The Century of Baudrillard

Alison Jackson has a book out, Private. Here, in her own words, is what it's all about:

My aim is to explore the blurred boundaries between reality and the imaginary – the gap and confusion between the two. I recreate scenes of our greatest fears which we think are documentary but are fiction.

I use look-alikes of celebrities and public figures to create a seemingly real documentary scenario which is in fact a fiction. Likeness becomes real and fantasy touches on the believable. The viewer is suspended in disbelief. I try to highlight the psychological relationship between what we see and what we imagine. This is bound up in our need to look – our voyeurism – and our need to believe.

My work is about simulation. Creating a clone of a copy of the ‘real’ on paper. It is not a fake, it takes a place of the ‘real’ for a moment whilst looking at the image. As Baudrillard puts it, simulation is different from feigning. Feigning is pretending, such as, feigning illness or pretending to be ill. The subject is not ill, just seeming to be, but ‘simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. Since the simulator produces ‘true’ symptoms, is he ill or not. He cannot be treated objectively either as ill or not ill. ‘