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Writer's pictureTan Sher Lynn
Oct 25, 20198 min read

Artists who work with Fiction and Reality

Nikki S. Lee



  • physically, mentally, and spiritually explored different subcultures and ethnic realities.

  • Parts of Lee’s life, situations, identity issues

  • connections between performance and non-performance, existence and non-existence


Layers, Nikki S. Lee


  • Had street artists draw her

  • Curious how people see her in different countries

  • the layers of these portraits reveal deeply embedded sketches of Lee’s personalities

  • tackle the fragile interdependence between perception and identity

  • identity exploration, social examination, and experiential expression



Who Am I? The artist drawing attention in NY - Nikki S. Lee



Baik, K. (2011) 'The "Projects, Parts, And Layers" Of Nikki S. Lee', Vice, May 20. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z4y8zx/the-projects-parts-and-layers-of-nikki-s-lee


 

Lynn Hershman Leeson


  • Identity based works (fictional and real identity/ physical and virtual space)

    • identity in a time of mass, overpowering consumerism; privacy in an era of surveillance; the interfacing of humans and machines

  • Stages the self as both simulacral and embodied

    • LH←→RB: they exist as the interrelated sides of one Möbius strip of selfhood ∞

  • Pursued avatars in a variety of media - film, interactive video and Web-based projects


Roberta Breitmore (1973 - 1978)

  • Private performance as the fictional character

  • Real-life activities

    • opening a bank account, obtaining credit cards, renting an apartment, seeing a psychiatrist, and becoming involved in trendy occupations

  • Documented in 144 drawings and surveillance photographs, checks, credit cards, and a driver’s license

  • Turned to obsession - ended with formal exorcism, held at the crypt of the 15th century sex symbol Lucrezia Borgia.



Agent Ruby, (1998-2002) Lynn Hershman Leeson

Agent Ruby (1998-2002)

  • Reincarnation of Breitmore

  • Cyborg character/ robotic avatar

    • initially created and controlled by H.L but gradually altered by her experience of the world

  • Expanded cinema - Teknolust (film still)






At Her Temp Job After She Was Fired (1978)

  • embodiment (the body of the woman who replaces Roberta) and disembodiment (the absent Roberta who, in turn, has already replaced Hershman Leeson)









Desmarais, C. (2017) ‘Lynn Hershman Leeson: Myths and machines at YBCA’, SFGate, February 10. Available at: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Lynn-Hershman-Leeson-Myths-and-machines-at-YBCA-10923873.php#next


Jones, A. (2008) ‘This Life’, Frieze, September 9. Available at: https://frieze.com/article/life


Weibel, J. (2016) ‘Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar’, Bookforum, Available at: https://bridgetdonahue-media-w2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/QE8_XUCuRJukDY-I5osMHA.pdf


Wetzler, R. (2016) 'The Invisible Artist: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Multiple Personalities', ARTnews, April 20. Available at: http://www.artnews.com/2016/04/20/the-invisible-artist-lynn-hershman-leesons-multiple-personalities/


 

Cindy Sherman


  • Photography = Conceptual art (often private performances)

  • Sherman wants her characters to take on lives of their own

    • Used to obliterate self, but now allow parts of self show through

  • Reinvent self = Anxiety as a child, keep family interested in her, fear of being alone

  • Post-structuralist: stretch intentions, make concept fit theories


Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) (Identity)

  • Cinematic allusion: fiction that doesn’t exist in memory.

  • traditional ways media often chooses to represent women

  • appropriation of the space on both sides of the lens

    • Destabilized the traditional opposition between artist and model, object and subject

    • Male gaze : theorized by film critics in terms of spectatorship and its gendered codes of looking


Disasters and Fairy Tales (Escapism)

  • direct challenge to the art market that had appropriated her

  • sense of artifice created by garish colors and gaps that reveal the fiction behind the illusion

  • photograph - divorced from narrative of portraiture; instead exists within the context of fairy tale discourse, outside the realms of both fairy tale and portraiture.

using a photographic space that is a fictional space, whether it’s created in the studio or appropriating pictures from the Internet.


