ONE CAN DRAW, PAINT, SCULPT, or digitally illustrate what doesn't exist, but photo-based practices generally necessitate that someone or something be there to be photographed. To depict unreality—fantasies, fairy tales, religious stories, etc.—the photographic artist must resort to staging, manipulation, editing, or a combination of these. A photograph or film thus can unfold a fiction and simultaneously document the strange reality of acting, choreography, set work, cinematography, and all the other “real” activities that figure into generating a “reel” experience. In some cases, this

ON THE OCCASION OF HIS FIRST MAJOR SURVEY EXHIBITION, at LA MOCA, Gabriel Orozco told Benjamin Buchloh in a public dialogue that, as an artist, he works “in reality.” Identifying reality as his medium—as opposed to conventional practices such as sculpture and photography, both of which Orozco also deploys—is provocative. First, from an art-historical perspective, the equation between art and reality conjures up the tradition of the readymade initiated by Marcel Duchamp and transformed by postwar artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1959 famously declared: “Painting relates to