“Artists who attempt to ‘deconstruct’ the image world — that is, to lay bare its power in regulating our thoughts and desires — have developed a series of strategies, particularly in film, video, and photography. Some have adopted an almost documentary approach, seeking to reintroduce the ‘referent,’ revealing the actual social relationships masked by signs and representations. Others have drawn narrative fragments — like commercials or prime-time soap operas — directly from the media and reorganized them into collages or montages meant to demonstrate the contradictions inherent in the image world: its two-faced status as the peddler of desire and the conduit of social regulation or control…”
