The Muse of Misrule
Beauvais Lyons and John Phillips discuss fictive art and museums with Antoinette LaFarge, author of Sting in the Tale: Art Hoax and Provocation
Main Photo Credit: Marcel Duchamp La Boite en Valise Cleveland Museum of Art. Photo by Tim Evanson.
John
In your book on fictive art, Sting in the Tale: Art Hoax and Provocation, you discuss numerous artists who have presented themselves as experts operating within seemingly “real” specialist institutions including museums, collections and archives. Could you elaborate on this practice and what you see as some of the common objectives that might lay behind this strategy?
Antoinette
There are several common objectives, though naturally not all apply to everyone. One strong throughline is the question of power in the art world: by assuming an institutional mantle, artists can be heard in a different way, understood as experts. The public still tends to see artists as fundamentally irrational and wayward, as untrustworthy narrators and flaky fabulists. Speaking through the mask of a curator, archaeologist, or archivist – or, at another level, speaking as the institution itself – forces the audience to pause those assumptions, at least temporarily. There is also for some artists a question of institutional critique – of holding up to scrutiny the very presumption that expertise only resides inside those walls, and querying the often inflated and sometimes opaque vocabularies of techspeak, artspeak, and critspeak. Some of these fictive institutions reflect a desire for mainstream institutions to be more expansive in what they allow through the doors – in effect, these fictive institutions come into being to house what cannot otherwise find an institutional home.
Beauvais
Yes, creating fake institutions as a strategy to critique institutional systems of authority. This critical mimesis is key to what makes fictive art both amusing and serious.
Antoinette
Right and since faking is a form of play, this often involves exploring the joys and affordances of polyvocality. Quite a few of these artists create not just one expert alter ego, but a whole slew of them – Norman Daly is a great example here, with the collection of argumentative scholars he created for his Civilization of Llhuros project.”. This provides the artist with a way to bring in nuance by offering many points of view, to revel in the exploratory pleasures of self-contradiction, and to delve into the psychological richness of what theater terms ‘mask work’ – giving form and voice to the many aspects of one’s own psyche that might otherwise remain hidden under the veneer that is the artist’s ordinary public persona
Beauvais
I love the idea of polyvocality. While it is often thought of as a collective expression, when one artist speaks from multiple identities, it could be considered either a disordered personality (such as schizophrenia), a reflection of the code-switching required that reflects in an intersectional world, or even a form of creative role-play
Antoinette
I agree. And while code-switching is ordinarily discussed in contexts connected to race, gender, and class, I think it’s important to remember that code-switching turns up in all kinds of situations, especially when there is a power imbalance of any kind. Think, for instance, of how teenagers might talk to their parents differently than to their peers. It’s something people do without always being aware that they do it – a kind of hidden skill. Fictive art gives people the chance to deploy that skill in a more deliberate way.
Beauvais
These are effectively the ideas you address in Sting in the Tale in terms of a “heteronym,” where one not only creates an imaginary persona, but an often complex and rich back story, as well as the “multinym,” which involves the creation of an imaginary persona by a group or collective. In this context, I especially like the concept of reverse plagiarism. Where plagiarism is a way of attributing the work of another to oneself, creating works under a pseudonym is a way of attributing your own work to another person. Like the theatrical mask, there is an aspect of this masking that oftentimes allows one to be a more honest and authentic self.
I found the first chapter of your book especially instructive, organizing fictive art around concepts of generative fiction, evidentiary objects, authoritative framing, and self-outing, while also distinguishing fictive art from less complex forms of pranking.
John
Fictive art offers an example of how the museum involves implied and actual narrative. Could you discuss ways that various artists use a museum context as a form of storytelling?