Respini, E. ‘Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?’, Available at: https://www.moma.org/


Adam, T. (2016) ‘Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’’, The Guardian, July 3. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/03/cindy-sherman-interview-retrospective-motivation


Cumming, L. (2019) ‘Cindy Sherman review – a lifetime of making herself up’, The Guardian, June 30. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jun/30/cindy-sherman-national-portrait-gallery-review-a-lifetime-of-making-herself-up


Freeman, A. (2016) ‘Your ultimate guide to Cindy Sherman’, Dazed, August 3. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/32147/1/your-ultimate-guide-to-cindy-sherman



 


  • Portraits and landscapes

    • Themes of sexuality, identity, and culture of origin, memory and nostalgia in a variety of other media

    • Fictional autobiography

  • Photographs : depict groups of boys engaging in ambiguous activities ( all him )

  • exploration of boyhood themes and behavior.

    • draws less from his cultural heritage (Cuban-American), than from gender identity and sexuality issues, especially

    • search for identity, self-esteem and a sense of self.



Fairy Tale Series (1996)

  • Reenact fairy tale characters

  • mismatches and distorts these cultural icons and he constructs his own world of hybrids

  • “Investigate social constructions of age and gender and I allude to taboos of gender role play, adult and childhood fantasies, and conventional ideas of beauty and the grotesque”.

Self Portraits Series

  • more personal narratives as he introduces himself as characters in a variety of questionable childhood actions

  • While these characters are perceived as disturbing or disgusting, their bizarre quality and vulnerability achieves in making the viewer sympathetic to them.


Amphibians (2003)

  • narratives continue along his main thematic exploration and his characters digitally clone themselves before our eyes in obsessive activities



Cubiná, S. K. (2006) ‘Anthony Goicolea’, Arte al Día, Available at: http://www.artealdia.com/International/Contents/Artists/Anthony_Goicolea


Davenport, G. (2002). ‘The Illuminations of Bernard Faucon and Anthony Goicolea’, The Georgia Review, 56(4), 961-986. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41402264


Irvine, K. (2002). 'Anthony Goicolea', Museum of Contemporary Photography. Available at: https://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2000/2/anthony-goicolea.php


 

Joan Fontcuberta


  • Used photography because it was a metaphor of power.

    • in the early 70s, photography was a charismatic medium providing evidence, when propaganda and censorship helped create a culture of mistrust.

    • Photography is reality or fiction,

    • What is the boundary between them?

    • What is the meaning of the image?

  • narratives from the photographer's fantastical portfolio, including dioramas, photographs, film, and related ephemera


Sputnik (1997)

  • Reconstructs the story of the astronaut （character）

  • "Ivan Istochnikov" is a Russian translation of "Joan Fontcuberta"

  • Documentary proofs: photographs, documents, military suits worn by Istochnikov, part of the spacecraft

  • Expose the construction of reality masked by the putatively neutral nature of documentary photography - J.F

⚬ challenge disciplines that claim authority to represent the real – botany, topology, any scientific discourse, the media, even religion


Stranger than Fiction

  • Documentary narratives mixing fact with fiction and science with art

  • Create ambiguity - images are just a construction, photography as evidence is just a conventional belief


Sirens

  • Sirens is a tool that teaches us to explain evolution, to understand how we construct models to understand reality

  • Pedagogy of doubt, protecting us from the disease of manipulation

  • People passively receive a lot of information from media and the internet - reluctant to expend the energy needed to be skeptical

  • His work created a real shock and backlash from the art world, because so many people believed it was true



Bruni, B. (2018) ‘Joan Fontcuberta | Sputnik. The Strange Story Of Cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov’, Photolux Festival, December 7. Available at: http://magazine.photoluxfestival.it/en/joan-fontcuberta-sputnik-the-strange-story-of-cosmonaut-ivan-istochnikov/ (Accessed: 17 October 2019)


Jeffries, S. (2014) ‘Joan Fontcuberta: false negatives’, The Guardian, July 8. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/08/joan-fontcuberta-stranger-than-fiction (Accessed: 17 October 2019)


