Additional information
by Antoinette LaFarge (Author), G. D. Cohen (Foreword by)
- 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...
Author Biography
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.
Number of Pages: 416Dimensions: 1.3 x 9 x 6.2 INIllustrated: YesPublication Date: August 24, 2021
