Szymon Zakrzewski
FICTITIOUS ARCHIVES, COUNTERFACTUAL STORIES, IMAGINED OBJECTS. ON MYSTIFICATION IN ART

Il. Magdalena Lazar

This article investigates artistic hoaxes based on authentic events from the past. I begin by discussing the effect of the concept of “archive” on artistic practice in the early 21st century and naming the new roles taken on by artists after the “archival turn.” I scrutinise selected artworks to look for analogies between the work of historians and the efforts expended by the creators of hoaxes. I delineate the process of creating fictional works and the methods of giving them credibility. I unveil the reasons why artists decide to stage their own hoaxes. The works I discuss do not exclusively belong to the domain of visual arts as I also draw examples from the realms of design, music, and literature. It seems hardly justified to order artistic mystifications by domains as they tend to combine a variety of elements that often cannot be crammed into one creative field. In terms of form, fictitious pieces resemble hybrids created by intersecting different media: visual materials, objects, literary works, sound recordings, or film.

Turn to the past

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, an “archival turn” was observed in the humanities. Researchers stopped viewing the “archive” merely as a collection of documents, a place, or an institution that assembles and stores records, and renders them available.¹ The dictionary definition of the term was expanded to include a plethora of new metaphorical meanings, most of which I shall not be able to list, let alone discuss here.² For the purpose of this article, however, I would like to shed light on the term “archive” as it was understood by Michel Foucault. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, the French philosopher defined the “archive” as “the law of what can be said.”³ For him, the “archive” becomes a figure of power that decides what is allowed in discourse. While being a knowledge and storage system, it also constitutes a system of exclusion, an instrument for maintaining the status quo.⁴ The idea of “archive” with its new interpretations has also aroused interest in the field of art. Researchers studying contemporary art have noted that artists not only reach for metaphorical meanings of the “archive” in their works, but are increasingly beginning to take on the role of investigators of the past – turning into historians, archivists or archaeologists.⁵ Although there is agreement among art historians that this is so, a single definition or terminology facilitating a characterisation of the relationship between art and archives remains to be developed.⁶ In The Artist as Historian, Mark Godfrey indicates that a rising number of artists set about doing their artistic work by carrying out archival research. The objective behind artworks created in this way is to encourage viewers to reflect on how the past is constructed and represented.⁷ In his essay An Archival Impulse, Hal Foster discusses a selection of artworks produced to illuminate unremembered themes from the past by providing rediscovered visual materials, objects, or texts, while he is also interested in pieces structured analogously to the workings of archives – including fabrication of fictional documents and the logic that governs the arranging and juxtaposing of visual materials thus obtained.⁸ The “archival” turn among artists, albeit perceived⁹ and categorised in various ways, coincides with the historiographical doing‑away with the exclusive right of historians to write history.¹⁰ For Pierre Nora, this change signals the “democratisation of history.” The idea is linked to the emancipation of nations, groups or individuals that are given voice. Minority memories come to the surface and are now taken down from the perspective of those who were once oppressed.¹¹

Mainstreaming histories of excluded groups has become a common practice also in the art world. Artists, as Hal Foster observes, growingly shift from one social issue to another, from one political debate to another,¹² in this way abandoning reflection on the medium itself.¹³ By employing histories of underexposed, marginalised individuals, artists stand in opposition to Western institutions as manifestations of power, while the social dimension of their work provides justification for the existence of art today.¹⁴ In an attempt to address themes history has so far neglected, they often adopt methods known from historiography: they write and analyse events which have never happened. Potential versions of history, once known as “uchronias,” now tend to be called alternative or counterfactual histories.¹⁵ In his book History That Never Happened, Alexander Demandt, one of the first historians to delve deeply into what took place allegedly, writes about three walls that protect classical historiography against counterfactual narratives. In the first place, events that have not happened in the real world are of no relevance to historians; besides, historians have no appropriate research methods at their disposal to investigate such occurrences which, importantly, divert attention away from scientific exploration of facts.¹⁶ But artist do not see these limitations as impediments because no research methodology gets in the way of their practice. When creating purported events, it is the plot and the narrative that matter to them, not so much the “bastions” of footnotes that would verify the subject of their work.¹⁷ Answering the question “What would have happen if things had taken a different course from what is generally known?” constitutes the starting point for any artist wishing to stage a historical hoax. In what follows, I am going to present a selection of fictional archives and counterfactual histories set in actual circumstances of the past. I shall also explain how they were constructed.

