The return of the real – years ago that was the programmatic promise of a new, reality-oriented art. However critical of context and institutions art had tried to seem in the past, political upheavals and social changes had led to an even more urgent push toward the outside, toward grappling with real, palpable conditions. By that time television and the new media were beginning to tirelessly come to grips with the promise held out by reality, and artistic approaches could not avoid likewise reflecting on realistic and documentary qualities.
Is this then Reality Art? Analogous to the mass media field, a general renewal of interest in the commodity »reality« can be discovered in today's artworks as well. This is particularly evident in the reawakening of a wide range of ethnographic and downright journalistic approaches. These can be traced through diverse exhibition and display forms – irrespective of their cultural location – although they do not try to compete with other media systems. Whether classic documentary film, information services or broadcast formats – the recent documentary approach in art reflexively conforms to the inherent laws of each respective channel, while the works nonetheless insistently proclaim their own logic and specifics.
springerin 3/2003 pursues the promise of this Neo-Realism and Documentarism. The articles look at the expectations projected onto these developments as well as the recurring ambition to finally catch up with social realities and to create continuities with the world outside. The fact that this attempt is still often marked by misunderstandings and geographically and culturally influenced differences in meaning – by polyvalencies in the real itself that always remain just out of reach – is voiced unmistakably in the essays and interviews in this edition. In addition, the authors also delve into the numerous blind spots that are often left untouched in popular references to reality