Sting in the Tale

Art, Hoax, and Provocation

Antoinette LaFarge

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781954600058
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by an expert "fictive-art" practitioner.

In her groundbreaking book, internationally recognized multimedia artist and writer Antoinette LaFarge reflects on the most urgent question of today: where does truth lie, and how is it verified? Encouraging readers to critically question the role art plays in shaping reality, Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation defines a new genre of art that fabricates evidence to support a central fiction. Interweaving contemporary "fictive art" practice with a lineage of hoaxes and impostures dating from the 17th century, LaFarge offers the first comprehensive survey of this practice.

The shift from the early information age to our "infocalypse" era of rampant misinformation has made fictive art an especially radical form as it straddles the lines between fact, fiction, and wild imagination. Artists deploy a wide range of practices to substantiate their fictions, manufacturing artefacts, altering photographs, and posing as experts from many different fields. A fictive-art practitioner herself, LaFarge explores and underscores the myriad ways art can ground or destabilize one's lived reality, forcing us to question our subjective experience and our understanding of what counts as evidence.

Many examples of these curious and sometimes notorious fabrications are included - from nonexistent artists and peculiar museums to cryptoscientific objects like fake skeletons and staged archaeological evidence. From the intriguing Cottingley fairy photographs "captured" in 1917 by teenage sisters, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology; from the work of artists like Iris Häussler, Joan Fontcuberta, and Eva and Franco Mattes to the enigmatic encyclopedia known as the Codex Seraphinianus, fictive art continues to reframe assumptions made by its contemporaneous culture. With all the attendant consequences of mistrust, outrage, and rejection, fictive art practitioners both past and present play upon the fragile trust that establishes societies, underlining the crucial roles played by perception and doubt.

NOTES

Introduction

1 The title of a 2003 book by Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

2 The origins of the term “superfiction” are unclear, though its first appearance in print seems to have been in the Australian philosopher Adrian Heathcote’s short 1995 article “True Lies: The Rise and Rise of Superfictions,” which focuses on the work of Australian artist Peter Hill. According to Hill, he had been using the term since around 1990 (personal communication). Heathcote does not define the term, although he does refer to superfictions as a form of meta-art and notes that they manage to be at one and the same time “simulacra of ‘real’ art works that masquerade and deceive and yet, in another sense, are the real thing” (Heathcote, 33). This was followed in 2002 by Hill’s own doctoral thesis “Superfictions,” in which Hill investigates “how fictional situations have been introduced into contemporary art spaces” (Hill, 4). Hill felt that the term “superfictions” was needed “to distinguish the practice from pure literary fiction in one camp and installation art in another” (Hill, 51). He further argues that “the term ‘superfiction’ is useful to distinguish these visual fictions from their better-known text-based counterparts in literary fiction. As superfictions have developed over the past two decades, the idea of narrative, especially fragmented narrative, has increasingly been introduced” (Hill, 6 fn 11).

In my view, treating the fiction as an “insertion” into art spaces does not sufficiently account for the mutual dependence of the visual and the textual within fictive art. Similarly, the idea of “fragmented narrative” can certainly be applied to fictive art, but it elides both the central narrative coherence of these projects and also the fact that the narrative tends to emerge over time. “Fragmented” suggests something that existed as a whole and was broken up, rather than something that came into being one piece at a time. A better term might be ‘distributed narrative’ as it acknowledges the way the narrative takes form within the different media, objects, and events produced.

Feminist performance scholar Carrie Lambert-Beatty adopted the term “parafiction” in her 2014 essay “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” Here she lays out the case for parafiction as a practice that “is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literary and dramatic art,” by analogy with the term “paramedic.” Lambert-Beatty makes clear that she departs in her use of the term “parafiction” from two different ways that it has been used in literary studies: firstly, for stories that are true but told in the style of fiction, and secondly, for stories (like those of Thomas Pynchon) that are deliberately built on preexisting works, creating an endless circulation of literary self-referentiality. Lambert-Beatty makes clear that her chief interest in parafiction lies in the way that these works have “one foot in the real.” Parafiction’s personae and storylines “intersect with the world as it is being lived” and are “experienced as fact” for some amount of time, and in some degree (“Make-Believe,” 118). Here I am in full agreement with her; where we depart is in her emphasis on the nearness of parafiction to fiction—I see the central issue rather as the degree to which this kind of art has internalized fiction.

3 Klein, “Charm of the Lie,” 214, attributing the term to Delhi-based artist and writer Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

4 A 2013 exhibition at SITE Santa Fe entitled More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness included several artists discussed in this book, including Eva and Franco Mattes, Zoe Beloff, Iris Häussler, Walid Raad, Mark Dion, and the Yes Men. Its theme was postphotographic work involving staged and processed imagery.

5 Clair Le Couteur argues more strongly that with the arrival of expensive spectacle, fictive art has been drained of its potency as a challenging art form (“Fictive Museum,” 35–36).

6 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.

7 Eco, “Serendipities,” quoted in Ruthven, Faking Literature, 13.

8 Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe,” 138.

9 This idea is borrowed from similar phrasing in Burnett, “In Lies,” 204.

10 Bantock, Museum at Purgatory, XI.

11 Gunning, “Truthiness and the More Real,” 181.

12 Lambert-Beatty, “Make Believe,” 140.

13 I also acknowledge a set of very loosely related practices, such as metafiction; I will not treat these at any length here, but will reference them from time to time.

Chapter 1

1 Creating self-consistent worlds is typical of literature, movies, and video games, while the misdirection and fakery can be found in certain genres of each of these.

2 Le Couteur, “Fictive Museum,” 54.

3 See Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, for an elaboration of the idea that a great deal of modern and postmodern art requires explanation in order to be properly understood as art.

4 Le Couteur, “Fictive Museum,” 12.

5 For more on intertextuality, see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language; for more on the idea of the diaogic (from which intertextuality descends), see Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel.”

6 For more on Sebald’s subtle use of photographic ‘evidence’ in his novels, see Lise Patt’s illuminating introduction to Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald. A similar approach, though carried out on a much smaller scale and to less effect, is seen in works like the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is supported by a few photographs.

7 Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 11–12, 134. Iser refers us back to two earlier thinkers, German philosopher Hans Vaihinger (in The Philosophy of ‘As If’) and British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (in Theory of Fictions). Writing in the late nineteenth century, Vaihinger identified a Law of Ideat...