One of our favorite things to do on tour is look out for local DIY publications. In this new column we reach out to some of the best we’ve found. This week is the magazine ‘Article’. We picked it up while paying the Tramlines Festival in Sheffield last week.
THITH: How long have you been publishing and how did you start?
ARTICLE: We started the magazine a bit over two years ago while we were in our second year of university. There are two of us that do it. We were both doing subjects, philosophy and architecture, that gave us plenty of free time. Working on Article became a sort of creative outlet and a way to do something that felt useful.
THITH: How do you fund it and how do you distribute it?
ARTICLE: We paid for the first two issues by throwing two gigs and charging people on the door. Now on our fourteenth issue, it’s largely paid for by advertising, the sale of t-shirts and some really really generous sponsors. When we started out and were getting 400 printed we would pick them up from the printer behind the train station and then walk up the hill to our house leaving the mags in bars and shops that were open along the way. Since the mag has grown in size and quantity we’ve had to draft in a friend and his car. This last issue was the first one we distributed all over the country. I became intimately familiar with the passenger seat of my mate’s vintage Scirocco.
THITH: Is it a labour of love? What else are you working on?
ARTICLE: Absolutely! We usually get enough cash to pay for printing, but as to the time it takes putting it together, which is a hell of a lot, that is free. Off the back of the mag we’ve started getting graphic design work. Its really fun and quite gratifying too, considering neither of us are technically trained. We’ll see how it goes. I’d love to put off getting a real job for as long as possible. If it doesn’t pick up, I’ll have to keep my job working the bar at a nightclub.
“BETWEEN FAKE AND FICTION: Darko Maver and Elmyr De Hory”
Written by Lucy Dunn From the pages of ‘ARTICLE’ issue 0
The fine lines between the copy, the fake, the reproduction and the homage have become the obsession of countless artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. At a basic level, themes and motifs have been used over and over again in art since antiquity: no one for instance can claim to be the creator of the Madonna and Child motif. Forgery too has been around a long time, and in the highest spheres. Michelangelo faked several archaeological ‘discoveries’ which he claimed were remnants from ancient Rome but which he had in fact made himself. Rubens was known to alter works by other Old Masters in his collection.
I will look at two of the greatest art hoaxes of the twentieth century: the master forger Elmyr de Hory, and the controversial Serbian artist Darko Maver.
The best hoaxes participate in the machinations of the art world to the fullest extent, while at the same time mocking the legitimacy of the self appointed experts and connoisseurs. Hoaxers themselves are intriguing figures, who often seem to feel a real anguish about what they are doing and why they think they are doing it, caught between a belief their skill is a great as the masters they copy, and a cynicism towards those who claim to be able to judge the good from the bad.
Elmyr de Hory became notorious in the 1970s, when he admitted to forging a great number of works of modern masters, including Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Derain, Renoir, Chagall, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas. He had an astonishing skill for forgery, and ran off many of his finest works in under an hour. Despite his talent, de Hory aspired to be a genuine artist, and many times throughout his life would attempt to make a living from his own work, but found himself unable to sell it and would inevitably return, often reluctantly, to forgery. He disliked dealing with galleries, and on several occasions entered into partnerships with other fraudsters who would sell the work for him. These partnerships however inevitably led to de Hory being paid a relative pittance for his work, compared to the sums the dealers and galleries were selling them for. After many years on the run from Interpol, he was arrested in 1968 and served several months in a Spanish jail. Ultimately, his activities came to a tragic end. De Hory attempted suicide more than once, and finally took his own life in 1976. At this point, he knew he was due to be extradited to France and sent back to prison, he could no longer make a living from his forgeries which were increasingly recognisable as he got older, he had no money and even the house he lived in was being claimed by one of his exploitative partners who was threatening to evict him.
Darko Maver was a Serbian artist who came to attention of the art world in 1998, when photographs of his wax sculptures began appearing on the internet. These sculptures depicted grotesquely deformed bodies, and were noted for their brutal, unflinching realism. As Maver’s work became known, mystique around the artist grew. He was living and working through the death throws of Yugoslavia, when political dissidents faced heavy punishment including imprisonment. Then there was the nature of his art: as well as the sculptures he would make disturbing public performances, leaving what appeared to be maimed corpses in public spaces for unwitting members of the public to find, and alert the police. Maver was arrested in 1999 and imprisoned in Podgorica, where he later died. A statement announcing his death and a photograph of his body were distributed on the internet. By this time, his work had had gained notoriety and serious appraisal. The Italian pavilion of the 1999 Venice Biennale was given over to a retrospective of Maver.
The life of a hoaxer is naturally a shadowy and dangerous one, and in both cases the level of fakery and deception get much more complex.
What we know about de Hory and his work is complicated by his entanglement with his biographer Clifford Irving, who was subsequently discovered to be a forger himself, faking the ‘authorised’ biography of Howard Hughes. In his biography, de Hory claims authorship of over a thousand works commonly attributed to modern masters. It is not known to what extent this claim is accurate or myth-building. In Orson Welles’ final film F for Fake the final tragedy that de Hory’s life became is explored poignantly by the magisterial Welles. At the beginning of the film Welles promises that for the next hour, everything he says will be absolutely true. But several years later he claimed that everything in the film was fake. Who can be certain whether Welles, who plays the role of both narrator and magician, was trying to build up myths around de Hory, or his own film?
