Postmodernism has become a catch-all for a whole host of going beyonds in art and politics, suggesting a rupture with the critical culture of modernism, realism and Marxism. This volume suggests that these would-be breaks are spurious and that in the visual arts modernism and realism cannot be so easily dismissed. The author does not deny that decisive political and cultural changes have affected the visual arts over the last 20 years, or that postmodernism might be usefully employed to describe these changes. Rather, by looking at the legacy of Voloshinov, Trotsky, Benjamin and Adorno, he argues that any claims to the explanatory power of postmodernism can only be understood in the light of the still determining power of many of the aims and concerns of the modernist and realist projects. Addressing the work of a number of contemporary artists, including Terry Atkinson, Art & Language, Susan Hiller and Rasheed Araeen, as well as general topics such as painting and sexual difference and visual culture under Thatcherism, the author offers a Marxist defence and analysis of postmodernism as an extension of the critical imperatives of art in the West today.