This Is Not a Hoax

Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture

Heather Jessup

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771123662
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

This Is Not a Hoax shows how the work of some contemporary artists and writers intentionally disrupts the curatorial and authorial practices of the country's most respected cultural institutions: art galleries, museums, and book publishers. This first-ever study of contemporary Canadian hoaxes in visual art and literature asks why we trust authority in artistic works and how that trust is manifest.

This book claims that hoaxes, far from being merely lies meant to deceive or wound, may exert a positive influence. Through their insistent disobedience, they assist viewers and readers in re-examining unquestioned institutional trust, habituated cultural hierarchies, and the deeply inscribed racism and sexism of Canada's settler-colonial history.

Through its attentive look at hoaxical works by Canadian artists Iris Häussler, Brian Jungen, and Rebecca Belmore, photographer Jeff Wall, and writers and translators David Solway and Erin Mouré, this book celebrates the surprising ways hoaxes call attention to human capacities for flexibility, adaptation, and resilience in a cultural moment when radical empathy and imagination is critically needed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Little Disrupters
• Part One: A Novel in Three Dimensions Iris Häussler’s Historical Reconstruction at the Grange
• Part Two: Unsettling Images Decolonizing Ethnographies in the Artworks of Brian Jungen, Jeff Wall, and Rebecca Belmore
• Part Three: Imagining the Author The Heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, Erín Moure, and David Solway
• Conclusion: The Art of Stumbling
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index