 

Karen Jerzyk



The Lonely Astronaut ( character)

  • fantastical tone, the photographer only practical effects to create the images

  • explores themes of loneliness and isolation




Jerzyk, K. (2019) ‘The Lonely Astronaut Photography Karen Jerzyk’, Viral Bangka Belitung, January 22. Available at: http://apageo.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-lonely-astronaut-photography-karen.html


 

Aaron Sheldon



Small Steps Are Giant Leaps

  • Document his journey of exploration

  • Documenting reality in a fictional manner

  • “Our job as parents is to act as their mission control and co-pilot,” he writes. “To make sure they can explore as much of their new world as possible.”



Cade, D.L. (2016) ‘Little Astronaut Discovers Our World in Touching Father/Son Photo Project’, PetaPixel, April 27. Available at: https://petapixel.com/2016/04/27/little-astronaut-discovers-world-touching-photo-project/


 

Fiona Tan


  • Indonesia ➜ Netherlands

  • Explorations of memory, time, history and the role of visual images are key

  • Photography and film - research, classification and the archive

  • fascination with the mutability of identity



  • Imagined life of Cornelia van Rijn, daughter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

  • Tan recreates her biography

  • Omission from history books gave artist’s imagination an opportunity to free reign

How we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others?


  • Film made of still images

  • Hybrid of fiction and documentary

  • Photographs from past 150 years

    • 19th-century Japanese studio photos, 1930s military propaganda photos, American press images, amateur snapshots

  • Fictional narrative that shifts and bends the distinction between still and moving images

  • Explore the intersections between Japanese and western art and popular culture



Kenny, G. (2017) ‘Review: ‘Ascent’ of Mount Fuji, Guided by Over 4,000 Images’, The New York Times, June 6. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/movies/ascent-review.html


Lund, C. (2017) ‘Review: Ascent’, Slant, June 6. Available at: https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/ascent/


Risker, P. (2017) ‘Fiona Tan’s Ascent’, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, January 17. Available at: https://www.asff.co.uk/fiona-tans-ascent/


e-flux. (2015) ‘National Museum of Norway - Fiona Tan. Geography of Time’, September 8. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/877/fiona-tan-geography-of-time/


 

Henry Darger


  • Writer and artist who worked as a hospital custodian (Outsider Artist)

  • Kept mostly to himself, not quite reclusive but not incredibly social “in his own world”

  • His own life: reality or fiction?


The Realms of the Unreal



The Vivian Girls, the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion

  • compensate for a daily life of loneliness and inconsequence

  • a result of his own childhood sufferings - Orphaned and institutionalized


  1. Posthumously discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript

  2. Based on the themes of war and the sufferings of innocent children

  3. Darger used a patchwork collage to build up his compositions,

⚬ He traced figures from every possible source (above all, comics and mail order

catalogues) and at some considerable expense had them photographically enlarged so

that he could trace over them again and add them to his pictures.




Biesenbach, K. (2014) ‘Henry Darger’,Prestel, Available at: https://prestelpublishing.randomhouse.de/


Artspace Editors. (2018) ‘The Mysterious Story of Outsider Artist Henry Darger & the Vivian Girls of the "Realms of the Unreal"’, Artspace, June 15. Available at: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_


Steinhauer, J. (2013) ‘On Henry Darger’s 15,000-Page Novel’, Hyperallergic, February 18. Available at: https://hyperallergic.com/65318/on-henry-dargers-15000-page-novel/


Hansen, T. (2013) 'Writing the Unreal: Authorship and Identity in Henry Darger's In the Realms of the Unreal', The Department of English, University of Michigan, Available at: https://lsa.umich.edu/


 


  • Photograph staged images, not found in everyday world

⚬ Photography deals with perceived truth or reserved reality; paintings are known to be

from someone’s mind

  • Humans' relationship to the environment and to technology

  • Be imaginative with the ideas so that our impression of nature isn't just based on what we know or what we think we know through science



The Architect’s Brother

  • Merged 5-50 images through an adapted form of the paper negative process

  • Robert’s character:

⚬ An ‘everyman’ playing a game of survival in a post-apocalyptic universe

⚬ not so much self portraiture, but more as a stand in for humanity

⚬ sadness, hope, futility: viewers are able to project themselves into that kind of

sensibility

⚬ connections between Everyman’s world and our own. Are we like Everyman?

