Showcase Project: FAKE.

MUSAC invites Fake magazine to carry out an editorial and exposition project for the museum’s Showcase Project

MUSAC has invited Fake to develop a project for its Showcases. The initiative, produced by the Museum itself, will essentially revolve around a special issue devoted to today’s art, for which guest editor Tolo Cañellas has selected a number of works by contemporary artists, asking some of them to carry out specific interventions on the publication. Fake’s editorial line is underpinned by the idea that form is just as important as content, if not more so, applying concepts such as “copy”, “imitation”, “impersonation” or “appropriation” as formal tools to engage the reader’s critical perspective and suggesting readings on different possible levels. This special issue of Fake will draw its inspiration from Hello! magazine, appropriating its design, layout, sections and the luxurious artifice of its photography. The MUSAC Showcases will display an installation imitating the exhibits of any traditional museum. Based on Fake’s underlying philosophy, the exhibition will review the magazine’s history through its covers (published or not), with a special focus on this new and exclusive special issue. The magazine will also be distributed from the same spot. Close to 3,000 copies of this English and Spanish edition of Fake will be circulated free at the MUSAC stand at Frieze Art Fair from 16 to 19 October 2008.

FAKE. PIECE OF ART /pis of art/ Rewording, mutating, morphing, changing hat and changing tack, pretending to be what one is not, constructing and reconstructing the self, saying one thing and its opposite, being one’s opposite. For Fake, container is on occasions just as important as content. The form is the message... and sometimes even more than the message. Fake is known for its remakes, reconstructions, tributes, appropriations of other newsstand headers: from Vogue to Fantastic Man, through V, Super Pop or Vice. Under Fake’s lens, everything is subject to interpretation and straightforward explanations are considered reductionist. Fake engages in a manoeuvre to strip the Empire of Form of all its pomp and titles, baring the full significance of the content in the process. Fake’s readers play a crucial role; different people reading the magazine in different ways may derive an interpretation that is superficial or profound, clean or dirty, literal or metaphorical. One way or the other, the magazine is constructed entirely in the reader’s mind, and it is up to him or her to be merely inoculated with information or to find the key to life’s greatest questions in its pages.

These are the founding principles and aesthetic tenets of Fake, a magazine edited by Rafael Rodríguez since 2004 and distributed free in Spain. These are also the reasons why MUSAC invited the magazine to carry out this editorial and exhibition project. Faithful to its taste for appropriation, Fake should find in MUSAC an original channel for promotion and distribution. Fake has published over ten issues, each devoted entirely to a specific topic: cars, fashion, rock’n’roll, beauty or love. Why not devote the forthcoming issue to contemporary art?

FAKE to put out a special issue A key aspect of this project is the publication of a special issue of Fake guest edited by Tolo Cañellas. He will be in charge of filling this exciting issue with equally exciting contents. Half way between an editor-at-large and exhibition curator, Cañellas has selected a number of artists and works, many of them relatively unfamiliar to the established art circuit, transforming what was previously known as a magazine into a portable art gallery. The artists selected include, amongst others, Salvador Alimbau, Amadeo Azar, Juliana Beasley, Jemina Brown, Blake Boyd, Jacobo Castellano, Salvador Cidrás, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Pierre Debroux, Eric Doeringer, DR (American Suburb), Jon Mikel Euba, Alberto de las Heras, Michael Garten, Brandon Herman, Rob Mathews, Roberto Moreno, Shay Nowick, Darío Peña, Angelo Plesas, Carlo van der Roer, Morten Schelde, Azucena Vieites, Donatie Weissman and Lars Worm.

For the occasion, Cañellas has invited Cañellas ha invitado a Carlos Ballesteros, Ricardo Cases Jaro, Antonio Macarro, Aitor Saraiba and She Rules to carry out specific interventions on the magazine’s pages.

Thus far, the project could have been edited by any other magazine, but we all know that Fake is not just any old magazine, or is it? As well as working on the contents, the editorial team had to consider another equally relevant aspect: the form. An automatic trigger in the editors’ subconscious provided the perfect solution to allow for the readers/viewers’ active engagement. In the art director’s own words: “we had to add the possibility of an interpenetration, a reconstruction, for those who wanted to swallow the red pill instead of the blue. A reference that was practically universal, practically global, understood across the board and loaded with significance. An addictive header, loved or loathed, a hit, a major market player. Those who choose the blue pill will have to face the consequences of their brave decision (at least to get a bit of attention). For those who prefer the red, the labyrinth will unfold in thousands of unexpected directions”.

