Sting in the Tale

Introduction It sometimes seems that we live in an era of ubiquitous fakery. Indeed, there is now an entire vocabulary to encompass shades of deception that leave the propaganda and disinformation of past generations in the dust. Now we live with fake memoirs and deepfake videos, catfishing and sockpuppetry on social networks, astroturfing (fake grassroots efforts), and an entire rainbow of washings: whitewashing, greenwashing, purple, red, pink. In the realm of film and video alone we find docufiction, docudrama, pseudo-documentary, fake-fiction, mockumentary, and reality-TV parsing out differences in the compounding of truth and fiction that sometimes seem almost too subtle to grasp. Accompanying this shift from the early information age to our current “infocalypse” era of rampant misinformation, a form of art has emerged that likewise traffics in deception, placing itself right at this potent junction where fiction and fact make contact. But instead of following the current pressure to choose sides—especially, to choose the moral high ground of fact and truth as a bulwark against a tide of “lying liars”—these artists take a different path, one that confounds fact and fiction in complicated ways. One that indeed celebrates a state in which the two cannot be simply or securely separated into opposing camps. A key characteristic of this kind of artwork is that it centers on a specific kind of deceit: it places a highly developed fiction at its center that is passed off as factual. This fiction is secured as fact through the use of what appear to be evidentiary objects: documentary photographs and videos, historical artifacts and relics—all of which were actually made by the artists themselves. The final artwork consists in this constellation of manufactured evidence attesting to the central narrative, displayed in ways designed to further amplify the historicity or facticity of the whole. In that final display stage, these artists typically situate themselves publicly not as creators but as curators whose mission is to organize and explain the collection to their audience.An example: In 2008, the Art Gallery of Ontario hosted a purportedly historical exhibition entitled He Named Her Amber. It centered on a set of mysterious art objects said to have been made by Mary O’Shea, an Irish servant in the late nineteenth century. Visitors were offered a tour of the historic building where the servant had worked and where excavations related to her life were in progress. At the very end of the tour, visitors were informed that what they had seen was not a real excavation pertaining to actual history, as it appeared, but entirely the invention of a contemporary German-Canadian artist, Iris Häussler.In devising this elaborate installation, Häussler intended to provide an experience of art that was heightened by all the elements that made it seem real, and that was made more immediate by being unmoored from any conventional framing as art. By choosing this historical structure, which conceals art behind fiction, and fiction behind the appearance of fact, Häussler made vivid the links between women’s lower social and economic status in the nineteenth century, their exclusion from the public domain, and their inability to have their productions recognized as art. The fact that her version of history is a creative construction in turn serves to undermine the distancing effect of history as something that conveniently happens to other people in a time long gone and helps us to notice how such exclusions continue operate in our own time. In 2002, I started using the term “fictive art” to refer to this kind of work. In that year, I was the co-organizer, with the late writer and artist Lise Patt, of a College Art Association panel on the topic, and together we settled on the term after chewing over dozens of possibilities. Other terms that have been used for this kind of work include “superfiction” (preferred by the Scottish-Australian artist Peter Hill, whose 2002 doctoral thesis was the first major work to define this field) and “parafiction” (preferred by theorist Carrie Lambert-Beatty). I find I resist both terms for their logocentrism: in their very structure, both of these terms privilege the fictional-textual element and elide the absolutely critical role played by visual objects and images, especially with respect to the ways that objects help to assert the fiction within everyday reality. I am more sympathetic to the term “parafact,” which has been defined as a fiction “too strange not to be ‘real’.” Fictive art often achieves its successes by appearing to audiences in a very similar light: as being too plausible, too likely, too obvious not to be real.A working definition of fictive art might be expansive fictions that are actualized and temporarily secured as factual through the production of evidentiary objects, events, and entities. The temporary nature of the illusion is another key element of fictive art: these works either lightly conceal their made-upness, include elements that designedly undermine the fiction, or—as in the case of He Named Her Amber—cleanly out themselves to their audience at some stage. The outing phase is where the conversation about the artwork really begins, because audience (and critic) responses vary all the way from disgust and anger at being tricked to deepened pleasure at understanding the final layer in a complex production. It is no accident that a number of significant artists working in this realm are people who trouble our ideas about gender and identity, who use the form to expand on the larger social context of art: what it means to have to pass as someone (or something) else, to be invisible or mis-seen, to perform as a trickster due to low status, to be unable to contribute to the narrative around what counts as art. In other cases, fictive art arises out of resistance to cultural change and comes from those who benefit from the status quo. In both cases, the unease of epistemological uncertainty is a primary component of the experience of fictive art.