Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible

cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

When artist Michael Blum arrived in Istanbul in 2005 to prepare for the city’s 9th
International Biennial, he discovered that the apartment building that had been home in
the early twentieth century to the teacher, translator, communist, and feminist Safiye Behar
was slated for demolition. A remarkable, if little-known historical figure, Behar was a
Turkish Jew who had a long friendship—some say a romance—with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
first president of the modern Turkish republic. The two met in 1905, in the heady atmos-
phere of the Zeuve Birahanesi, a bar run by Safiye’s father on the ground floor of the same
now-condemned building. Throughout the last years of the Sultanate and the early
Republic, Behar and Kemal maintained a correspondence both intimate and intellectual.
Their friendship ended only with Kemal’s death in 1938 –the same year Safiye emigrated
to the United States (in fact, to Chicago), where she was active as a translator of Turkish
and as an organizer for various leftist causes.

Blum, who had been trained as an historian at the Sorbonne before he began his art prac-
tice (1), decided to give over his exhibition site to the documentation of Behar’s life. What
he constructed was a modest but thorough historical house museum, featuring installations
of Behar’s furnishings and personal belongings to be peered at over Plexiglas barriers, wall-
text describing her life story, displays of letters, photographs, and books, and a video inter-
view conducted by Blum with Behar’s grandson, Chicago architect Melik Tutuncu. Under
cover of the quiet, conventional visual language of the house museum, Blum was able to
address two publics, and two political situations, at once. For the local audience, the frank
discussion of Kemal’s likely affair with the Jewish woman, and her influence on his mod-
ernist reforms, served as a critical intervention in official hagiography of the leader so evi-
dent in Turkey. Meanwhile, for the large contingent of international visitors brought to
Istanbul by the Biennial at a moment when Turkey’s potential membership in the European
Union was being hotly debated, the life story of the leftist, secular, cosmopolitan, interna-
tionalist woman cut into stereotypes about Turkey as other or “islamicist”—perhaps remind-
ing them, for instance, that Turkish women had the right to vote earlier than their sisters
in France.

Plumbing local history in order to intervene in current ideological battles related to the
locale of the exhibition, Blum’s project, A Tribute to Safiye Behar (2005), fits into a model
of artistic practice that has been common since at least the early 1990s. This model was
epitomized by Fred Wilson’s 1992 Mining the Museum, an artwork-as-exhibition in which
the artist rearranged the collections of the Maryland Historical Society, enlarging the muse-
um’s “Metalworking” display to include slave shackles that had long lingered in museum
storage, for instance, or adding spotlights and audio recordings to highlight the slave chil-
dren featured as accessories of their white owners in antebellum portraits, so that they now
addressed the viewer with questions like “am I your brother? Am I your friend? Am I your
pet?” Working in the legacies of institutional critique and site-specific art, with site defined
now socially and historically as well as physically, artists from Andrea Fraser to Ann
Hamilton were able to refresh historical memory, suggest new lines of political questioning,
and produce works of art both visually and intellectually engaging to wide publics.

By the late 1990s, however, this kind of practice could itself be viewed in historical perspec-
tive, starting with what Miwon Kwon called its nomadism: jetting into a given location, an
artist spends time exploring its contemporary political issues and/or hidden history and
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible
cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

develops an installation to recall or intervene in them, before departing to provide this spe-
cialized consulting service at the next biennial or public art festival (2). As Kwon noted, the
nomadic mode of site-specific practice correlates structurally with the expansion of the
service economy (3) and revved-up international flow of both information and individuals
in globalized postmodernity, even as the actual projects produced in this mode oppose cul-
tural globalization by digging into the local and historical.

Born in Israel, educated in France, and a resident of Austria, with a CV that reads like a
catalog of the international exhibition and residency circuit (he has conducted site-specific
projects everywhere from Linz to Jakarta) Michael Blum certainly seems to embody the
nomadic mode of artistic production associated with the new site-specificity. As it turns out,
though, Blum’s installation departed in at least one significant way from that model. Peer
a little closer at the bindings of the books representing Behar’s work as a translator, whose
covers have an oddly pasted-on quality; pay a little more attention to all those photo-
graphs, in which Behar just happens to be distant, blurred, or partially obscured—question,
in other words, the exhibition’s authoritative visual language of vitrines, captions, and
Plexiglas barriers—and the fact that Safiye Behar is so little-known will cease to seem only
an effect of state ideology in Turkey or of stereotyping in the West. The most salient differ-
ence between Blum’s museological exposure of the history of his site and that of someone
like Fred Wilson is that Blum made his history up.

