version of a realism for today—meticulously attuned to planetary predicaments and the art and culture that inhabits them—Berry gives us means to map ways of being more hospitable, disobedient, migratory, alive, in the present."
—Matthew Fuller, co-author of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility and Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of TruthJosephine 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.