Antoinette
There are a couple of ways that this happens. Firstly, artists who invent their own museums use the traditional apparatus of the museum – the PR materials, the artist bios, the exhibitions and their didactics, etc. – to put forward whatever the basic story of their museum is. In this sense, it is a form of expanded narrative or transmedial narrative distributed across many different elements. Marcel Broodthaers’ Museum of the Eagle, Peter Hill’s Museum of Contemporary Ideas, and Ulrich Tillmann’s Klaus Peter Schnüttger-Webs Museum are all examples of this. Secondly, there are artists who create fictive art projects that are then shown in traditional museums and galleries. Here, the actual narrative of the project – purportedly factual, actually fictional – comes into direct conversation with the implicit museal narrative in which the institution has long been established as trustworthy, its didactics factual, and its exhibits historically grounded and thoroughly contextualized. In some ways, it is this latter setup that creates the greatest dissonance for viewers, since they frame their understanding from the get-go in terms of their trust in the host museum; whereas when they meet a fictive museum ‘in the wild’, so to speak, the novelty of the encounter means that they arrive with fewer assumptions. In addition, fictive museums and archives often signal through their naming – the Museum of Jurassic Technology; the Museum of Forgery – that visitors might want to approach with caution
Beauvais
In my experience, one of the challenges to any gallery or museum presenting fictive art is whether to represent the exhibition as either “real” or “fake.” Even when their press materials present the work as imaginary, the use of documentary conventions by the fictive artist can leave the viewer in a liminal space – not knowing what they are seeing. In most cases, cultural institutions are too conservative, and do not trust the viewer to figure out the work, and museums’ docents have a hard time role-playing the fiction.
Antoinette
This is a really important point – that institutions may be interested enough in the work to present it but without being willing to go all in on necessary temporary deception. One of the more successful solutions to this conundrum was the way Iris Häussler and the Art Gallery of Toronto handled her fictive historical installation-cum-excavation entitled “He Named Her Amber.” By all accounts, the docents were very well trained to keep tours of the piece feeling entirely real to the visitors, and the ‘reveal’ element was handled by a document handed to the visitors at the very end. (There were also, as is often the case with fictive art, a few hints along the way for alert visitors.) There is still a sense that the institution did not trust the visitors to figure it out on their own, but at least the AGT went all in on the deception in the initial publicity and in allowing the visitors a full and unmodulated experience of the piece.
Beauvais
How might we think about the idea of authenticity in the context of fictive art?
Antoinette
The fundamental problem here is the lack of agreement on what constitutes authenticity, and the related fact that it differs from one cultural group to another. Similar problems haunt the words ‘true’, ‘real’, and ‘genuine’. (Side note: the other day I stumbled into a set of Amazon listings of handmade leatherbound notebooks and was fascinated to note that although they were all newly made, they were all also described as “vintage.” Evidently, ‘vintage’ now no longer only means ‘somewhat old’ but also ‘reminds us vaguely of something somewhat old’.) One thing to note is that ideas about authenticity are generally aligned with things the person using the word considers positive. It is rare for people to acknowledge that their laziness, procrastination, greed, slovenliness, and so on are authentic. Similarly, when it comes to art objects, authenticity signals that the work adheres to mainstream artworld values: it was “properly” fabricated (i.e. not a forgery or fake), and its “meaning” is understood to align with its creator’s experience in some deep way (i.e. it is not tourist art or faux naïve art).
Whenever what is perceived as a rupture in this system occurs, charges of inauthenticity will arise. Fictive art tends to fail both tests – it involves a great deal of fakery (mimesis + camouflage), and there is usually some kind of gulf between the actual creator and the declared creator (fictional artist or institution). It can perhaps be understood as redefining or expanding on the two main aspects of art authenticity. For one thing, its fakery openly honors an entire history of art-making that has either been swept under the rug (the work of the few great forgers of history), or that has been twisted to serve the Western ideal of individual genius (i.e. the lack of legitimacy for copying and appropriation; the downgrading of fabricators to mere craftspeople). For another, by giving free rein to the ‘other voices’ within the artist, it recognizes that there is no singular psyche, few universal truths, and no objective view of the world.
Beauvais
Questions of authenticity are at the heart of many reproductive and mechanical processes, like historical methods in printmaking and photography. Despite what Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936 about mechanical reproduction, and the “withering aura” of reproductive processes, today these graphic media can appear as authentic time capsules from a previous era. I think of the many artists in Sting in the Tale who employ photographic methods, especially artists such as Kahn and Selesnick. Often these works employ a narrative, or are part of a collection or book, so that there is an accumulation of evidence which heightens the perception of truth.
