What’s So Alternative
About Alt-Facts?

Alt-Facts
Postmasters Gallery, New York
16.06.17 – 04.08.17

In an article published in The Nation at the beginning of 2004, Naomi Klein declared the previous year to be ‘the year of the fake’. Among the then-already bountiful proliferation and post-industrial data dissemination of lies, falsehoods and inaccuracies, the globalised subject-as-spectator saw an action-movie star elected governor in California and a ‘fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey’, as summarised by Klein.¹ In 2005 the fictional television personality Stephen Colbert, in a convincing satire of ( neo- )conservative TV newscasters played by the real comedian of the same name, proclaimed that such political subjects were no longer interested in truth. Colbert, playing the role of ‘Colbert’ ( homonyms across the divide of fiction/non-fiction ) claimed, in not so many words, that we had pivoted away from a Kantian critique of truth claims towards what truly mattered: ‘truthiness’. Rather than fact, the ‘truthiness’ quotient of some claim, story, history, or the like, is not based on whether something can be proved, verified or tested, but is instead dictated by emotion, by something you feel in your gut, so to speak.

And so, here we are: fourteen years after this so-called year of the fake, at a time in history that has subsequently welcomed the further entrenchment of simulacral ‘fake news’ and of the infamous ‘alternative facts’ moniker; the election of liars with ideological platforms rooted in the so-referred ‘double-sided’ truth; and rightist political figures whose rhetoric is given credence due to populist enthusiasm, xenophobic fear, and mass anxiety caused by neo-liberal exploitation. In a recent conversation, published in Texte zur Kunst, Sabine Hark and Sighard Neckel discussed how much of the purported ( white ) ‘working-class resentment’ that predisposed the election of the grandest of all fake leaders – the reality-television celebrity Donald Trump – was a mass reaction to the worker’s alienation via economic neo-liberalisation. This disenfranchisement had been blamed, instead, on cultural liberalisation characteristic of the decades since the events of May 1968. The blame was cast by twenty-four-hour news stations, tabloid news media, and so-called bubbles of information.

During the last two decades, artists employing subversive deception, with practices ranging from ( post- )internet art to illusionistic sculpture, have developed artistic models that produce critical and discursive sanctuaries within the turbulent sea of news coverage, media saturation and omnipresent digital image/information culture. Carrie Lambert-Beatty has termed such models as ‘parafictional strategies’, invoking the work of Michael Blum, Eva and Franco Mattes ( 01.ORG ), and Walid Raad, among others. In ‘Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’, she describes this use of the parafictional: performatives/premises/imaginaries that are not true, but that cannot be said to be untrue either.² Such approaches categorise the work of the artists exhibited in Alt-Facts, recently on view at Postmasters Gallery in New York. No Fun ( 2010 ), a work by Eva and Franco Mattes, greets the viewer upon entry and demonstrates both reality and ( virtual ) hyperreality: a video features a split screen composed of a fictitious suicide on one side, and the reactions of randomised users of the online video chat service Chatroulette on the other. It is documentation of their internet performance – playing on a laptop positioned atop an inflatable mattress – in which online avatars were greeted with the morbid scene; their reactions constitute the spectral range of the internet users, from active curiosity to aggressive apathy. In the second of two rooms, New York Times ( 2008 ), by the activist culture jammers The Yes Men, articulates the facility with which ‘fake’ news can be created and distributed, but also serves as the ephemeral residue of an action that provided like-minded readers with a momentary glimpse of media in a post-capitalist ‘utopia’. In The Yes Men’s version of The New York Times, printed in thousands of copies and handed out in the morning in cities across the US in 2008, readers saw headlines such as ‘IRAQ WAR ENDS’ and ‘Maximum Wage Law Succeeds’. In fake advertisements, energy corporations pledged to switch and commit themselves to sustainable energy. What an ( alternative ) world it would be!

However, while this set of strategies, or perhaps even tendency, has been developed and employed, its use has also been hijacked by original targets of the critique. Accordingly, these deceptions run parallel to, and are often indistinguishable from, the actions that global hegemons and biopowers employ to dupe and control political subjects. When, in 2004, The Yes Men famously subverted a BBC news broadcast through a series of parafictional manoeuvres, they were able to convince the world, and Dow Chemical’s shareholders, that the company would finally, after twenty years, commit to the clean-up and aid of those affected by the lethal Bhopal gas tragedy – if only for two hours.³ Over a decade later, a man identified as Nils Bildt and described as a ‘Swedish defense and security adviser’ spoke on Fox News to defend false claims about increasing crime rates due to immigration in Sweden. The Swedish government later had to alert the world to the fact that they had never heard of him.⁴

