Faith in Fakes

[Banksy: Exit through the Gift Shop (2010)]

Is Mister Brain Wash real?

I have to say that it was quite some time before the question even occurred to me. I'd watched Banksy's movie twice, squirming with horror at the artistic crimes of his artistic alter-ego (and nemesis) Thierry Guetta, but the idea that the latter might be partially - or wholly - fictional, a mere hoax on the viewing public, didn't strike me until I saw it mentioned as a possibility in an article about something else.

I'd always prided myself on having a good nose for such things. Peter Jackson's famous 1995 mockumentary Forgotten Silver fooled me for about five minutes, I recall. Banksy's prank - if prank it is - is far more cunning than that one.

Once the idea's come up, though, it's extremely difficult to get it to go away. Could there really be a creature out there such as MBW [Mr Brain Wash], terrorising the "honest" world of the humble street artist? How much more likely it seems that "Thierry" is just an actor, a stooge set up to take a dive, a non-pompous way of starting a dialogue around that old perennial, "What is Art?"

There doesn't seem to be much of a concensus on the matter even so. There certainly does seem to have been a big "Mr Brain Wash" show in LA in 2008. But, then, when you think about it, what does that prove? I guess the main point is, if you think Mr Brain Wash's art is shallow, derivative shit, what exactly distinguishes it from the deliberately shallow satirical images plastered up by Bansky and his ilk? What makes one set of images look fresh and witty and the other set look tired and lame?

[Banksy: One Nation Under CCTV (2005)]

What makes good art good, in fact? Clearly a lot of people look at Banksy's stencils from the Left Bank wall in Israel as crude propaganda. Others would see them as frivolous aestheticism unworthy of their "serious" topic. And yet to me they seem clever and heartrending at the same time: designed to communicate a big message in big strokes, but unquestionably capable of eliciting the same query from everyone who looks at them: "What exactly do we think we're doing here?"

I don't know what makes good art good any more than anyone else. If I did I'd be out there making it instead of sitting here talking to you guys. Nor am I positive that I always know it when I see it. I think I'm seeing the real thing here, though.

In the end it really doesn't matter if Mr Brain Wash is real or not (I fear that the balance of probability has begun to swing to "not", for me). The Banksy documentary he inhabits seems to me every bit as original and daring as his West Bank mural project. The reason? Because each of us has a little bit of Mr Brain Wash sitting inside us: the complacent Mr No-Talent who thinks he or she can get away with imitating other people's (or even our own) inspiration and feel that's somehow good enough ("the audience laughed; I got paid"); the time-waster who fills the world with so much mediocre dreck that there's no room left for the real thing when it does happen along.

Where do you draw the line? That's the question Banksy's film is really asking. The line between Mr Brain Wash and Bansky himself, on the one hand: the "real" (albeit super-tricksy) artist and his simulacrum. On the other hand, the real possibility that we ourselves might chance on something really worth saying, versus that easier alternative of continuing to churn out pastiche and self-parody. The need, above all, to shut up from time to time on the chance there might be something there worth listening to.

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I raised some of these issues a year or so ago in a post on Fakery. Since then I've come across another book on the subject, Melissa Katsoulis's Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes (London: Constable, 2009). Melissa includes no bibliography or set of references, and is - for the most part - content to tread the same old track through Chatterton, Ossian, William Henry Ireland, Ern Malley, and Helen Demidenko, but she's certainly dug out some striking new additions to the canon of fakes: some of the Oprah-endorsed "misery memoirs", for instance.

Th real question, though, remains: Is "Melissa Katsoulis" a real person? There's a striking lack of corroboration around the subject. The (huge) author's photograph on the inside back cover could really be anyone, and one is forced to ask the question why anyone would want to compile so essentially perfunctory and untheorised a chronicle of infamy under their own name ...

This fake book's fake cover is, in some ways, the wittiest part of the whole scam. "Melissa' (whoever she is - Andrew Motion? Nigella Lawson?) is certainly laughing all the way to the bank. Who's to say that half of those "roaring twenties" tricksters she's dug up are real in any case? What better camouflage for a trickster than making other tricksters into your subject matter?

[Melissa Katsoulis: Telling Tales (2009)]

Fakery

[The Hutton Commentaries]

The epic battle against recidivism at the Dargaville Museum outlined in a series of recent posts on Reading the Maps (and rather amusingly replied to on Art, Life, TV, etc.) has got me to thinking about the whole subject of fakes and fakery in general.

Why is it I'm so instinctively drawn to books of pseudo-history and ridiculously unlikely theories propounded by ignoramuses?

Did you know, for instance, that the "appearance of mu" in the word "Pounamu" defines it "as a religious relic from Lemurian times"? I bet you didn't. And yet it must be so, because I read it in a book, a most entertaining and interesting volume entitled The Atlantis Encyclopedia, by Joseph Frank (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2005), pp.228-29. Frank's book contains a foreword by Brad Steiger, a veteran in the field, and author of the celebrated Atlantis Rising (1973), among many other volumes. Atlantis Rising has a most intriguing passage in it which he considers the possibility that Atlantis may be all around us even as we speak!

[Atlantis in the Andes]

As far-fetched as it may seem, for one moment consider that the incredible technology of Atlantis was able to step up the individual frequency of every man, woman, and child, every rock, flower, tree, and the very earth of their island continent and translate them into the fourth dimension.