  • Visual Parable: Theatrical, apocalyptic, surreal



  • “Dream reality”: layering, varnish and painting

  • Embraced color in exchange for the monochromatic toned

  • Broadens The Everyman’s engagement with others

⚬ Continue his yearning to understand and reverse mankind’s broken relationship to nature



Langford, M. (2005) 'Image and Imaginations', McGill-Queen's Press, August 16. Available at: https://books.google.cz/books?id=yZfltI5Q18kC&pg=PA114&lpg=PA114&dq=robert+and+shana


Stead, J. (n.d.) 'Robert And Shana ParkeHarrison – Insight', John Stead Photography, Available at: http://www.jonathanstead.com/parkeharrison.html




Cavanaugh, M. (2011) ‘Plight Of The Everyman: The Photography Of Robert And Shana ParkeHarrison’, kpbs, March 7. Available at: https://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/mar/07/


Hope, D.S. (2009) ‘Reporting the Future: A Visual Parable of Environmental Ethics in Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison's The Architect's Brother’, February 3. Available at: http://d3zr9vspdnjxi.cloudfront.net/artistInfo/parkehar/biblio/3.pdf?0


 

Joseph Beuys


  • Blurred the lines between art and life, and fact and fiction

⚬ What believed to constitute "reality" mattered more in matters of human action, social/

political behavior, and personal creativity than any definition of everyday reality based

on traditional standards of "normalcy," or social codes of so-called "proper" conduct.

  • Social sculpture: central interest was transformation, the alchemy of one thing turning into another

⚬ teaching, protests, student party, etc

  • Interested in discovering and communicating in mythic terms:

⚬ How damage might be transfigured or transformed

⚬ Myth had been poisoned by the Nazis, and now he would undertake a grand project of reclamation and decontamination, conducted in a purely psychic realm.



Anachronistic figure

  • Accounts contradict each other; events are repeatedly minimised or transfigured into myth

  • Mythologized experience of War in Crimea (1944 letter)

    • radio operator ➜ dive-bomber pilot

    • Plane crash: poor weather ➜ enemy artillery fire

    • Rescuers: Russian workers ➜ Tatar shamans

  • Evading responsibility or Self-creation?

    • Later life: irritated by how it was used for decoding his idiosyncratic and remarkable artistic language.



Bonami, F. (2005) ‘The legacy of a myth maker, Joseph Beuys’, Tate, January 1. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-3-spring-2005/legacy-myth-maker


Laing, O. (2016) ‘Fat, felt and a fall to Earth: the making and myths of Joseph Beuys’, The Guardian, January 30. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/30/fat-felt-fall-earth-making-and-myths-joseph-beuys


Jones, J. (2018) ‘Joseph Beuys review – a show steeped in fat, felt and fiction’, The Guardian, Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/apr/16/joseph-beuys-utopia-at-the-stag-monuments-review-galerie-thaddaeus-ropac-london


O’Hagan, S. (2005) ‘A man of mystery’, The Guardian, January 30. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jan/30/art2


Knöfel, U. (2013) ‘New Letter Debunks More Wartime Myths’, Spiegel Online, July 12. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/new-letter-debunks-myths-about-german-artist-joseph-beuys-a-910642.html


 

Jacob Hashimoto



The Eclipse

  • express his views on what was happening

“So if you're painting a picture of a landscape, it needs to reflect your view as an artist, your experience in the world, and what you see coming down the pike… We’re talking about the political landscape, but it could also be the physical landscape,....”



Chaves, A. (2017) ‘THE ART OF WORLDBUILDING’, Alserkal Avenue, December 11. Available at: https://alserkalavenue.ae/en/folio/the-art-of-worldbuilding-jacob-hashimoto.php


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