The Truth. What does it really mean in art? Does it mean that if you are an artist, you have to draw exactly what you see? Does it mean your work is implacably chained to who you are, as a person? No fictional writer is ever pushed against this set of standards. So, what of fictional art, where everything, including the artist’s identity is open to be skewed? This is the focus of Antoinette LaFarge’s astonishingly immersive 2021 publication, Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation, that in four scrumptiously detailed parts, reveals a beautiful understanding of the monster of art through the concept of hoax as it throws every preconception into the air. This encyclopaedic foray takes you through the work of some of visual art’s most outrageously brilliant minds and leaves you gasping for more.
While LaFarge’s book doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, it splits the fabric of what truth means when you are making art and allows this idea to stretch wide. Wider than you can believe. The idea of not only inventing a person, but of creating that person’s whole body of work and lived history as a construct to be taken seriously, is a skill that teeters on the clinically insane and makes mockery of the idea of authorship. But it has been done. It’s about testing one’s own ability to understand history. It’s about challenging the values of education and truth, and it’s about flying in the face of earnest givens.
LaFarge considers iconic achievements such as the precocious invention by 18th century youth Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) of the comprehensive and convincing life and works of Thomas Rowley, a fictional 15th century priest, which he invented. She explains Arturo Ott and the Manual of Lost Ideas, a project and the identity of an artist which takes a circuitous and mysterious route from the annuls of World War Two into the archives of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in contemporary Los Angeles, reading like a sleuth novel of the 1920s.
The text is exhaustive but encrusted with gems such as the first dinkum faked photograph, created in 1917 by two teenaged girls, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, of the famous Cottingley fairies in the bottom of their garden, which foxed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. There’s a focus on The Department of Eagles, in the Museum of Modern Art which was created by Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers between 1968 and 1975, spoofing museum culture and all its formalities and labelling. It’s about the internalised madness of inventing a world of expression that digresses from common usage, but is so sophisticated in its thinking that it rivals the kind of ideas you may consider rational.
It is here where you will find a brief survey into the work of contemporary printmaker Beauvais Lyons, the self-appointed director of the Hokes Archives, and the university-appointed Divisional Dean of the Arts and Humanities at the University of Tennessee and his body of prints of faux fauna which cocks a sophisticated snoot at the rules of taxonomy, to name but one instance.
And while you might raise an eyebrow or two to the spread of blatant lies in art, and the power that art has to challenge bureaucracy in parody, in jest and in earnest, don’t close the book. Turn around, instead, to consider how Artificial Intelligence and the behemoth of fake news is haemorrhaging all over our world and metastasising as it sullies the incontestable with the doubtful.
The value of LaFarge’s work cannot be understated in what it offers the curious reader, the reader who is seduced by a good mystery and the reader of art history: art that is not about the ‘truth’ in the dogmatic sense is a wild genre all of its own, which deserves serious academic engagement across the world, even for the lapsed or sometime scholar.
- Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation is written by Antoinette LaFarge, edited by Carrie Paterson and published by DoppelHouse Press, Los Angeles (2021).