[-empyre-] Warhol legacy-- How Real is Real?

Thu Jun 8 15:00:25 AEST 2017

Hi Renate and Anna,

Not as a proper response to your thoughtful exchange, but in an effort to voice a preoccupation of mine, discussion of fake prompts me to immediately think of fake food, esp how food enacts and complicated divisions between fake/mock/real. There are so many kinds of fake food—edible “fake” meats, inedible fakes, like for display at restaurants, and edible products like the egg log (make your own! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0TMVq3dQu4). (Norbert Schoerner and Steve Nakamura wrote a book about fake food models: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/03/25/468622469/artisanal-plastic-japans-fake-food-is-a-real-art.) And then there are foods like Splenda, which is artificial yet somehow we don’t think of it as a fake food. Food also gets stretched & economized & climate adapted—plastic rice, wax in chocolate. Food worlds have perhaps never been rigid about fakeries. 

And an aside—Pope Francis recently declared fake news to be akin to coprophilia! “I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into – no offence intended – the sickness of coprophilia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/07/pope-compares-fake-news-consumption-to-eating-faeces-coprophilia ). The truth of poo!

More anon as we report back from our events tomorrow.

Lindsay

On 7/06/2017, 7:19 PM, "Anna Munster" <a.munster at unsw.edu.au> wrote:

    ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
    Renate - thanks for that gem from the past-present!

    This is exactly what art can do - create a kind of space (time) in which multiple temporalities co-exist and complicate each other. FAKE news rests on a kind of ‘only here and now’ and ‘only because I said so” set of ‘facts’.

    One thing that I think art can do is to change these kinds of rigidities…..I’m wondering what other artists are currently dialoguing, intervening in to FAKE right vs wrong… it would be great to hear from other artists on the list!

    Media artists, all and one, are there any fake-real Warhols out there who might be replying to Larious? Or….?What are the aesthetic politics possible to open up and loosen fakespace?

    cheers Anna

    > On 7 Jun 2017, at 8:40 AM, Renate Terese Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:
    > 
    > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
    > Dear all, 
    > Thanks Anna and Lindsay for telling us a bit about your upcoming event at the University of New South Wales on Friday.  I wish we were a bit closer so we could attend but for now will rely on your reportage.  Really looking forward to it as the month unfolds.  I would like to pause a bit for this post at least on the question you post early on in this morning, 
    > 
    > Anna wrote <snip>
    > Is it the case that (the)media and arts are located in completely different spaces and are responding with totally different tactics or strategies in the wake of ‘post-truth’ politics? 
    > It seems as though so much old media is caught up within an epistemological chasm, flung back and forth between being a pack of liars and defending the ‘facts’. Being duly investigative. 
    > The social media scape, on the other hand, feeds itself on more and more elaborate stoushes around ‘lies’, rumour and ironic irony…
    > <snip>
    > 
    > In the March 2017 issue of Frieze magazine, writer Pablo Larious, wrote a hilarious” letter” to Andy Warhol in his essay “How Real is Real? From Donald Trump’s post-truth to Andy Warhol’s philosophy, and back again.”  In essence the essay takes the form of a letter to Warhol that sets the stage of life, art and politics within the pro-wrestling world.  That world was one of Warhol’s favorite where in 1985 he was interviewed after a Wrestling-Mania event in Madison Square garden.  Larious, an Berlin based art critic trained in comparative literature, reminds us that the root of the  word wrestling actually means to ‘steal’ or ‘distort the meaning of.’ 
    > 
    > Larious asks questions to Warhol as if he were alive today in 2017 in the middle of a rigged world:
    > “Would you like to talk to me sometime about how daily life became so spectacularly news worthy, so fake…I’d like to ask you about the sad irony, in 2017…Is it okay if I ask you about your relationship to a man named Donald Trump—“  Ironically, it was Warhol who wrote twenty plus years ago a potential script for Donald Trump, “the president has so much good publicizing potential.” In fact Warhol intersected with Trump on several occasions over a silkscreen print. In turn it was Trump who quoted Warhol’s writing “good business is the best art” printed in two of Trump’s books.  
    > 
    > Given the legacy that Warhol left, the convergence of life and art, business and brand, I ponder over how old and social media has been archived, fragmented, re-used to such as extent that both create gaps of innuendo for all facets of our existence including politics.  Larious critically asks his readers if it is possible that we discern “fakery” and “mockery” from the “real” in an age where everything is layered with the discrepancies of digital re-production and  social media.
    > 
    > Tim and I are looking forward to more discussions on fake news especially through the lens of our global subscribers.  Hope you will all feel free to post. 
    > Renate
    > 
    > 
    > Renate Ferro
    > Visiting Associate Professor
    > Director of Undergraduate Studies
    > Department of Art
    > Tjaden Hall 306
    > rferro at cornell.edu
    > 
    > 
    > 
    > 
    > 
    > 
    > 
    > On 6/6/17, 4:51 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Anna Munster" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of a.munster at unsw.edu.au> wrote:
    > 
    >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
    >> Thanks Renata and Tim!
    >> 
    >> Lindsay and I are pretty interested in asking about what art might do in the global fakescape currently permeating the atmosphere.
    >> 
    >> Is it the case that (the)media and arts are located in completely different spaces and are responding with totally different tactics or strategies in the wake of ‘post-truth’ politics? 
    >> It seems as though so much old media is caught up within an epistemological chasm, flung back and forth between being a pack of liars and defending the ‘facts’. Being duly investigative. 
    >> The social media scape, on the other hand, feeds itself on more and more elaborate stoushes around ‘lies’, rumour and ironic irony…
    >> 
    >> What powers might art hold to do something different? Isn’t art built upon the fake, upon reflexivity about its own performativity: The Yes Men, Pierre Huyghe,AUDINT (http://audint.net/n2017/deadrecordoffice/), The Museum of Jurassic Technology….all deploy the fake in another spacetime than in opposition to the ‘real’ or the ‘true’…..
    >> 
    >> We are about to run an event: FAKE NEWS from the Art and Politics Bureau’ as Renate mentioned…..we’ll let you know what we have to ‘report’ (already a problem and questioned by new and experimental forms of documentary)…
    >> 
    >> cheers Anna
    >> 
    >> Professor Anna Munster
    >> UNSW Art and Design.
    >> Sydney, Australia
    >> 
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