At the same time, the double-coded aspects of fictive art assume that viewers will experience a second reading of the works. You call this “self-outing,” but how this is achieved might be subtle. I have never seen David Wilson from the Museum of Jurassic Technology break character, and I love him for this. In some respects, one can imagine that this fosters a higher level of critical engagement with the authority of the museum, but it might also lead to a general skepticism about any claims to truth. In a world of “alternative facts,” how are we to think about this?
Antoinette
Like fiction, fictive art asks us to pause and remind ourselves that there are several different kinds of truth: there is the truth that has to do with factual accounts of history or with agreed-on matters of scientific fact (and I am simplifying here, since many historical ‘facts’ embed analyses that do not hold up over time), and then there is the psychological truth that resonates with our own experience of the world. Fiction and fictive art both aim to help us analyze and navigate the enormous complexity and often inchoate nature of life itself. If a viewer is not prepared to do that – in any context, not solely while looking at a fictive art project – then they will likely use the narrowest possible definition of truth (the ‘facts only’ one) to reject the work entirely as a pack of lies.
The worst sin of fictive art is to flout the consensus that has arisen over the centuries that demands a careful framing of fictional matters as fictional in order to make this journey easier for the viewer. This is why novels are tagged as such in contrast to nonfiction and movies are separated from documentaries. The continual breaching of these boundaries in both media (literary fiction and film) signals just how impatient creators are with this hand-holding that is offered to the general public. Fictive art goes a step further – whereas both novels and movies are held at one remove behind the wall of mediation, fictive artists frequently create evidence in the form of realia that share the same physical space with the viewer. Good examples here would be fictive archaeology projects by Iris Häussler and by Beauvais and Hokes Archives. I believe that the immediacy and intimacy of experience that this situation fosters is part of what creates strong dissonance when viewers realize the double nature of the fictive art project. Does it lead to permanent skepticism about claims of truth? Possibly, though such skepticism is not misplaced if it brings viewers to consider what the difference is between a sound claim and a weak claim, and what kind of truth is in question at any given moment.
John
In many respects, it could be argued that all curatorial practices inherently incorporate an element of fiction, given their operation within societal dynamics that are constantly in flux, marked by ongoing debates and realignments. For example, fifty years after his passing, and with the hindsight of feminist art theory, the narratives surrounding Picasso have undergone substantial transformations since 1973. Similarly, interpretations of artistic contributions from global majority cultures have witnessed profound shifts in understanding. From your perspective, how do you view the role of fictive art in offering distinctive viewpoints and insights within this perpetually evolving terrain of narratives and interpretations?
Antoinette
I see fictive art as attempting to shift the arguments in two main areas, both of which I have already touched on. The first is the very strongly held view throughout the art world that fakery is always and simply bad, for reasons both moral and commercial. I read a great many books and essays on forgery and fakery in the course of research for Sting in the Tale, and nearly all of them viewed fakery in a very negative light. The exceptions were mainly memoirs by famous forgers and a couple of outlier scholarly books, especially Sándor Radnóti’s The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art. I think fictive artists tend not to see art the same way as most people – they view fakery and related activities like copying and appropriation as the heart of their practice, and they do not see why they should follow the rules about which aspects of these activities are acceptable. In this I would say that they align with the post-digital generations that are completely out of step with the copyright regime put in place and enforced by the Big Three media industries (film, games, and music).
Beauvais
Of the many books on fakes, there is the example of Otto Kurz’s book Fakes: A Handbook for Collectors and Students (1948) in which he devotes the final chapter to “Fakes without Models.” Here he provides cases where people invented artifacts from plausibly ancient but non-existent cultures for both financial gain, or cultural status.
Antoinette
Practically speaking, there are a lot of texts on how to create fakes, though they are ordinarily sold as handbooks of conservation or restoration work. The necessary skill set is nearly the same. And I suspect that quite a few of the people who have invented ‘ancient’ artifacts worked at one point or another as art restorers. I must say that the forgers I admire are ones who created brand-new works within an artist’s oeuvre – people like Elmyr de Hory – which requires a whole other level of engagement than does copying existing works. When well done, such works have their own authenticity as artworks, even if they do not possess historical authenticity.
