Hiding

Nothing defines postmodernism so well as its refusal of depth, its emphasis on appearance and spectacle, and its tendency to collapse a three-dimensional world in which image and reality are distinct into a two-dimensional world in which they merge. Our postmodern world is a world of surfaces and our postmodern condition one of profound superficiality. For Mark C. Taylor, the disappearance of depth we sense all around us is a change full of creative possibility. Taylor introduces us to a popular culture in which detectives - the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter - lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. He looks at the current preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. The limitless spread of computer networks, the history of phrenology, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas - all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation. Conceived and developed with designers Michael Rock and Susan Sellers, this work transgresses the boundary that customarily separates graphic design from the story within a text and embodies the very tendencies it analyzes.