Journal Article: ‘Rogues, Rumours and Giants: Some
Examples of Deception and Fabulation in Contemporary Art’, Parallax, volume 21, issue 3, Summer
2015
Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the last few decades projects have included advertisements for non-existent events, invented historical personae, forms of tactical media, imitation newspapers and websites, and a variety of pseudonyms adopted for various purposes. While this glut of deceptive artworks is relatively recent, it could be seen to build on a longer history that stretches back as far as early forms of camouflage, trompe-l’oeil and quadratura. Arguably what distinguishes recent artistic experiments in this domain from their antecedents is a focus on process, with an eye to managing not only the deception itself, but also the moment when it unravels.
︎download here
Lying has proven to be a surprisingly popular activity among artists in recent years. Over the last few decades projects have included advertisements for non-existent events, invented historical personae, forms of tactical media, imitation newspapers and websites, and a variety of pseudonyms adopted for various purposes. While this glut of deceptive artworks is relatively recent, it could be seen to build on a longer history that stretches back as far as early forms of camouflage, trompe-l’oeil and quadratura. Arguably what distinguishes recent artistic experiments in this domain from their antecedents is a focus on process, with an eye to managing not only the deception itself, but also the moment when it unravels.
︎download here