Antoinette LaFarge - Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation

TALE
Art, Hoax, and Provocation

Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation

By Antoinette LaFarge

Edited by Carrie Paterson

2021 Antoinette LaFarge.

Foreword by G. D. Cohen.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher. The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that all sources for documents and photographs have been verified and therefore disclaim any liability, damage, or loss caused by errors or omissions. Any parties with further or contrary information to the cited sources are requested to contact the publisher so that future releases of the book may be updated.

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: LaFarge, Antoinette, author. | Cohen, Greg D., foreword author.

Title: Sting in the tale: art , hoax , and provocation / by Antoinette LaFarge ; foreword by Greg D. Cohen.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. | Los Angeles, CA: Doppelhouse Press, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN: 2021938012 | ISBN: 9781733957953

Subjects: LCSH Conceptual art. | Art--Forgeries. | Mimesis in art. | Truth. | Hoaxes. | Deception. | Impostors and imposture--History. | Aesthetics. | Art--Philosophy. | BISAC ART / Criticism & Theory | ART / Conceptual | LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist | PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics

Classification: LCC BH39 .L34 2021 | DDC 709.04/075--dc23

Book design: Ako Joop with Antoinette LaFarge

Cover design: Antoinette LaFarge and Jesse Colin Jackson

This book is set in Faune, Bembo, and Circe fonts. Faunes highly variable faces were designed by Alice Savoie under a commission from the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France, and were inspired by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century animal engravings.

Cover:

Iris Hussler, Sophie La Rosire Memorabilia Vitrine including tools, materials, and objects cast in plaster of paris by La Rosire in 19071908.

2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

DoppelHouse Press

Los Angeles

TALE
Art, Hoax, and Provocation

Antoinette LaFarge

(Institute of Cultural Inquiry)

(Peter Greenaway)

(Adam Ryder)

(Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda)

(Robert Renhui)

(Leo Lionni)

(Damien Hirst)

(Luigi Serafini)

Dedicated to Lise Patt

(19552019)

friend

colleague

visionary

G. D. Cohen

Alas, Kafka: I am he. So reads the final, lapidary entry (dated January 9, 1924) in Franz Kafkas fourteenth in quarto notebook, long thought to be lost until its recent discovery in an obscure municipal archive in Buenos Aires.

Encapsulated in those five terse words is something akin to the essence, avant la lettre, of fictive art, the emergent practice so deftly dissected by Antoinette LaFarge in the book you are about to read. Kafka, performing Kafka (a role imagined, as fortune would have it, by Kafka and meant, it would seem, to be played by none other than Kafka), suddenly comprehends the performance of Kafka as both an act of Kafkas own devising and an invention utterly foreign to Kafka, and conveys this recognition with the rhetorical equivalent of an acquiescent sigh. A jaded rebuke to Rimbauds je est un autre/I is an other, penned by the French pote maudit half a century earlier? Or a message in a bottle to the future Jorge Luis Borges, who, some fifty years later, in his micro-story, Borges y yonot inconceivably drafted after happening upon Kafkas lost notebookwould also displace himself into the realm of fiction (Al otro, a Borges, es a quin le ocurren las cosas/To the other one, to Borges, is the one to whom things happen)?

Were Kafka (or Borges, for that matter) to have sought further nuance (or passing succor), he might well have turned to the musings of Roberto Valaco: The objective is not to master the subject. Rather, it is to subject mastery to hazard. To the artist I offer this as the only legitimate aspiration: one must design ones own incompetency (Schriftatlas I, 9A). Valaco, reflecting on the matter sometime in the middle of the last century, did not so much presage the postmodern as leapfrog it altogether, plunging headlong into the crucible of the fictive as the only viable salvation for any artistic venture of the future.

Eccentric heir to Kafka, Valaco, and Borges (as only an heir to such precursors can be), no doubt a kindred spirit of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, too, LaFarge has illuminated the most recondite aspirations of a cohort of already distinctly obscureand, as it happens, profoundly radicalartists. And the light dazzles as much as it disrupts and disturbs: students of art history will certainly revel in the profusion of insights erupting from these pages; art practitioners, meanwhileespecially those most averse to the idea that fakery, deceit, and appropriation might actually form the soundest bedrock of artistic practicewill feel compelled to question their every certainty. LaFarge has not merely rendered, with alluring precision, the wilds of contemporary fictive art for her reader. She has set the cornerstone of a new discourse on art itself, on what art can and should be in our post-historical, post-truth era.

If the reader finds herself suspicious of the lineage into which I have just inserted LaFarge (Kafka! Borges! Warburg! Benjamin! Valaco!), she should be. Part of what distinguishes fictive art, after all, is the highly peculiar stance it assumes in relation to Western arts familiar litany of bygone European male artists and intellectuals. If the foot soldiers of fictive art have arrayed themselves on the margins of that consecrated canon, it is in full awareness of the power they wield from their fringe positions. Practitioners of fictive artamong them a critical mass of women and people of color, as the roster of artists discussed in Sting in the Tale attestsare less intent on eschewing the ubiquity of the Dead White Male (DWM) in Art Historys prevaling narratives than on marshalling the putative dominance of the DWM to deviant (and devious) critical or conceptual ends. Fictive artists generate many of their reality effects by adopting a male alter-ego, say, in order to validate the critical or eccentric standpoint of their projects; or by invoking the name of this or that luminary of the artistic canon as a secondary character in an invented history, as a means to certify its authenticity.

Simply stated, to sow seeds of doubt about the certitudes of received art history and institutionally sanctioned art practices is the fundamental impulse of the genre. That is to say, the best fictive art gives the lie to the familiar stories we have told ourselvesand insist on telling ourselves stillabout what art is and what it means. Fictive art is about intimating alternative narratives, giving form to speculative realities, altering our faith in the order of things by inventing a convincing parallel order.