Today, three years after the fact, Blum readily admits that Safiye Behar is a product of his
own imagination. But at the time of the exhibition, he refused to break the carefully-
researched fiction he had constructed. To some critics, the fictionality of the work’s central
figure was relatively obvious, betrayed by details like the book cover, or a trace of overact-
ing and touch of dark humor in the video (as when Safiye’s grandson describes the death
of his entire immediate family in a freak accident in 1966—conveniently enough for Blum,
whose “research” might have otherwise gone on forever) (4). But some otherwise astute
critics accepted the exhibition’s claims, finding Safiye Behar a fascinating figure but the art
work itself flat-footed (5). In Turkey, press reaction ran the gamut according to media out-
lets’ relation to Kemal’s legacy—Blum was critiqued by the conservative press and support-
ed by progressives (6). As for the reaction of ordinary viewers at the Biennial, it appears
that for them as well reactions varied, with some taking the exhibit at face value and oth-
ers suspecting the deception. One critic describes viewers “scurrying back” to revisit the
installation once they discovered that Safiye was a fiction (7).

A useful shorthand term for the mode of Blum’s project might be the parafictional: like a
paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a mem-
ber of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit out-
side. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot
in the field of the real (8). Which is a nice way, of course, to say that instead of simply
telling a story, it tells a lie. It deceives tactically, and for progressive purposes, and in a way
that allows for the possibility of the lie’s discovery. But it lies nevertheless, allowing view-
ers to be caught in a “gotcha” moment of having been fooled, to wonder uncomfortably
about the status of the claims the exhibit makes, or to go away in a strange kind of edu-
cated ignorance, their worldview subtly altered by untruths. With this, Blum multiplies the
messages of the already full-mouthed project, addressing not only the two constituencies
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible
cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

of locals and foreigners, but visitors who experience the work differently depending on
whether and how much they suspect deception. In setting up this range of positions, Blum
is far from alone. In fact, he is typical of many socially-engaged artists in the last several
years who have felt that the most expedient means for art to do something actual in the
world is, perhaps paradoxically, to engage in dissimulation.

Take, for example, a slickly-designed information booth and ad campaign that in 2003
announced to the citizens of Vienna that much as sports stadiums were being renamed
after corporations that sponsored them, the city’s beloved Karlsplatz would soon have its
name changed to Nikeplatz, and that a monumental swoosh sculpture would now adorn the
historic square. This transformation of public into branded space seems to have been com-
pletely credible to most Viennese passerby, though it turns out that what they were expe-
riencing was not a corporate campaign but a hoax-cum-artwork by the Berlin-based(?)
Italian duo Eva and Franco Mattes, who identify themselves as “con-artists” and go by the
name 0100101110101101.org. (9)

Or consider, at a more lyrical end of the spectrum, the extended artistic investigation of the
Lebanese Civil Wars by Walid Ra’ad, who presents his work as parts of the archive main-
tained by The Atlas Group, a collective dedicated to the research and documentation of the
contemporary history of Lebanon (10). Many of the projects center around the figure of
Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a historian of the wars who died in 1993, leaving his archive to the Atlas
Group. The Fakhouri files also include notebooks documenting his eccentric habits during
the years of the wars. For instance, he played a gambling game at the horse-track with a
group of other Beirut historians, in which they guessed not which horse would win a race,
but how many fractions of a second before or after the moment when the winner actually
crossed the finish line the “photo finish” photographer would snap his camera’s shutter, as
revealed in the newspaper coverage of the race the following day (Missing Lebanese Wars,
1998). The historians’ game illustrates what the artwork demonstrates: the queasy space
between fact and knowledge.

It’s in this space, also, that activists like the Yes Men place their bets, in perhaps the best-
known recent examples of parafiction. Partially anonymous enemies of corporate globaliza-
tion, they pose as representatives of the corporations or institutions that they target: as
when a Dow Chemical spokesman announced on BBC that twenty years on, the company
was finally ready to take responsibility for the devastating chemical spill by its subsidiary
Union Carbide at Bhopal. Such con-art is, of course, ethically complicated, as the Yes Men
are quick to admit. But it can also be uniquely effective. “We need to be devious in order
to achieve a condition of honesty,” they say. (11)

How would you feel about Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum if you learned he had been less
than honest in making it? What if it turned out that the slave shackles he exhibited had not
been languishing in the museum’s storage areas, or that he had painted the black children
into the paintings he so powerfully animated? (12) The historically-site-specific projects of
Mining the Museum’s moment cleave to a model of radical frankness built into their sixties
sources. If Bruce Nauman in 1967 sent up the previous generation’s investment in art as
the route to “mystic truths,” he and the artists of his generation can be understood to have
replaced it with the mandate to reveal mundane truths (13). Minimalism, famously,
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible
cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

reduces art to its basic facts: an object, a viewing body, a space. Such works may not say
much, but at least they do not deceive. The other term used for this art at the time,
remember, was literalism. Hans Haacke’s ways of representing gallery-goers or art institu-
tions to themselves elaborate the same idea in a social register. Think how disappointing it
would be to discover that Haacke secretly stuffed the ballot boxes of his MoMA Poll at night;
or that the Shapolsky of his project documenting the dealings of a New York slumlord, infa-
mously censored by the Guggenheim Museum, was a made-up character.