Mystification as the subject of construction

As mentioned above, the practice of artists setting up fictional archives or alternative histories is in many ways identical to the work of historians who try to reinterpret past events, expanding them to include omitted themes. In their work, artists who take an interest in the past develop a coherent argument, construct a causal sequence of events with “one object of enquiry leading to another,” in Mark Godfrey’s words.¹⁸ Events joint together in a new consistent narrative have mostly never been interpreted within such context before. This brings to mind the work of Susan Buck‑Morss, a philosopher and intellectual historian who combined elements of Hegel’s philosophy with the Haitian Revolution. Step by step, Buck‑Morss demonstrates that the author of The Phenomenology of Spirit must have been aware of the events unfolding on the other side of the ocean which, as likely as not, affected the emergence of the master‑slave dialectic.¹⁹ A new reading of history, connecting things that have so far escaped the attention of other scholars, means that we not only have to reflect once more on past events, but make sure there are enough reliable sources to support the discovery as well. This is a situation in which readers find themselves surprised and disoriented. Similar feelings are triggered in the audience by sensational historical “discoveries” faked by artists.

A hoax like this was played by Yan Tomaszewski with his project Museum of Reproductions.²⁰ The Franco‑Polish artist decided to reconstruct lost sculptures and drawings of Mieczysław Szczuka, based on photographs published in the Dźwignia magazine.²¹ The original works have never been found, yet it is known that they were last seen in Paris before the outbreak of the Second World War. That was when the artist’s widow, Teresa Żarnower, left Poland to live in the French capital, taking with her the creative output of her deceased husband. Familiar with the history of the works produced by the avant‑garde artist associated with the Blok group, Yan Tomaszewski thought he would provide an exceptional epilogue. On 11 December 2014, he delivered a lecture titled Szczuka’s Crate at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.²² There he presented reconstructions of Mieczysław Szczuka’s sculptures and drawings, convincing the audience that these were authentic pieces he discovered in Paris while working towards a PhD. The hoax gained credibility from the fact that the artist did not show Szczuka’s “new” or “unknown” works but recreated only those well‑known to avant‑garde researchers. In an interview for Magazyn SZUM he said: “[…] everything has been made in reference to the images of things that are not extant so this is – as Didi‑Huberman would put it – a survivance (survival) of those images that have made it to this day and continue as spectres or ghosts which I am trying to revive. It is this process that interests me: the updating of something separate from us in time and space, the memory, the workings of it all, the changes. It is a move as slight as it gets yet, in my opinion, it ends up being gigantic.”²³ For the artist, the “act of repetition” is central to the project. It enables him not only to recall images from the past, but to go into hiding. Assuming the role of a reconstructor who recreates Mieczysław Szczuka’s works on the basis of a detailed examination of the few surviving photographs, he can step into the background as an artist.²⁴ Acting in secrecy, or withdrawing, is a method commonly deployed by creators of hoaxes. According to psychologist Jan‑Willem van Prooijen, this is also one of the five basic patterns of conspiracy theories. For a theory to be called conspiracist, a number of conditions must be fulfilled. Firstly, the assumption that nothing happens at random and all events result from other intentional actions must be made. The course of events is the doing of certain people implementing a plan. They act in collusion, clandestinely, their purposes far from beneficial to the public interest.²⁵