The story of Darko Maver goes far deeper as well. Due to the many hoaxes he had created in his art practice, many people questioned the suspicious nature of his demise, and wondered if it could be a final performance. Had he faked his own death? In fact, shortly after the Biennale retrospective, Eva and Franco Mattes of the art group 0100101110101101.org admitted that they had invented the character of Darko Maver entirely. To prove this, they released a photograph taken in the same cell where Maver was reported to have died, of the actor playing Maver alive and well, holding a magazine reporting his death.
The truth is that Darko Maver never existed; he was not a hoaxer, but a hoax. The photographs of his ‘sculptures’ were actually images of genuine aborted foetuses scanned from medical textbooks. The ‘hoax body’ performances were actually terrifying photographs of genuine corpses which 0100101110101101.org had found online.
Both the creation of Maver and the forgeries of Elmyr de Hory challenge common assumptions of authenticity. The Matteses’ work prompted a lot of soul-searching about the nature of the internet and how much we know or think we know about digital information, drawing attention to how easily we can think we have checked, researched, and reassured ourselves of the truth. The deception reveals the gap that is created when an artwork is translated into different media. At the Venice exhibition, visitors thought they were looking at photographs of wax sculptures, while in fact they were seeing reproduced photographs of unborn babies and human remains.
The lifespan of Darko Maver, from invention to death and Biennale retrospective was less than a year, which showed up the casual way in which media sources repeat what they have heard, authorised by collective wisdom. Afterwards, Antonio Caronia said, ‘If someone in whom I trust doesn’t certificate the existence and the value of an artist, the artist doesn’t exist’
But who to trust? De Hory’s forgeries throw doubt on those figures we would presume we can turn to for verification. With a project like Darko Maver, it is easy to blame our ‘digitised world’ which removes people so far from the ‘genuine article’ that they do not know what they are experiencing. Elmyr de Hory, however, created genuine articles, physical paintings which delighted viewers and fooled the experts. Apparently, he sometimes even fooled the artists themselves: Van Dongen was said to have been shown a de Hory imitation of his style and swear that he had painted it himself. De Hory did more than create skilful reproductions: he created entirely new works in uncanny renditions of the artists’ signature styles. The physical object, as both de Hory and Orson Welles stress in F for Fake, is the test of the so-called expert. Experts, we hope, have proven their knowledge in the chosen subject, and we should expect to be able to treat them as a trusted authority. In the film, Welles says ‘this is not the century of the hoax. We fakers have always been practicing our art. What is new is the expert, who speak with the absolute authority of the computer, and we bow down before them. They are god’s own gift to the faker.’
Well, perhaps.
Forgers often argue that what they do shows up the pomposity of the self-proclaimed expert, and perhaps to some extent they can, but the argument is so often made from the perspective of the egotistic forger who feels himself underappreciated by the critics. It is an attitude encountered time and again from de Hory, filmed casually saying ‘bye bye Picasso!’ as he burns one of his perfect fakes, in Clifford Irving, in Wells himself, dressed as a magician.
Eva and Franco Mattes’ hoax goes so much further, pointing blame at anybody who is in some way interested in either arts or the media. As a joke, the work of Darko Maver is clever, but is very cruel to the casual visitors to the Venice Biennale, for instance, who try to come to terms with the supposedly brilliant sculptures, only to later discover that they had been peering at horrific photographs of real murder victims, real aborted foetuses. The justification for using such images because they were already ‘freely available on the web’ is shaky at best, and damns everyone who uses shared media of any kind, which is to say everybody.
One last story, which shows that once you start delving into the art of fraud and fraud as art, you can find that the labyrinth is far deeper than expected.
The duo behind Darko Maver have recently exhibited a work called Stolen Pieces: fragments which they have chipped away or snapped off from great modern masterpieces in museums all over the world. They even have a fragment of Duchamp’s Fountain. Except that they don’t because in a sense Fountain never existed either. As with Maver, the piece was first brought to the world’s attention via a photograph, this one taken by Alfred Steiglitz, then in an editorial by Beatrice Wood called The Case of R. Mutt (the name signed on Fountain). At this point – or perhaps earlier – the ‘real’ object was lost. Every subsequent object known as ‘Fountain’ in a museum has been a reproduction which has come, via the artist’s authorisation, to stand in for Fountain. Though even if we accept there was such a thing as an ‘original’ Fountain, it may not even have been Duchamp’s at all: he did not claim authorship of the work for several years after it first became famous, and some historians believe that it was actually the work of the eccentric Dada artist Baroness Else Freyberg-Loringhoven. Oh, and there are also critics who claim that Stolen Pieces is itself a faked performance, which in the last analysis would make the fragment a piece of enamel which falsely claims to be a fragment of a copy of a possibly non-existent urinal which Duchamp may have lied about inventing.
Art forgery, whether it done openly, or as a hoax, or as a hoax of an entirely different hoax, has been around for a long time, and the layers just keep getting deeper. Ultimately though, the hoaxers tend to find themselves isolated. There are numerous fake and inferior ‘de Horys’ on the market today, which both add to his myth and discredit his reputation. The master himself was swindled many times over in his lifetime. Eva and Franco Mattes live continually on the move, at risk of arrest. It is a practice which, once started, can all too swiftly suffocate the faker under the layers of his own deception.
See more and get back-issues of ARTICLE here.
When we’re writing songs or working on ideas for things we often keep a lot of reference material most of which is images we find on-line and such. While we were writing ‘Pigeons’ we had kept these photographs from Bill Henson.
