Matters of Abstraction: Brechtian Realism, Contemporary Art, and the Critique of Capital

Abstract: This essay evaluates Bertolt Brecht's conception of realism and its resonances in contemporary visual art practice. I argue that in his poetological writings from the late 1920s and the 1930s, Brecht developed an understanding of social—as opposed to formal—abstraction, which crucially informed his notions of social reality and critical realism. This aspect of Brecht's thinking, which I link to both structuralist and value-critical accounts of Marxism, is emphasized in what could be called a realism of social abstraction in the current conjuncture of capital's crisis. Within this theoretical framework, I examine artworks with direct or indirect connections to Brecht's work. Stephen Willat's sociological diagrams, Andreas Siekmann's visualizations of global economic processes, Chto Delat's restaging of the Soviet avant-garde, as well as Blaise Kirschner and David Panos's filmic fiction of capitalist primitive accumulation are all premised on the idea that processes of abstraction shape the very materiality of contemporary life.