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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.
— Johanna Skibsrud, Author of The Sentimentalists, Winner of the Giller Prize
A parlour game? A sly wink-and-nod? A cruel but usually harmless trick perpetrated on the unwary? All of my previous associations with the hoax have been overturned by this elegantly argued, deeply thoughtful, and passionately political book. Drawing on an abundance of examples from visual arts and literature produced in Canada, Heather Jessup shows us how these seemingly momentary glitches in the fabric of our deeply held assumptions and conventions have the interruptive power to turn our reflections towards the searing disruptions of colonization, genocide, and institutionally sanctioned cruelty. This is a rare, creative work of cultural scholarship
— Lorraine York, Senator William McMaster Chair, Canadian Literatures and Cultures, McMaster University
In this immensely readable book, Jessup makes the case for the necessity of disruption. This is Not a Hoax proves that our innate human gullibility can be a powerful tool for questioning the institutions and experiences that shape our lives
— Mandy Len Catron, author of How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays
Introduction: Little Disrupters
Part One: A Novel in Three Dimensions
The Haptic Conceptual Artwork of Iris Häussler
Haptic Conceptual Art
The Museum Label’s Pact
Complicated Complicity: The Necessity of a Viewer
With Open Eyes: Revising the Historical Tour
Mistakenness and Disorientation: Responses to Iris Häussler’s Hoax
(Pissing?) On the Museum’s Authority
Part Two: Unsettling Images
Decolonizing Ethnographies in the Artworks of Brian Jungen, Jeff Wall, and Rebecca Belmore
Reverse Ethnography: Artistic Response to Colonialism and Classification
Dubious Origins: Paul Kane’s Nineteenth-Century Canadian Ethnographic Art
The Reverse Ethnography of Brian Jungen’s Sketches Solicited for Wall Drawings
The Near-Documentary Photography of Jeff Wall
Unsettling Acts of Remembrance: Rebecca Belmore’s Wild and Vigil
Part Three: Imagining the Author
The Heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, Erín Moure, and David Solway
What Is a Heteronym?
Metaphoric Possibilities: Translating the As If of a Portuguese Shepherd
Collaborative Possibilities: The Interfering Theatrics of a Galacian Theatre Director
Critical Possibilities: A Greek Fisherman Suffering from the “Malady of Atwoodism”
Translational Possibilities: (Dis)comforts of the Mother Tongue
Conclusion: The Art of Stumbling