ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some strains in modern and contemporary scenographic practices. It begins with key precedents of the interwar avant-garde and the postwar period in order to set the stage for the expanded scenographic techniques of the immediate present. Throughout the chapter dwells on the enigmatic core of scenography in the visual arts: its ability to disorient and unground collectives of subjects by weaving bodies into a world of fantasy in which the realities of space, time, and history seem momentarily upstaged, as it were, by the new rules of a fantastical, scenographic realm. The practitioners – from Marcel Duchamp to Walid Raad – worked within the bewildering, and sometimes paranoiac, multiple life they saw conjured in scenography's hybrid spatial order: a life that made actors out of flesh and blood bodies, dreamlike gestures out of everyday movements.
