Hal Foster, Finzioni reali, 2024

‘Real Fictions‘ is a critical reflection that explores the complex relationship between reality, art and representation. Through a detailed and engaging analysis, Hal Foster takes us on an intellectual journey that examines the metamorphosis of critical and artistic thought from late modernity to the present day.

Foster moves his investigation from the work of German artist Thomas Demand. In his works, Demand introduces a ‘blurring’ to activate the real: barely perceptible details strike the viewer’s gaze, activating memories and feelings rooted in collective and individual memory. It is precisely from this blur that Foster identifies an emergent approach, reflecting a practice in which artifice is used not to mystify the real, but to “produce an interruption, a crack or a distance, that allows a glimpse of a hidden reality”.

Foster finds traces of this approach in the work of recent artists such as Tacita Dean, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen, who use artifice to rehabilitate the documentary medium as an effective critical system. The resulting representation captures and communicates aspects of reality precisely through ambiguity and artifice: “The lie described my life better than the truth […]. These statements are not Oscar Wilde-like aphorisms reveling in paradoxes and defending style, but are rather proposals on how artifice, the utopian splendour of fiction, can be put at the service of the real’.