Fictive art

genre from the 1960s Europe United States

Fictive art is a practice that produces objects, events and entities designed to support the plausibility of a central invented narrative. Such projects disguise their fictional essence by incorporating materials that stand as evidence of factual events - often formats carrying presumptive cultural authority, like 'historical' photographs or 'scientific' data - and so are designed to deceive viewers about their ontological status. The key tension is that no accumulation of artifacts can actually make a fiction real, and when the fiction is revealed, fictive artists may be taken for hoaxers or forgers. Precedents run from Marcel Broodthaers' fictional Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles (1968) to Walid Raad's Atlas Group archive of the Lebanese civil wars.

Mandelbrot set . Initial image of a zoom sequence: Mandelbrot set with continuously colored environment. Coordinates of the center: Re(c) =
Mandelbrot set . Initial image of a zoom sequence: Mandelbrot set with continuously colored environment. Coordinates of the center: Re(c) = CC BY-SA 3.0 (credit: Created by Wolfgang Beyer with the program Ultra Fractal 3 .) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Fabricated documents, photographs and artifacts presented as evidence
  • Authoritative framing: archives, museums, dossiers and scientific data
  • Deliberate blurring of fiction and documentary truth claims
  • Plausible historical narratives built from real events and invented detail
  • The reveal converts a hoax into a conceptual critique of belief and evidence

Key figures

  • Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) — Invented fictional museums and archives as art (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles)
  • Walid Raad (b. 1967) — Creator of The Atlas Group, a fictional archive of Lebanon's civil wars

Example works

  • Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles — Marcel Broodthaers (1968)
  • The Atlas Group Archive — Walid Raad (1989-2004)

Sources

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