The second area where fictive art is taking an unusual stance is in its redefinition of authenticity through polyphony. All fictive artists that I can think of are working through one or more alter egos, and these often go much deeper than a mere nom de plume. In taking this approach, some are querying the current norms of identity politics, which hold that we must clearly declare our biological and cultural identities, that these must be in some way ‘true’, and that we must then stay inside those lanes in anything we say or create. In other cases, they are rejecting the typical idea of the artist brand, whereby the artist is identified with a unique style of work and way of talking about that work. This is not to say that fictive artists do not create unique and distinctive works of art, but rather that it can be hard to identify a fictive artist with a particular work given the various layers of camouflage and misdirection in operation. In effect, what is being modeled are alternate ways of being in the world; ways that have some interesting resonances with (as well as differences from) the ways that non-artists currently curate their personas on social media.
John
I am reminded of Going Places, a performance staged by a group of second-year UK art students in 1998, who came to be known as Leeds 13. After receiving sponsorship from their student union to stage an exhibition, they disappeared from campus. All thirteen members re-emerged a week later in the arrivals lounge of Leeds international airport. Where, sporting suntans, photographs and souvenirs, they boasted to the reception party, which included their somewhat vexed tutors, about their week-long holiday in Malaga—all funded, they claimed, from the sponsorship money. Their ‘irresponsible’ action sparked a frenzy of criticism in the national press, until days later they announced during a national TV interview that the whole event was a hoax. It had been staged using lens filters to give the bleak beaches and bars of northern England a Mediterranean hue. Their announcement generated a second national debate about the boundaries of art and responsible deception, this time at least with support from their tutors. The following year the group borrowed artworks by other artists including Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Kurt Schwitters, and Marcel Duchamp, which they presented as a collectively curated artwork for their final exhibition. They were individually awarded first-class degrees. Rather peevishly, their student union banned them for life.
Antoinette
That’s hilarious. It absolutely lives in the area where fictive art and hoaxing overlap. For me, the key here is the degree of commitment to their project—most visible in the careful details and the follow-through to a second round of provocation with the final exhibition. All done in the spirit of Duchamp and Dada and Fluxus. Good for the university for giving them first-class degrees.
Beauvais
For several decades curators seem to have had much more social capital than artists. Artists are often pawns in the curatorial playbook, characters that serve the curatorial argument. Duchamp recognized this even before this more recent preeminence of curators and played his hand among the Dadaists and Surrealists in a curatorial role during the mid-20th century. His “La Boîte-en-valise” could also be seen as a form curatorial self-representation. In this new cultural context of curatorial preeminence, why wouldn’t the artist who wants agency to inform contemporary discourse assume this mantle?
Antoinette
Yes indeed. I think it is notable in this context that there are some roles fictive artists tend not to assume, and one of them is gallery director (as distinct from archive director or museum director/curator). Artists understand that galleries are only a way station on the road to that holy of holies, being curated into a permanent museum collection
John
So, given that fictive art often operates within the museum setting, what thoughts do you have about forms of fictive art that operate outside of this institutional setting?
Antoinette
One intriguing aspect of the extra-institutional projects is the question of how they create the reality frame for the audience since they don’t have the built-in gravitas of the institution behind them. Books are one such avenue, but they still tend to draw on an institutional imprimatur, as purported products of either a scholarly press or a museum publication program. I also think of performance-oriented projects like the Luther Blissett heteronym – a name that can be used by any musician for any purpose – or the web avatar Lonelygirl15, where credibility is to a large extent created through the performers’ bodies. (A parallel project in literature might be the JT Leroy persona created by Laura Albert and personified in public appearances by a friend.) Showing up in person, putting your body on the line – walking the walk,” as the saying goes – is a first approximation of credibility.
The multinym “Luther Blissett” is also a good example of how the sphere of operations of a project may be defined by the nature of its attack on institutionality itself. This creates a kind of mirroring effect as the artist adopts the antithesis of some institutional practice. For example, in attacking the idea that artists are expected to achieve and maintain individual name recognition, the folks behind the Luther Blissett project structured it to avoid exactly that: they set up an open pseudonym that could be used by any artist or activist as needed. And by now it has been used by dozens of people, especially in Italy, where it originated in 1994. Luther Blissett is a very recognizable name in certain circles, but in no way does it correspond to one single artist.
