Sting in the Tale - by Antoinette LaFarge Paperback

About the Book

"An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by Antoinette LaFarge, herself a "fictive-art" practitioner. Stealthily occupying the remote corners of history, literature, and art are curious fabrications that straddle the lines between fact, fiction, and wild imagination - non-existent people and poets, Edgar Allan Poe's hot-air-balloon to the Moon hoax, crypto-scientific objects like fake skeletons, psycho-geography, faked inventions, and staged anthropological evidence. From the intriguing Cottingley fairy photographs, "captured" in 1917 by teenage sisters, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, "fictive art" (the author's term) continues to reframe assumptions made by its contemporaneous culture. The shift from the early information age to our "infocalypse" era of rampant misinformation has made this genre of art with a sting in its tale an especially radical form. Cataloging historical projects and those from the late 20th and early 21st century that probe this confusion, LaFarge foregrounds the medium's potential for run-away creativity. At its center, fictive art is secured as fact by creating series of evidentiary objects and by employing the language and display methods of history and science. Using documentary photographs and videos, created historical artifacts and relics, explanatory texts and didactics, lectures, events, and expert opinions in technical language, artists have created constellations of manufactured evidence attesting to their artwork's central narrative. This dissimulation is temporary in most cases, often surprisingly revealed in a self-outing moment; other times, it is found out. With all the attendant consequences of mistrust, outrage, and rejection, what we can learn from fictive art practitioners both past and present bears on the fragile trust that builds societies, and that when broken, brings them to the brink of chaos. Readers of A Sting in the Tale will be amused, delighted, and soberly engaged in thinking about what the role of art could be in shaping discord or discourse"--

Book Synopsis

• Fictive artworks have multiplied rapidly in the last two decades with a wide range of artists who have worked in this genre and generated its upsurge in popularity.
• Some of the projects covered in this book have strong cult followings, so it will appeal to people fascinated by the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript, for example.
• Concluding considerations include contemporary internet-based artists, NFTs, and the role misinformation has played in recent politics and events like the January 6th attack on the US Capitol.
• The self-referentiality of fictive art allows for critical conversation about the social contract and aspirations toward a just society in the age of rampant misinformation. It differs from cons and hoaxes, pyramid schemes, identity theft, forgery, impersonation, etc. in that its goal is to be eventually found out, revealed as an elaborate fabrication, and appreciated as a fiction-based form of art.
• As the author writes, the book highlights artists "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."
• The book connects the long history of the "trickster" in art to the contemporary urgency to use art as a socio-political tool for productive mischief-making.
• LaFarge is a known academic expert, having originally conceived of the term "fictive art" and presented it during a 2004 panel at the annual College Art Association conference. The term is now cited by others writing about the field.
• The launch of the book will roughly coincide with the announcement about The Getty's acquisition of LaFarge's long-time collaborative project with the late artist Lise Patt and others. This project, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI), was a museum/library/exhibition space/cultural production center and publisher, whose 20-year history will be widely celebrated.
• LaFarge is Professor of Visual Art and faculty member in the Electronic Art and Design department at University of California Irvine and has multiple contacts nationally and internationally through whom she will be promoting the book.
• LaFarge has been an influential artist in the realm of "fictive art" since the early 1990s, starting with her "Museum of Forgery" and including several elaborate fabrications, one of which provoked outrage when she trained an actor to become her real world avatar and present papers, interact with unknowing scholars, and communicate on LaFarge's behalf. This project was eventually published in Art Journal under the essay title, "Social Proxies and Real-World Avatars: Impersonation as a Mode of Capitalist Production."
• Alongside her trickster activities, and in part because of them, LaFarge has a great respect for history and regularly donates time as a Wikipedia master editor, with contributions of over 400 biographical articles resuscitating marginalized women and people of color who contributed to the arts, humanities, and sciences.
• From research for one of these Wikipedia entries came her latest book, Louise Brigham and the Early History of Sustainable Furniture Design, published in 2019 by Palgrave McMillan.
• LaFarge has created or co-created over two dozen original new media performance works and installations in the United States and Europe. She co-curated two early exhibitions on computer games and art and is the founding director of the Plaintext Players, an online virtual performance group that has been widely w...

  
  
  

  Review Quotes

  
  
  
  With Sting in the Tale, Antoinette LaFarge has crafted a masterful study of fictive art -- a genre of geofictions, fictive museums, art movements, and invented persona which predate and challenge our current affliction of alternative facts and terrifying political fabulations. At once entertaining and edifying, this scrupulously researched study is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, bound to generate significant debate for years to come. If Philip K. Dick invented an academic historian to define and taxonomize the interdisciplinary genre of our age, Antoinette LaFarge would be it.
  -- Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
  

  
  
  

  About the Author

  
  
  Antoinette LaFarge is an internationally recognized new media artist with a special interest in speculative fiction and alternative histories. She has authored several books, including Louise Brigham and the Early History of Sustainable Furniture Design (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and Monkey Encyclopedia W (ICI Press 2018). Her writing and artwork have appeared in Art Journal, Wired, Leonardo, Ada, Gnosis, the Southern Quarterly, the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies from MIT Press, Oxford University Press, and other international presses. She is a longtime contributor to Wikipedia, where she focuses on filling gaps in coverage of women and people of color.