Superfiction

genre movement 1989-present United Kingdom Europe

A superfiction is a visual or conceptual artwork that uses fiction and appropriation to blur the line between fact and reality - inventing organizations, businesses, or whole lives and presenting them with documentary seriousness. The term was coined in 1989 by the Glasgow-born artist Peter Hill, who cited Karl Popper's falsificationism, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. That year Hill announced his fictive Museum of Contemporary Ideas, supposedly on Park Avenue, complete with billionaire benefactors; press releases reached Reuters and the Associated Press, and Germany's Wolkenkratzer magazine reported the museum as real. The strategy has precedents from Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast to invented scholarly fauna, and today spans practitioners from General Idea and Janet Cardiff to Joan Fontcuberta and Damien Hirst.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Invented institutions - museums, archives, companies - given plausible names, addresses, and histories
  • A documentary apparatus of forged press releases, catalogues, and archival material
  • Fictitious personas with complete biographies, presented as real people
  • Deadpan, realist presentation that makes the fiction indistinguishable from fact
  • Appropriation of museum, corporate, and media formats as the artwork's frame
  • Open-ended works that unfold over years, like living fictions

Key figures

  • Robert Smithson (1938-1973) — Early practitioner whose The Monuments of Passaic (1967) staged factual documentation with invented significance
  • Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) — Invented fictional artists in the 1980s, within a much broader painting practice
  • Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955) — Photographic fictions such as Fauna (from 1987) posing invented science as documentation
  • Janet Cardiff (b. 1957) — Audio walks since the mid-1990s superimposing fiction onto experience (Paradise Institute, 2001)
  • Damien Hirst (b. 1965) — Staged the pseudo-archaeological exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2017)

Example works

  • The Museum of Contemporary Ideas — Peter Hill (1989)
  • The Monuments of Passaic — Robert Smithson (1967)
  • Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable — Damien Hirst (2017)

Sources

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