'False Witness'

February 22 - March 1, 2001

[Art Reviews]

Fabulous forgeries

False Witness plays with the truth at the David Winton Bell Gallery

by Bill Rodriguez
FALSE WITNESS. Installations by Joan Fontcuberta and Kahn/Selesnick. At Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery through March 11.

The two ambitious art projects at the David Winton Bell Gallery, collectively called False Witness: Installations by Joan Fontcuberta and Kahn/Selesnick, complement each other neatly. Both play with the conceptual art sub-genre of false attribution, and there's a wonderful symbiosis that occurs as the light each shines on their particular mode of deception spills across the gallery to illuminate the other work in the Brown University show.
Fontcuberta has staged an elaborate mock hoax that ripples with déjà vu. With photographs and artifacts, he charts the life of a cosmonaut supposedly killed during the Soyuz 2 -- an actual, but supposedly unmanned, space flight in 1968. If his exhibition were in a Moscow air and space museum rather than an art gallery, we would have no reason to suspect we were being hoodwinked -- or winked at.
This reminder of how vulnerable we are to sociopolitical and historical flim-flam (not to mention "honest" distortions from bias) is a wide-angle view of our credulousness, to which Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick hold up a magnifying glass. They examine the psychology of misbelief with whimsy but with no less meticulous detail, creating a fantastical post-apocalyptic world of the future. They also provide photos and artifacts -- which have come back to us through time-travel that this otherwise primitive culture has discovered.
Identify at all with the superstitious dystopian innocents, and you better understand how the Soviet Union could get away with rewriting history, as Fontcuberta reminds us. If his doctored Pravda pictures remind you of freeze-frames from the Zapruder film, you can understand the yearning for certainty that those naïfs of the future -- and crystal-petting New Agers of the present? -- stand on in lieu of epistemological bedrock.
The Fontcuberta portion is titled Sputnik. When the artist learned that the second Soyuz flight was the only one without a cosmonaut, he was fascinated with the notion that the Soviets had plenty enough practice in Stalinist days to erase a dead man from history. So he decided to accomplish the reverse, creating such a person and inserting images of a fictional Ivan Istochnikov (actually, the artist himself) into everything from newspaper clippings to school yearbooks and group photos. Over a 10-year period, Fontcuberta did his research: travelling to Russia, collecting material to manipulate, even interviewing cosmonauts.
The result, first displayed in a 1997 Madrid show, is overwhelming in its detail, reminding us how a big historical lie could very well accumulate from sufficient tiny ones -- we're so impressed by facts. As well as Pravda shots of the cosmonaut before and after his inconvenient death by meteor, we see him in group photos from school days through photo-op celebrity. We even see a crayon drawings of rockets that he scrawled in kindergarten and the chew toys gnawed by the dog, Kloka, that accompanied him on the mission.
If the Sputnik show has a significant weakness, it is its single-dimension, offering one basic observation: that media can lie, albeit with impressive thoroughness. In other projects, the Barcelona-based photographer Fontcuberta has created alternative universes akin to the companion show here.
The implications of the Kahn-Selesnick installation, Transmissions from Schottensumofkünftig (Scotlandfuturebog), unfold and branch out. The misty settings of island bog and rocky terrain on the Isle of Skye amplify the mystery of the odd images. These pre-literate "bogdwellers" wear or display bizarre objects, such as beak-like cones on their faces or a wheel-like lattice like a gerbil cage that one walks in. They perform strange rituals. One pair exchanges a block of lard and a quartz crystal, an homage to avant-garde artist Joseph Bueys, who had a fetish for lard and felt. Other art history quotes -- besides, obviously, the apocalyptic landscapes of Pieter Brueghel -- include a surreally out-of-place odalisque who reclines with her backside to us.
The photographs are Iris prints on rice paper, several of them long panoramas, with the detail yet softness of platinum prints. There are puzzling artifacts under display cases, as in a museum. A mummified "Messiah" figure is accompanied by a lengthy text that waxes Borgesian about the nature of time and the impossibility of abstract ideas being, so to speak, made flesh. A second tongue-in-cheek essay explains the apocalypse that brought this all about.
Of course, a shortcoming of this humorous approach is that any truly mythic level is subverted by our superior smiles. Cthonic depths can't very well be plumbed in a yellow submarine. Ironic distance, and the smirk it brings to our lips, is the Achilles heel of post-modern art that limps when it tries to stride. Some of the entertaining content here is drolly insightful, however, such as the implication that only a culture as disciplined as the Germans could survive an apocalypse. The crowning irony is that the serious concerns Kahn and Selesnick have about knowability and our power to make meaning have been muted by their aversion to seeming pretentious.

Fabulous forgeries

False Witness plays with the truth at the David Winton Bell Gallery

by Bill Rodriguez