Back to reality: truth, lies and extra-moral considerations in the work of Sophie Calle and Sharon Lockhart

This paper investigates the work of Sophie Calle and Sharon Lockhart in order to test out out two influential models of realism in current critical writing on art: the psychoanalytical and para-ethnographic framing of realism proposed by Hal Foster in the book The Return of the Real, and Nicolas Bourriaud's more recent formulations concerning 'operational realism' in  Relational Aesthetics (and other texts). The paper examines key issues raised by these writers — and the vexed question of the relation between these critical models and their 'objects', the role they assign to the works of art under consideration — alongside analysis of works such as Calle's Gotham City Notebook (largely actualised on a New York City sidewalk) and Lockhart's photographic and film-work coming out of (ostensibly) 'ethnographic' expeditions made to parts of Brazil. How have models of contemporary realism inflected the way we see Calle and Lockhart? In what ways do both these artists, associated primarily but not purely with photography, mobilise or valorise the real in their work? I argue that while Calle is invoked by Bourriaud to model the idea of operational realism, and Lockhart's recent work, for reasons that certainly carry weight, has been linked to Foster's arguments relating to a newly critical 'ethnographic' realism, on closer analysis both these artists' artworks may be said to betray the critical models they are supposed to exemplify — and perhaps to betray the limitations of these models, in particular their inattention to considerations of singularity, play and illusion in the functioning of artworks. Calle and Lockhart alert us to a more sophisticated realism—one predicated not on a nostalgia for truth-content or a fetishisation of actuality, but on a recognition of the ways in which reality and artifice, sociability and solitude, physicality and virtuality, complicate and inflect one another in the experience of works of art.