A conspiracy theory is formulated by Jakub Woynarowski in his Novus Ordo Secorum (New Order of the Ages) project. He takes on the role of a “researcher” who challenges the established narrative of 20th-c avant‑garde movements only to “discover” three centres of proto‑avant‑garde. The first is the “Nuremberger Constructivists,” a sixteenth‑century movement formed by Lorenz Stöer, Wenzel Jamnitzer and Hans Lencker. The second key group were the “revolutionary architects”: Étienne‑Louis Boullée, Claude‑Nicolas Ledoux and Jean‑Jacques Lequeu, active in the late 18th. The last of those influential trends was represented by Russian constructivists, with Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko at its forefront. In Novus Ordo Secorum, these three unrelated movements are united by the Kraków‑based artist in a coherent historical narrative.²⁶ Jakub Woynarowski relies on diverse visual analogies between works produced by the artists named above to construct an alternative history of art, using his own pieces to make it believable. Clear diagrams that visualise the continuity of new history, illustrations and photomontages featuring motifs from the works of the artists in question, corroborate connections between the centres. Cementing the whole story is Freemasonry, referenced by his version of history, which also gives it an aura of mystery. There have been many connotations discovered between works and ambiguous concepts at work in Woynarowski’s practice. The artist uses this method as a vehicle for unrestricted combination of stories far apart from one another, what matters though is that the very act of “detecting” references, or “inventing” them, brings him artistic pleasure.²⁷ Worthy of attention, apart from the intellectual game played with the viewer, is the subversive nature of the work, originally intended to undermine the established dichotomous division into conservative and progressive opinions on art. Woynarowski describes his chosen path as anachronistic “avant‑garde conservatism.”²⁸ He writes: “Those who do not go with the flow of their era remain anachronistic – anachronism gives you the chance to distance yourself from the present. Hence my concept of an alternative art history, based on »anachronistic comparativism,« or an attempt to create a set of artistic phenomena that defy »historical« stereotypes. This idea highlights cultural continuity and palpably undercuts the reading of the 20th-c Avant‑Garde as a new »antiquity,« radically changing the course of history.”²⁹ The artist is well aware of the fact that history is an object of construction. His creative output provokes viewers to reflect on how discourse, as Foucault understands it, constitutes a “system of possibilities for the emergence of knowledge”³⁰ and that representation of real events is made coherent by the use of narration. It is the historian who makes the connection between selected characters or events and encourages readers to interpret past events in a specific causal order. As demonstrated by Hayden White, it is difficult to infer interrelationships between events and assess their significance from chronicles or annals alone.³¹ Chronology as a science is, according to Jacques Barbeu‑Dubourg, “dry, laborious, unprofitable, offering the spirit a welter of repulsive dates, a prodigious multitude of numbers which burden the memory.”³² Impressed by geographical maps, the French physician and inventor designed the first known linear visualisation of world history, rather than presenting it in a list or table, as had been done before.³³ The timeline was 54 feet long and incorporated all significant, in the opinion of its maker, events from Eden to the Enlightenment. The scroll of paper was inside a wooden “machine,” which acted both as a case and a tool for rolling the sheet to the left or to the right using two crank handles like Torah rollers (eitz chaim). The “machine” offered 6,480 years’ worth of events in total but the reader got to see at a time a span of 150 years that fit in the frame. Introducing moving and animated images, the invention was supposed to make chronology appealing to the eye and imagination.³⁴ For the first time, Jacques Barbeu‑Dubourg’s “machine” provided a simultaneous view of certain events on one page, the distance between histories that had once been large diminished on the sheet. This world historical continuum poses the question as to which events did not find their way into the scroll. Not necessarily because they did not belong to the Great History, but because they never happened.

Jennifer Walshe is an Irish composer who has devoted the better part of her creative practice to restoring figures to Ireland’s musical history that have never existed. She has set up a fictional sound archive called Aisteach in which she has then “discovered” marginalised or forgotten experimental musicians.³⁵ Drawing on genuine historical data about the 20th-c avant‑garde as well as Irish history, she has written biographies of fictitious artists and provided audio recordings she has herself composed and attributed to the invented characters. The Aisteach repository contains information on over twenty imaginary artists, non‑existent music groups, along with a radio show and a music club created especially for the project. The Irish Dadaists are one of the movements invented by Jennifer Walshe. Familiar with the fact that Ireland’s middle class was hardly in strength in the 1920s, she has planted the Dada movement in the working class. Its members earned their daily bread at the Guinness Brewery, the only place at the time that offered working conditions decent enough for employees to still have time to pursue their interests when they came off shift. However, they went unnoticed by Dadaists in continental Europe because of their lack of commitment to pacifism – the Irish were at war against Great Britain.³⁶ Every decision regarding the biography of a fictional character must have a rational justification grounded on historical circumstances. Lending verisimilitude to a hoax is a key element in fictional pieces. An artist‑invented story must have an air of credibility for the audience to be willing to believe it.

Making fictional stories credible

In her essay On Photography, Susan Sontag writes: “Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”³⁷ The notion that photographs constitute incontrovertible evidence confirming the authenticity of an event is still quite strong despite recurrent cases of misconduct on the part of photographers. Winfried Georg Sebald’s books reveal how great a power an image has. Almost every work by the German writer intersperses text with photographs depicting people, landscapes, fragments of architecture, bills or receipts. Precisely interjected across the text, they make readers uncertain – it is sometimes far from clear whether this is still fiction or a historical novel based on true facts. The author himself, aware of the effects of his method, says: “we all tend to believe in pictures more than we do in letters.”³⁸ The photographs used by the writer often do not represent what the text says. But this hardly matters because we, as readers, are prepared to trust the author.³⁹ Christian Metz, in Film Language, wonders: “Yet why must it be that, by some strange correlation, two juxtaposed photographs must tell something? Going from one image to two images, is to go from image to language.”⁴⁰ Perhaps it is in this reflection that the hidden meaning of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne is contained. Two years before his death, the art historian began creating thematic boards on which he juxtaposed, among other things, various works of art, press photos, advertisements, prints and pages from scientific treatises. The mere juxtaposition of images encourages us to interpret things as involved in certain relationships; we instinctively seek analogies between representations, even if they are from different orders or eras. The atlas form facilitates recollection of images from the past but not in any specific order, not in one coherent narrative. According to Georges Didi‑Huberman, Aby Warburg’s work “offered an apparatus for putting thought back into movement where history had stopped, and where words were still lacking.”⁴¹ It undermined the previous divisions in art history. Michel Foucault pointed out the limitations of the categories supposed to cast light on the “abundance of beings.” In the preface to his book The Order of Things, he mentioned Jorge Luis Borges’s essay The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.⁴² The Argentine writer discusses absurd, self‑contradictory, and incomplete taxonomies that try to explain the order of the universe. As the French philosopher wrote, such divisions arouse laughter that “shattered […] all the familiar landmarks of my thought.”⁴³

