After-Image: The museum seen through fiction’s lens

Abstract

This paper looks particularly at the ways in which artists have employed photography in projects and interventions, which act to disrupt the established discourse of authenticity in museum narratives. Using four examples the article considers how photography has been used by artists to problematise museological constructions of ethnographic and historic veracity. In particular it focuses on the ways in which categories, such as “real” and “authentic”, which have traditionally been stabilised through photography’s “truth effect”, can be made permeable and discursive through the same medium. It examines photography performed, manipulated and appropriated and considers its role in (de)stabilising facts and fictions which contribute to a critical and ethical understanding of past events and their role in shaping possible futures.

Notes

¹ An interpretive philosophy concerning how understanding can be achieved.

² “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia” was a series of six lectures given by Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, October-November 1983 (see Pearson).

³ Foucault conceives of modernity as less a period in history and more an ethos or attitude.

⁴ Indian Reservations are areas of USA land managed by an American Indian Tribe.

⁵ A kete is a traditional woven bag or basket made from flax in Maori symbolism it is also a vessel for transmitting knowledge.

⁶ See online at <http://projects.prm.ox.ac.uk:8080/pcs/viewpub.php?pid=254&id=18>.

⁷ See <http://projects.prm.ox.ac.uk:8080/pcs/viewpub.php?pid=279&id=17>.

⁸ One progressive Turkish publication, Radikal knew the museum tribute to be a fabrication but gave it quite extensive coverage interviewing the “Austrian historian” before revealing, at the end of the long article, that Blum was an artist and Behar his fictive creation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Robins

Claire Robins is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of London. Her research interests include artists in sites for learning, curatorial practices and the shaping of knowledge in galleries, museums and art education. She has recently completed a monograph that examines the ways in which galleries and museums have deployed artists’ interventions to reinterpret and critique collections and practices. She is particularly interested in artists whose work might be defined as “parafictional” and who intervene in educational contexts in powerful, ludic and disruptive ways.