Atlantis did not sink below the earth in a single day of an antediluvian cataclysm: Atlantis trembled for twenty-four hours as incredible machines raised its vibratory rate until it could materialise in another spectrum of tangibility and establish itself in another space-time continuum.

Atlantis may be all around us and may be entered through certain window areas of dimensional interpenetration.

Don’t be in a hurry to find such an ultra dimensional door, however; a single day in Atlantis may be equal to a month, a year, a decade in our own space-time continuum.

[Brad Steiger, Atlantis Rising. 1973 (London: Sphere Books, 1977): 136-37]

Rather a lot of "mays" and "mights" and other uses of the conditional tense in that extract, don't you think? Why might a day in Atlantis be equal to a month, a year or a decade in our own "space-time continuum"? Because that's what happens in the Narnia books? Or just because it's kind of fun to imagine it? (You never know, maybe future film-rights might be based on the idea ...)

Steiger has his tongue firmly in his cheek, I suspect, unlike his acolyte Joseph Frank, whose solemn, po-faced entries on such subjects as "Wai-ta-hanui" ["New Zealand's oldest known tribe, said to have arrived more than 2,000 years ago ... The Waitahanui were supposed to have been prodigious mariners who navigated the world in ocean-going sailing ships, and raised colossal stone structures, of which the Kaimanawa wall is the last surviving example." (p.287)] or "Mu" ["Atlantis and Mu engaged in some cultural interchange, but the peaceful Lemurians mostly regarded imperialist Atlanteans with a veiled mixture of dread and contempt." (p.188)] would be guaranteed to raise the hackles of Maps and all his PC archaeological buddies.

Why the hell do people write this kind of drivel?, I ask myself as I leaf through my little library of Atlantiana & Lemuriosity. I know why they publish it - because it sells. Which must mean that people enjoy reading it. Do they believe it? Not all of them can be postmodernist game-players addicted to the spurious and kitschy (which I suppose is my melancholy motivation for collecting it), but I doubt they're all credulous Trekkies and star-children, either. it's a kind of region of speculative semi-fiction, I suppose. Nice to read about and indulge in as a kind of "what-if."

Fundamentally, though, I think its appeal is based on mistrust. We don't really feel we can rely on "experts" any more. Too many cases of intellectual fraud and self-interest in the academic and scientific establishment have left them (or us) with about as much street-cred as so many used-car salesmen (or politicians, to take it down a couple of rungs). "Who pays your salary?" is - unfortunately - the only relevant question to ask of most "authorities": in court, in the lecture room, in print, or anywhere else for that matter.

At least cranks' motivations tend to be fairly easily discoverable - when they're not already firmly emblazoned on their sleeves. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that I take a sympathetic interest in the views of neo-Nazis or Holocaust-deniers (or neo-Colonialists, for that matter) - but that's not because they're ill-informed idiots, it's because of the sheer horror of the crimes they're attempting to palliate. I'd say the same for apologists for Stalin or Mao, for that matter. Or any other gloomy old tyrant or mass-murderer. Sorry Mr Dolan, but I'm not too impressed by the morals of Genghis Khan, either ...

People who read books about Atlantis and the Martian pyramid and NASA's great Moon-landing hoax are not necessarily idiots (or if they are, then I'm one too - which might not be too much of a stretch for regular readers of this blog). They read them because they're halfway convinced already that everything told them by officialdom is a lie if not the result of a conspiracy. What else are they to think when big US companies have started paying their executives billion-dollar bonuses again before the ink is even dry on the blank cheques paid over to them by Congress? That we can trust our Lords and masters? That they have our best interests at heart?

Anybody who'd like to investigate further the relationship between literary fakes and the standard tropes of postmodernism could do worse than read Ken Ruthven's fascinating and provocative Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), where he goes through all the various scandals where allegedly "indigenous" writers ('B. Wongar', Helen 'Demidenko' [Darville]) have been praised to the skies for their sensitive and nunanced portrayals of alternate world-views, then "caught out" and denounced for their clumsy impostures a few months later.

The books hadn't changed. They still had the same fixed arrangements of white space and black letters as before. The only thing that had changed was the shitheads composing the reviews. So much did they hate being exposed as credulous dupes and tone-deaf critics, that they had to react with swift disproportionate rage to avoid exposing the whole nonsensical ramp of "established artistic reputations" altogether.

Funnily enough, I found Ruthven's book, virtually brand-new, on the chuck-out pile at Auckland Central Library, priced at one dollar, so maybe somebody inside that august institution felt a little queasy about its implications. Call me paranoid, but ...

No, seriously, the subject is clearly a complex one. But you can't go on teaching people to distrust fixed ideas and commonplaces, to test out ideas for themselves, and then expect them to except all the ideas you're trying to peddle to them. You know you're right - that your ideas are sound, well-researched, academically respectable. But why should they accept it on your say-so? It may be worrying to watch people reading books about Celtic NZ and the Chinese influence on the Italian Renaissance instead of "sound" historical research - I find it extremely irritating seeing people reading Jeffery Archer instead of trying to penetrate my own portentous and labyrinthine tomes - but you can't really blame them sometimes.

Why are they doing it? What do they find in these books? Those, I think, are the questions we should be asking instead.

[K. K. Ruthven: Faking Literature (2001)]