At first sight, Phil Collins’ recent practice addresses a media landscape saturated with popular factual programming and the universal promise of celebrity status open to just about anybody. His works indulge in the representational structures of so-called ‘post-documentary’ culture that reality television has come to epitomize. Collins is interested in the confessional mode of TV exhibitionism and the way it erodes clear distinctions between public and private spheres. At the same time, he is fascinated by the fall-out from instant C-list gratification. What makes his practice so fascinating, however, are not these individual elements per se, but their excessive sum total. In Collins’ art none of these phenomena are ever simply objects of detached or academic critique. Rather, he utilises their very forms and test-runs formats and institutions, as well as audiences and participants, in an excessively involved crash investigation of contemporary media politics.

Collins’ new project, the UK episode of his ongoing the return of the real series, is a case in point. Invited by the Istanbul Biennale in 2005 to produce a work that would engage local audiences, Collins responded by hijacking the attention patterns, the format and the former participants of Turkish reality TV. He invited some of those who felt that their encounter with publicised intimacy and instant mass exposure had profoundly affected their lives, and organised for them a press conference in one of the city’s best hotels to engage the national media. Suspended between effective media realities and their art-institutional critique, his project created a secondary media space in which ex-participants were given a second chance of staging their life stories for camera and mass audience. Collins then hired the director of a Turkish extreme – makeover show to conduct a series of hour-long interviews with the subjects and commissioned a series of glamorous photographic portraits. Across its various component parts, the work generated a vast number of outcomes – from an accumulation of celebrity-style paraphernalia through a series of confessional documents, to the elaborate multi-channel video installation – and it is their complex interplay, perpetually questioning their own status, that makes Collins’ practice so elusive.

With his contribution to the Turner Prize 2006, Collins collapsed this doubling of production and display even further. In parallel to showing elements of the original Turkish material, he set up a fully functioning office in the gallery for the duration of the show. Consciously enacting the discrepancy between reality and its representations, shady lane productions, as the intervention was titled, fed off the media visibility of Collins’ nomination to provide access to yet another realm of reality TV experience and thus solicit more material for the next stage of the project. Separated by a glass window from the visiting public, the office effectively staged the mechanism of media spectacle as a vehicle for making new work.

The work also emphasised the strong performative aspect of much of Collins’ practice since works such as the 1998 performance eight hours is not a day. For three consecutive days, Collins occupied the premises of a former labour exchange in Belfast, performing pretend duties from 9am to 5pm, surrounded by friends and props. The performance was transmitted as a live feed on a television monitor installed in the front window. In the Tate installation of shady lane productions, a photograph from this piece was displayed on the wall of the now working office. Appearing as a mixture of ‘office art’ and documented business history, it blurred both works into a hybrid presentation of the artist as persona and service industry director alike.

That all of this material is made up in one way or another – by media operations, the participants’ exhibitionism or Collins’ staging – is not an insight here, but to the contrary, provides the works’ point of departure. Even though shady lane productions came across as an art-invention first and foremost, it was also – importantly – an actual work place, operational Monday to Friday. Staffed by the artist and a team of investigative journalists and documentary filmmakers, it researched and coordinated a press conference for nine British reality TV participants at Café Royal in Piccadilly.

From this event, a number of works are emerging which will eventually be presented as the British episode of the return of the real. In Collins’ practice, this may well prove the point at which fascination is no longer played out by manipulating spatio-temporal exchanges, or by instigating participatory situations in places such as Belgrade, Baghdad or Bogotá, as he has done in the past. Rather it seems that estrangement has now caught up with him as a fundamental condition of his work, regardless of locale.