Fakeries and Fabulations
About midway through Colum McCann’s 2009 National Book Award winning novel, Let the Great World Spin, we meet a pair of conceptual artists, Blaine and Laura. They drive the mysterious black car that extinguishes the novel’s Christ figure in a hit and run accident. Later, McCann has Andy Warhol wander through, looking for a rent boy. McCann’s hostility toward conceptual artists is so commonplace that it wouldn’t bear mentioning, but his novel has so conquered the middlebrow consciousness that it was praised hourly on public radio as we began assembling the Fakeries and Fabulations issue of Quodlibetica.
We don’t need to remind our readers that art describes many things, not just the development of media and their potential, but the creation of alternative ways of seeing and thinking. In this issue, we are moving beyond craftmanship, stepping over the masters of form, and giving the content of conceptual art its due.
The resulting essays range from Jan Estep’s cogent and careful defense of the abstracted ideals behind conceptual art to Emily Atchison’s “On Being Duped,” a startlingly honest tonal tribute to an especially mystifying installation at the Walker, where the opaque and corporeal work intersects with the ego of the spectator. Adjunct art college instructor Ed Charbonneau examines the fraudulence inherent in pedagogy as he inverts a familiar student nightmare. Despairing of art’s falling currency with an increasingly apathetic public, Sheila Dickinson surveys the work of culture-jammers Hasan Elahi and The Yes Men.
In keeping with our commitment to foreign correspondence, we bend time and space to fill out the remainder of our slots. Tom Haakenson writes about Dada and resurrects Nietzsche in the context of 21st-century Munich. Editor Christina Schmid sends us a “wish you were here” from conceptual art utopia, Grace, MN. And in a dispatch that may come from another world entirely, Jake Ramberg, in “Antique Fables & Fairytoys,” takes an implicating trip through heir apparent David Sollie’s presentation of advertisements from his grandfather’s defunct company, The Shackway Corporation.
In conjunction with this issue, we are hosting a Quodlibetica first: we will be screening a 35mm print of the Orson Welles’ classic art documentary F for Fake at Trylon Microcinema on Sunday April 4th. You can decide for yourself whether the film is genre-busting, myth-busting or truth-busting. Certainly, it challenges notions of expertise and mastery in the art world.
Click here to proceed to the issue.
For more information about our F for Fake screening, click here. To buy tickets, click here.
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