Memory is never just a straightforward process of recording lest we forget and even in the best equipped minds, it can be a slippery mechanism.It can be both elusive and intrusive and we can rarely be completely sure of its fidelity to the events or facts that it recalls.
The exhibition "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness " in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts 2013 which featured 28 international artists, asked the following questions-:
In a world where new technologies can radically reshape the original experience being depicted, how do we define what is real?
How do we navigate between truthiness and deception in everyday life?
When can fiction be truthful?
American artist Mark Dion 's digs appear to follow archaeological practice but, are parodies of these practices by Natural History Museums.Dion makes us aware that while the traditional factual displays of museums add to our general knowledge bank,they are not as innocent and plainspeaking as they pretend to be.For instance Dion coopts Mickey Mouse into his installations on the themes of animal classification and extinction.To do this he creates a hybrid character Mickey Curvier, a fusion of the French zoologist Baron Georges Cuvier and Mickey Mouse.At the crux of this fusion of zoologist and cartoon character is the issue of turning nature into culture and the way that provide raw material for those coercive tiny paradigms that Disney (man and corporation) would impose on the world's past, present and future.His installation "Curator's Office " in the exhibition "More Real?"entailed the construction of a artificial office, a curators office in the 1950s disseminating a story that this office was actually uncovered.It was an elaborate work of fiction that manifested in a room similar to the period rooms.The motive of this exhibition was to play with structures of truth and what happens when it gets disrupted ,when we use forms that we trust to be untruthful or to use forms that look incredibly deceptive to be truthful.
Within the context of a museum exhibition, Curator’s Office is a “period room,” an installation of objects, furnishings, and architecture meant to illustrate a historical moment by re-creating its interior domestic spaces. Period rooms are popular museum attractions that are both authentic (in their contents) and false (in their detachment from their original contexts). As such, these displays pose complex museological questions: How does a curator decide which moment in time to re-create? How authentic can a retrospectively assembled room be? How does one maximize both accuracy and educational impact?² Because Curator’s Office highlights the ways in which one person’s obsessions, sensibilities, and prejudices shape a museum’s collections, it can be read as a metanarrative on the problems posed by period rooms. “Today’s museums demonstrate rather than seduce,” Dion has said.³ In Curator’s Office, he aims to do both.
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| "Curator's Office"Mark Dion 2013 |
The exhibition "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness " in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts 2013 which featured 28 international artists, asked the following questions-:
In a world where new technologies can radically reshape the original experience being depicted, how do we define what is real?
How do we navigate between truthiness and deception in everyday life?
When can fiction be truthful?
Iris Häussler’s narrative installations, which range from the sweeping to the succinct, revolve around fictitious histories. Each project begins with a detailed biography of an invented character, which Häussler drafts with a novelist’s eye for detail. She then builds objects or environments that her characters might have used or made, and opens them to the public. Her best-known projects, The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (2006) and He Named Her Amber (2008–9), were elaborately theatrical, often unsettling environments in which viewers were guided through displays of sculpture purportedly created by characters named Joseph Wagenbach and Mary O’Shea.
Since Häussler is interested in the distinctions between fiction and reality, she does not immediately reveal to viewers that her installations are artworks. On the contrary, she goes to great lengths to ensure that they first experience her historical fictions as truth (later, through various means, she reveals their actual status). Although she is sometimes criticized by people who feel that they have been duped, Häussler remains committed to a gradual unfolding of her works that begins with “naïve, childlike fascination” and ends with a reconsideration of the work in its new context.¹ The entire process raises issues of authorship, artistic intention, and the constantly shifting boundaries between art and life.
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| "Collection of Small Artifacts" 2010 Iris Haussler |
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