D. Graham Burnett’s essay, ‘In Lies Begin Responsibilities’, published in the catalogue accompanying the 2012–13 exhibition ‘More Real?’ Art in the Age of Truthiness at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and SITE Santa Fe, approaches the notion of parafictional and deceitful practices with due caution, and perhaps even with anxiety. He wonders whether such strategies and practices could inevitably become the oppressive tools of the very figures and tendencies that they initially sought to combat. The current moment makes it clear that his worries were not, and are not, misplaced. As such, Alt-Facts positions the viewer between two propensities, one idealistically hopeful and the other anxiously distressed, to allow her to make sense of the mechanisms by which truth, fact, falsehoods and, yes, even parafictions, are created, circulated and written into the annals of history – for better, or for worse.

Along this line, David Diao’s paintings in Alt-Facts clearly follow the parafictional track. In the same room as the stack of The Yes Men newspapers, the works reposition him into Western modern ( art ) history – a history written predominantly by and for white men. In 40 Years of His Art ( 2013 ), Diao paints and enlarges the famous invitation for Alfred H. Barr Jr’s 1939 exhibition of Picasso’s work at the Museum of Modern Art. In lieu of Picasso’s name, it is of course Diao’s – everything else remains just the same. Near Diao’s paintings, two works by Meriem Bennani mock and simulate two different structures: reality television and advertising. Rather than editing or subverting history in the way of Diao, Bennani’s work, instead, employs satire to interrogate the structures used, to entrench reality further into the fictional. In Fardaous Funjab, Episode 1 ( Pilot ): Fardaous ( 2015–17 ) she parodies reality television, while adeptly mimicking its aesthetic and format. Her show follows and glamorises the fictionalised life of a luxury high-fashion hijab designer. Instead of interrogating the illusions of entertainment media, Matt Johnson’s sculptures deal with material illusionism. They are made from carved wood and then painted, and mimic rumpled avocado boxes, Amazon packages, and the like. In all such parafictional works, the artists take ‘truth’ as a fluid coil to unravel, to investigate and, most importantly, to interrogate, for its processes of construction.

Following the definitions proposed by the crowd-sourced website guide to slang, Urban Dictionary, ‘alternative’ implies something that strays from the norm, from labels that allow for easy branding in creative post-Fordist economies. Clearly, the moniker is itself as subject to the same forms of commodifying value-production as any other ‘non-label’. When Kellyanne Conway rebuffed reporters’ arguments that the President had lied about illegal voters, inauguration crowd sizes and so on, she proposed that he was trafficking in so-called ‘alternative facts’– the contention being that there is an alternative to the reality that is presented to the public. And so, what’s so alternative about such a claim by Conway, given the above definition’s call for individualism? Quite frankly: nothing at all. This is a traditional distortion of data and rhetorical games played by the right, and by globalist neo-liberals as well. The only difference is the discursive packaging of such statements: it is not ‘incorrect’, it is alternative to the norm – and only an ‘outsider’ can provide such alternatives.

Returning to Postmasters Gallery and the artists’ attempts to subvert paradigms of objectivity, we might ask whether those strategies are so alternative themselves? I contend that not only are they ‘alternative’, they are more potent as well. They follow the successful subversive tactics of the twentieth-century avant-gardes – of the staunchly communist surrealists, of the anarchic Situationists, of culture jammers – by proposing different political imaginaries, whether by critique or by parody. They invite your close interpretive gaze onto sex toys designed for DIY prison construction by Kenya ( Robinson ), or via virtual reality glasses in Rachel Rossin’s recreation of a scene from Zabriskie Point. They beckon the viewer to be fooled, which then necessitates a later return to contemplation, countering the characteristic momentary glances of the internet age. The dialectics between the rhetorical strategies of state power and those of such artists remains stark. One could even say that such strategies provide an alternative to explicitly criticising those such as Conway, who only provides fodder for the ‘alternative’ histories they construct and peddle. Perhaps the works in Alt-Facts provide a road to ‘the elusive truth’, after all.

1. Naomi Klein, ‘The Year of the Fake’, The Nation, 8 January 2004 <https://www.thenation.com/article/year-fake/>.

2. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’, October, vol. 129 ( Summer 2009 ).

3. See The Yes Men, ‘Jude Finisterra Interviewed’ ( 2004 ), in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2009, pp. 478–84. See also <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiWlvBro9eI>.

4. Liam Stack and Christina Anderson, ‘Fox News Distances Itself From Controversial Swedish Guest’, The New York Times, 27 February 2017 <https://nyti.ms/2mxuJoy>.