The limitations of language and the trouble with perceiving reality through rational categories were also highlighted by Walid Raad in the Atlas Group project. The artist built up a fictitious archive to present the story of the 1975–1990 Lebanese war. By juxtaposing authentic historical sources with fabricated documents, he was able to address previously unknown aspects of the conflict. For this purpose, he invented some characters, including Fadl Fakhouri, a historian and the author of the Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire series, concerning 145 bombings that killed 3,641 out of the 4,386 casualties in the Lebanese Civil War. His “research work” involved creating collages of photographs depicting selected models of vehicles that were used in car bombings. He also wrote a detailed report about each incident, including information on its location, the date of explosion, the number of victims, the amount of explosives used and the make of car.⁴⁴ It turns out that, in most cases, bombs were placed under Mercedes.⁴⁵ Does this piece of information yield a valuable insight into the Lebanese War? Not really, but that is what this project is predominantly about. Walid Raad directs attention to how the discourse on the Lebanese Civil War is constructed. He lays bare the arbitrariness of some news reported by the media and demonstrates how certain observations contort the significance of real events. Authentic stories absent from dominant narratives can only come to light through fictional works.

This paradox was also noticed by theatre director Katarzyna Kalwat who invited artists to join her in creating a fictional archive of Maria Klassenberg – an invented artist and performer active in the 1970s and 1980s. The story of Maria Klassenberg represents a hypothetical fate of a female artist who has failed to attract the attention of artistic community for years. The hoax took the form of a performance that was not staged in the theatre but at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, as part of a retrospective. The show of the artist that had never lived was curated by Anda Rottenberg, while Maria Klassenberg’s “archival works” were produced by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga. Natalia Kalit played the role of the daughter who rescued her mother’s archive from destruction and Urszula Kiebzak took the part of Maria. At the end of the performance, the hoax is revealed to the audience and the following words are uttered from the stage: “being fictional is not the same as not being true.”⁴⁶ The figure of Maria Klassenberg becomes a symbol of all female artists who are not allowed into art galleries or the discourse of art. Through her story the patriarchal power structures that determine visibility are out for everyone to see. Besides, the project shows how the prestige of a gallery and the authority of a curator lend credibility to fictional stories.

The limits of fiction

In one of his famous lectures, to be later published in Six Walks in the Fictional Wood, Umberto Eco explores the narrative strategies employed by fiction authors. He begins by pointing out that “any narrative fiction is necessarily and fatally swift because, in building a world that comprises myriad events and characters, it cannot say everything about this world. It hints at it and then asks the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps. Every text […] is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work. What a problem it would be if a text were to say everything the receiver is to understand – it would never end.”⁴⁷ These blanks left by fiction authors are not only caused by their inability to tell everything, but a space for readers to fill in with their own reflections, associations or guesses as to what is yet to come. A hoax should come gapped in order to guide its recipients to the understanding that they are being faced with a piece of fiction. It is not there to mislead viewers but to play with them. As German philosopher Hans‑Georg Gadamer wrote, art and play have a lot in common. Both require us to suspend our faith, overlook our own lives and worries for the time being, put our trust in prevailing beliefs aside (epoché). We formulate temporary rules that govern art. Aware of their arbitrariness, we do not question them but abandon ourselves to the game. It is the game that takes possession of us, not the other way round, making it possible for us to step outside ourselves for a moment.⁴⁸ On the one hand, the hints dropped by the authors of a hoax cannot be too clear. On the other hand, they must be obvious enough for the audience to notice them at all. Hiroko Shiratori managed to achieve the right balance in creating gaps in the hoax that made his project Unusual objects from Japan 1868–1945.⁴⁹ In his work, the Japanese designer revisited the early Meiji period (1868–1912). It had been both a breakthrough moment in the history of the Land of the Rising Sun which had opened its borders after two hundred years, and a time of great moral and social changes that had also witnessed the beginning of Japan’s westernisation. Hiroko Shiratori decided to retell this story by means of “imaginary objects” coming from that period. One of the four fictional designs he created was a pair of scissors and a comb for a barber who had lost both of his hands in an accident that had happened when he had been doing his mandatory military service. These foot‑operated tools enabled him to continue practising his profession. In fact, such items could not have come from the Meiji period as feet are considered “dirty” in Japanese culture, unworthy of being used to serve customers. This paradox was intentional, allowing for the fiction to be unmasked. The designer made it clear in the exhibition catalogue that the project was not an account of a true story. In design fiction terminology, “unusual objects” are called diegetic prototypes. According to Bruce Sterling’s definition, they are meant to help suspend our disbelief in change.⁵⁰ These objects serve as props – vehicles for our stories.