Indeed, using Hello! magazine as a “container” suggests all sorts of considerations: we can talk about how art consumption is falling into a routine for the masses, or how artworks are becoming commoditised; we can talk about banalisation and spectacle or about democratisation and the abolition of the Art System’s traditional elitism. As always with Fake, the reader has the last word.

Hello’s traditional sections (home, cooking or travel) will provide a thread that structures Tolo Cañelles’ heterogeneous selection. From the cover and in an interview illustrated with classy photos, his alterego will recount the project’s ins and outs. The rest of the magazine will include defining work by each artist or pieces specifically commissioned for Fake.

FAKE at the MUSAC Showcases “In 1973, Orson Welles once again threw the rules of the game into question with “F for Fake”, (…) one of the most scathing and compelling pieces of non-fiction ever filmed. Over a whole hour, the actor, director and scriptwriter promises to reveal the truth about a lie, following the steps of a pair of counterfeiters: one forges paintings and the other edifying lives in novel form. Welles himself (recently accused of being a fraud by critic Pauline Kaen) never forgets that he could be the third in dispute (...) Finally, rising above cartloads of cynicism and irony, the million dollar question is left to linger: who is genuine? Who is the impostor? Pablo Picasso once said he was able to paint fake picassos like no-one else... Thirty years later, the question is still blowing in the wind, bouncing back and forth like a maddened game of ping-pong.

Maybe because there are still so many discourses operating on the basis of the unacceptable idea that some things are “truer” than others, that some people are more authentic than others. (...) Without hardly realising it, most of us have fallen victims to a concept of the “real” that is as false as the (supposed) imposture that it intends to dispel. The worst thing is that, in the process, we have forgotten that imposture is the very nature of pop. That you don’t need to know about music to be a musician (Adult). That it’s irrelevant whether or not you’re Anglo-Saxon to make rock’n’roll (The Raveonettes are Danish). That you don’t need to be a teenager to talk about teenagers (Larry Clark). That it’s the impurities, the bastardisation and the simulation that create the opening for any kind of cultural activity. An impostor is also a creator, except without the mystification of ideologies. And if counterfeiters exist it’s because the “experts” were there to start with. F for Fake, to Welles and all the fakers, means nothing other than Freedom. Freedom from the restrictive, castrating ideology of authenticity. A line of thinking that goes from Artaud to Chatterton, from Adorno to Bataille, From Wilde to Warhol, Houdini to Bowie”.

This presentation, published in the magazine’s first issue, is essential in understanding the action with which Fake is to take over MUSAC’s Showcase Project. The back of the case is to represent the walls of a traditional museum: a vinyl cover shall mimic the classical red and green wall with gilt mouldings. At both ends, all the covers of Fake (including some that never saw the light of day) will announce that everything on display is precisely that: a fraud. In between both areas holding the covers/warnings, two plasma screens will play Orson Welles’ “fraud”. The remaining showcases, against a backdrop of generic museum walls, will display forgeries of classical pieces. On either side of the showcases, two CD devices will provide an audio guide of sorts, explaining the project.

The option is also available of extending the exhibition space into the digital universe, on a site where viewers can see the videos and listen to music that cannot be captured on paper.

Fake will also be circulated at Frieze (London, 16-19 October 2008), the world’s most vibrant and unprejudiced art fair, where MUSAC will be present as guest institution. At Frieze, MUSAC intents to reappraise an institution’s role within an art fair context. In order to do so, instead of acting as a commercial agent, the museum has chosen to present a number of projects: Dora Garcia’s invisible performance The Romeos, Carles Congost’s Art Ringtones and the action Moments of Intensity by Marc Vives + David Bestué. The special issue of Fake will cover MUSAC’s initiatives at Frieze. A few copies will be presented at the Showcases, as an invitation to plunge into this Piece of Art.

Showcase Project: FAKE. PIECE OF ART/pis of art/

Koordinator: Carlos Ordas