have been purposefully choreographed for the photographic cyclops. The famous photograph taken by Robert Capa, in which a (republican?) soldier collapses in a Spanish Civil War, can be connected to the photo of the autopsy of an extraterrestrial being found in the Nevada desert, as two products of creative and convincing minds. Hitler's or Pancho Villa's histrionic attitudes appear to have been the cause of monumental, and in some cases lamentable and unpleasantantiaesthetic-film montages. In a light box by Jeff Wall, Deod Troops Tolk (A Vision ofter on Ambush of o Red Army Potrol neor Moqor, Afghoniston, Winter 7986), 1992, various dead soldiers, mutilated and bloody, appear in a landscape which fills the entire visual field: there is no sky, the scene itself is everything. As in many of his other photographs, Wall constructed this image in a studio, with actors, make-up, production and direction, not in order to deceive us, but rather as a demonstration of an exsitu representative capacity in which the sublime and the complicitous go hand in hand with a hoax invented during the Renaissance. Certainly what is evidenced here is no trick: the cadavers chat while an Afghan boy robs them of their spoils. Wall's capacity for the super-production of one instant onto an exterior is also illustrated in the depiction of the landscape itself. In other images, more understated and intimate, a certain atmosphere is achieved through the simulation that a private space is being invaded. Arguments around the private and the public (a common art-world
pendulum) intersect, as well, with the propositions of some artists whose work has taken place outside the spaces of galleries or museums, as in the case of Robert Smithson or Vito Acconci. The institutions of art, however, are ubiquitous. As part of the activities comprising a systematic work, at the end of the seventies Vito Acconci informed various conceptual art colleagues of his actions, in this way revealing, through specific documentation, his private contingencies to a public he himself chose. We have access to these records through photographs, letters and texts: information. One of his 1969 works consisted in following one person on the street until he or she entered into a private realm (Following Piece). I imagine the person pursued by Acconci, who in turn was pursued by a photographer. I imagine, as well, Nacho L贸pez following a guy walking down the street with his arm around a mannequin, as if taking it out for a stroll. This type of constructed surrealist photo, the opposite of an oneiric automatism based in extravagant realities-which Breton promoted -forms a practice which has been ahistorically perpetuated by a significant number of photographers; this practice functions as a way to negate the spontaneous situation, in whose discovery the work would supposedly be located rather than in the photographic product itself. Like Nacho L贸pez, Michelangelo Pistoletto takes an object out for a stroll on the street: a popier-mach茅 225