Hidden in Plain Sight

With the rise of electronic media and the theoretically infinite reproducibility of images, questions of the relationship between representation and reality are pertinent. This text considers such issues, investigating strategies of illusion in recent installation, video, and performance art.

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From antiquity to the present, art has engaged in teasing and testing our concepts of reality. Now, with the rise of electronic media and the theoretically infinite reproducibility and mutability of images, questions of the relationship between representation and reality loom larger than ever. "Hidden in Plain Sight" documents an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that investigates strategies of illusionism in recent superrealist, appropriation, installation, video, performance and immersive electronic-media artworks. These works, by 60 artists, transgress the boundaries between original and copy, present and past, abstraction and representation, illusion and reality. A CD-ROM, available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms, is included with every copy of the book, and presents interactive multimedia simulations of virtual reality artworks created especially for the exhibition.
In addition to Maurice Tuchman's introduction and Virginia Rutledge's discussion of the meanings of the virtual reality medium, essays by seven art historians and theorists explore the ramifications of contemporary art's interrogation of reality: Norman Bryson looks at the portrayal of the human face in its current artistic passages through gigantism and ghostliness; Martha Buskirk charts the course of art's recycling and subversion of traditional genre conventions and codes; Hal Foster identifies a "traumatic real" that illusionist and reproductive art simultaneously avoid and reveals; Boris Groys examines the loss of self inherent in the "replication realism" of handmade works that mime readymades; Lev Manovich discusses the aesthetics of realism in digital media; Margaret Morse explores the relation of the body and screen in projective and interactive art forms; and Richard Shiff shows how facture or "touch" can reinforce or resist illusionist space, with often paradoxical results.