The construction of the narrative in the exhibition design for The Face of God at Vandalorum in Värnamo is different. Designer Johnny Friberg and a team of artists and researchers “reconstruct” the works of Milka Belia Havel, a sixteenth‑century “inventor” who has never existed. They come up with the fictional character of an entomologist from Prague who was a member of the court of Rudolf II, the King of Bohemia.⁵¹ She looked for recurring patterns in the sounds made by insects that would provide a foundation for a scientific theory, naively hoping to find a divine particle. To achieve that, the inventor made designs for research devices, instruments or installations that would allow her to listen to the sounds produced by the tiny creatures. The Swedish designer set out to develop an entire universe to corroborate the artist’s existence. More than thirty people were invited to collaborate by writing biographies, essays, fabricating exhibits, drawings and documents. Taking part in the show were also contemporary artists who drew “inspiration” from Milka Belia Havel’s work. The result was so remarkable that, for a month, not a single person suspected the story was untrue. Two things come to attention here. The first and fairly obvious one it that we live in an era of post‑truth when verifying the information we receive has become highly problematic which, in this case, has been confirmed by the media that published enthusiastic reviews of the exhibition without so much as trying to perform an in‑depth analysis. The other problem concerns design. This exhibition, despite slight blanks left for an attentive viewer, was “overdesigned.” The sheer number of fake exhibits that lend credibility to the story distracted attention from the essence of the project, which was, among other things, the erasure of women from history. The choice of the sixteenth‑century Kingdom of Bohemia as the background to the events seems arbitrary enough. Unlike in Hiroko Shiratori’s project, the story was not contextualised by a clear paradox legible to the viewers. The Swedish designers did not think it right to provide an afterword at the end of the exhibition explaining that the entire story was made up. Their project should be considered more as an exploration of fiction and its possibilities than an attempt to retell a silenced story from the past.

Fiction as a distorting mirror

Jean‑Paul Sartre ponders on mental images in his book The Imagination. Having made a comparison between an imagined picture of his friend Pierre and the real person, he comes to the conclusion that the unreal Pierre is very one‑dimensional.⁵² However, Elaine Scarry believes that Sartre’s argument lacks validity. She claims that there is no point in comparing an idea of ​​someone with the real person. More interestingly, the absence of a close person prompts us to imagine them – the imagined picture comes to “life” in our eyes.⁵³ Fiction in art is very much like that, too. It is a sense of lack that elicits the willingness in artists to create fictional characters, imagined objects or counterfactual stories. Their motives for constructing mystifications vary, but what they do share is the urge to expose the actual workings of reality. They often attempt to critique them – by filling in gaps in history or undermining the dominant historical narrative. With their projects, they oppose the power of the Foucauldian “archive.” They expand what is allowed in the discourse. To this end they utilise non‑obvious tools and media – conspiracy theories, speculative design, literary fiction, photo books, para‑institutions and reconstructions of objects. They evoke a sense of surprise and uncertainty in viewers. They distance themselves from current events, thus creating a neutral space for discussion.⁵⁴ It is not the intention of artists, who are aware of art being a game, to deceive viewers but to encourage critical reflection. Still their fiction works do not constitute attempts to reclaim the past, they are produced in search of latent potential. In History That Never Happened, Alexander Demandt wrote: “our picture of history will remain incomplete if it is not brought into the framework of unrealized possibilities.”⁵⁵ By creating probable scenarios of the past, fictitious archives and counterfactual narratives, enable us to see the present as one of the possibilities.⁵⁶ They cause the wooden case of Jacques Barbeu‑Dubourg’s “machine” to crack open, and the scroll that bears the timeline is extended on all sides with new sheets of potential histories in a collage‑like fashion.