A third and smaller group of projects operates without any direct reference to art-world, scientific, or academic institutions. I’m thinking of the Cottingley fairy photos, for example, or the fictive airplane journeys of Leslie Payne. Here the impetus to ‘make real’ the fiction seems to arise elsewhere than out of need to directly confront institutions and their rules and hierarchies. This requires further thought on my part; in these cases, I am not sure what causes the shift from simple fabulation (making things up) to the attempt at ‘making real’.
John
Many forms of fictive art incorporate historical art materials and processes. At the same time, as AI tools become increasingly ubiquitous in various facets of our daily lives and cultural expression, and temporarily setting aside the challenge of ingrained societal biases within their algorithms, what is your perspective on the potential impact of AI on fictive art?
Antoinette
Prognostication is a tricky business so I don’t have a good answer to this. Though one of the things we already know from the history of cameras or the computer is that as tools become more widely and readily accessible, their creative affordances lead to an explosion of experiments and forms. And AI looks like it is close to the same tipping point as photography was in around 1900, or as desktop computing was in the mid 1990s. One set of doors is opened by creative activities that were difficult and that suddenly become much easier – like photo-faking once Photoshop arrived. Right now, AIs like Midjourney make creating images in historical visual styles extremely easy (though they are never quite right), just as ChatGPT turns out rather bland text imitative of known writers. Since they’ll surely get better at this, one thing I think we will see is a great deal of exploration of what Borges called the “Library of Form” – for example, a raft of variations on Hokusai woodcuts. We’ll see a lot more mashups too – Salvador Dali, meet manga. My sense is that as AI gets more expert it will overall make fakery one step easier than even with Photoshop (which still required a good deal of skill) and so there will be more of it.
Beauvais
I agree. One aspect of all AI is that it is parasitic, relying on existing data from which to create forms. While all human works spring from these mimetic forces, AI often gets things completely wrong, or is biased as a reflection of these data sets. One of the potential benefits of fictive art is that it will encourage people to interrogate claims to truth more vigorously, regardless of whether they have been created by humans or bots
Antoinette
And I want to underline, too, that what most interests me about AI right now is the ways that it gets things wrong. Many people have commented on how terrible visual AIs are at hands – surely this is because they are approximating from a database of other representations rather than from actual hand anatomy (which is likewise a failing of mediocre human artists). Some of these AI hands are hilariously awful, and some are wonderfully strange. Getting things wrong is a key factor in how art movements and aesthetic norms shift over time.
As a culture we are already used to an overload of what Hito Steyerl termed “poor images” so I doubt that the coming deluge of AI images is going to frighten people in terms of sheer quantity. I think the biggest rupture is going to be in labor markets, but individual artists are already terribly disadvantaged there even (perhaps especially) when they work for big media. On that front, the coming of AI represents the fruition of several hundred years of steadily cheapening the value of commercial artists’ work. It also surfaces the fact that a great deal of commercial art is hackwork of one kind or another, skilled but not particularly creative. It’s hard to say what is going to happen to the careers of commercial artists, but genuine creativity always finds a way through these technical turning points.
Beauvais
As an ultimate form of prognostication, AI itself will be dependent on future (and potentially non-existent) energy and information systems. When these are gone, any surviving humans will be back to using their hands as stencils on cave walls.
Antoinette
If we retain any memory of 20th century art history, we will probably be using our entire pigmented bodies, not just our hands!
John
On that futuristic note: Antoinette, Beauvais thank you enormously for sharing your insights into the intoxicating world of fixtive art and illusory museums. It has been a pleasure to delve into this captivating field with the unique perspectives each of you brings, wearing the hats of both leading practitioners and discerning critics. On behalf of the Museum of Unrest, thank you for enriching our discourse with your invaluable contributions.
By the way, have either of you settled on a particular cave yet, and if so, does it have a fictive plaque at the entrance?