A superfiction is a visual or conceptual artwork that uses fiction and appropriation to blur the lines between facts and reality about organizations, business structures, and/or the lives of invented individuals.[1]
The term was coined by Glasgow-born artist Peter Hill in 1989. Hill said he drew inspiration from Karl Popper's concept of "falsificationism," Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend's book Against Method.[2] Hill's website also calls the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges as an example.[3]
The Museum of Contemporary Ideas
In 1989 Peter Hill created his fictive Museum of Contemporary Ideas.[2] Supposedly located on New York's Park Avenue, the museum's purported billionaire benefactors, Alice and Abner "Bucky" Cameron, were said to have made their fortune from the Cameron Oil Fields in Alaska. Press releases were sent around the world to news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press and a range of magazines, newspapers, museums, critics and specialist journals. The GermanWolkenkratzer magazine believed the museum to be real and printed a story about it. As a result its editor, Dr Wolfgang Max Faust was asked to chair a meeting of German curators and industrialists to see if Frankfurt could build an even bigger multi-disciplinary museum than The Museum of Contemporary Ideas.
The characters within the Museum of Contemporary Ideas were later "turned" into another Superfiction called The Art Fair Murders and traces of both were exhibited in the 2002 Biennale of Sydney, (The World May Be) Fantastic, curated by Richard Grayson.
With its "Encyclopedia of Superfictions", Hill's Web site is something of an information hub on methodologically related artworks.
Probably the first curated exhibition of superfictions was "For Real Now" (De Achterstraat Fondation, Hoorn, Netherlands) in 1990 .
Roots and precedents
The practice of intentionally blurring the boundaries between fiction and fact has many precedents. Perhaps the best known of these is Orson Welles' adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds which was broadcast in the style of a breaking-news report in October 1938, and led many to believe in an ongoing Martian invasion despite a broadcast disclaimer.
Another example are the "snouters" Nasobēm (or Rhinogradentia), an order of animals invented by the German poet Christian Morgenstern in 1905 and then introduced into scholarly publication by the (fictitious) naturalist Prof. Harald Stümpke (1957).
Practice
Artists employing superfictions as a focus or significant part of their practice include:
Iris Häussler – many "fictitious memories", constructed living spaces of fictional personae (since 1989)
Oren Herschander – The Mountweazel Research Collection, an archive featuring a variety of material related to the life and work of American photographer and fictitious entry, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.
Shelly Innocence – Shelly Innocence is a former supermodel, international athlete and in-store demonstrator marketing Happiness™, Integrity™ and other intangible products. 2005
IRFAK Fat to Food Recycling, Glocal Affairs 2008, Mieke Smits
Martin Kippenberger – inventions of fictional artists in the 1980s, within a much broader oeuvre of painting
Leeds 13 – a year group of University of Leeds fine art students whose project Going Places (1998) simulated a Spanish holiday apparently paid for with financial donations
Seymour Likely – a fictitious artist invented by Aldert Mantje, Ronald Hooft and Ido Vunderink
Beauvais Lyons – Professor of Art at University of Tennessee and curator of the Hokes Archives which includes the Association for Creative Zoology, Hokes Medical Arts and the Spelvin Collection among others.
Hugo Markl — Contemporary artist Hugo Markl performs a concentrated reflection on receptive processes per se – deliberate intellectual error – in relation to the processing of text, film, and art: tradition, culture change, and art movement understood as intellectual auto-digestion. Within every tradition, overcoming artistic and intellectual key works has been characterized by mixing facts with fiction.
Rebekah Modrak{ReMade Co, a fictional artisanal plunger company masquerading as a real company.
Patrick Nagatani – Excavations, A series of photographs documenting proof of a worldwide ancient automobile culture.
Philip R. Obermarck – The Gammon Collection (2012), a collection of artifacts and items recovered from the Great Plains Society for the Dissemingation of Information and Education.
Michael Vale – Le Chien Qui Fume (2002 onwards). An historical satire that positions an icon of early 20th. century kitsch, the smoking dog, as an integral, but forgotten player in the history of Surrealism.
Alexa Wright – photography, including the depiction of Phantom limbs (After Image 1997) and other works that combine and superimpose visual artefact and documentation
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