At least in retrospect, this aspect of the period’s art seems related to the fact that the great
demon of the 60s counterculture was hypocrisy: condemn marijuana as you sip your cock-
tail, or trumpet American democracy while Jim Crow rules the South, and you earned the
disdain of the generation that prized authenticity above all else. Even Andy Warhol—the sin-
cerity of whose self-presentation was a constant riddle—can be understood to have cut
through hypocrisy with his works’ affirmation of their own commodity status; their refusal
to pretend that galleries and supermarkets are categorically distinct entities. We are no
longer surprised by such revelations, nor so bothered by inconsistency. When asked by an
interviewer what kind of sneakers he was wearing, one member of the art team that had
so convincingly sent up the global reach of Nike’s branding efforts in Vienna responded that
“I could even wear Nike. Don’t expect coherence from me, never…I am attracted by some-
thing at least as much as I refuse it.” (14) In a world where we are all bound into global
networks of capital, a world where the kind of alternatives envisaged by twentieth-century
communists like Safiye Behar are difficult even imaginatively to sustain, perhaps compro-
mise is the new clarity. And if so, then maybe the plausible is the new literal.

What I’d like to do in my remaining time is lay out some of the features of the art of the
plausible, and to explore, at least provisionally, the question of why it has appeared so fre-
quently in recent years—why it is that so many smart and creative people seem to think,
like the Yes Men, that it is necessary to be devious now in order to be honest. Perhaps the
most efficient way of doing this is to ask what would have been different if Michael Blum,
in seeking to address at once the ideological use of Kemal’s memory in Turkey and the
stereotypes about that country in the EU, had stuck either to the fictional or the factual in
his artwork, rather than operating in the in-between, ethically questionable space of the
parafictional.

Imagine, for instance, a truthful exhibition about the early Turkish republic or about
Istanbul’s cosmopolitanism that would have raised similar issues (15). Or imagine an
installation exactly like the one actually produced, but with a clear disclaimer stating that
Safiye was fictional. This, more or less, is what photographer Zoe Leonard and filmmaker
Cheryl Dunye did in The Fae Richards Photo Archive, at least in the book version of the
1996 project, which tells the life story in period pictures of a now-forgotten star of 30s “race
movies,” the African-American, lesbian actress Fae Richards. The photographs and captions
are completely convincing and compelling—but the book’s very cover makes clear from the
outset that Richards is a fictional character, and therefore that the images are Leonard’s
careful constructions.

This admission avoids the tiered levels of viewer experience that give the parafictional its
semi-sadistic edge: the way some viewers have their educated egos stroked by projects
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible
cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

like Blum’s, while others are their dupes. Likewise, to stick to the factual—like Hans Haacke
did in his visual exposés, for instance—would keep all viewers in an equal state of certain-
ty instead of catching them in levels of belief and doubt reflective of either their knowledge
or their skepticism. Either kind of alternative artwork would be not only more truthful than
the parafictional, but more egalitarian--and more kind. For they would avoid the complex
ways in which the parafictional not only positions but sorts its viewers. But they would also
be less telling about their, and our, particular historical condition. For art like Blum’s sorts
its viewers in terms of gullibility and skepticism, ignorance and knowledge. And it’s these—
the particular kinds of subject positions it not only creates, but rewards or punishes—that
suggest the historical dimensions of the aesthetics of the plausible.

Blum tells the story of a friend who had been involved with the project behind the scenes
back in Vienna, helping him craft the illusory traces of Safiye’s life. When the friend met
Blum in Istanbul for the Biennial, the artist took him to see the site of the Zeuve Birahanesi
bar and Safiye’s historical home, where he pointed out a bronze plaque attached to the
building’s façade. Inscribed in Turkish and English, it read, “SAFIYE BEHAR lived in this
house from her birth in 1890 to her departure to Chicago in 1938.” The friend suddenly got
very quiet. He didn’t bring it up until the next day, when he admitted to Blum that the
plaque had made him start to question whether he had been duped, himself—whether Blum
had been pulling one over on him, creating a fake museum to document a person who was
now turning out to be real (16). Such is the power of the visual tropes of historical mem-
ory that Blum deploys, and so trains us to question: the plaque, the vitrines, the walltext,
the photographs—or, for that matter, the art historical lecture, with its own devices for sig-
nifying accuracy and reliability. Safiye and her kind demonstrate a seeming historical neces-
sity for the skeptical squint—for what Michael Leja calls “looking askance.” (17)

The recent past has introduced at least two historical conditions that make emergent such
a way of encountering the world. Caroline Jones has argued that art works like Ra’ad’s that
encourage skepticism—art in the mode she usefully calls the “aesthetics of doubt”—count-
er recent efforts of those in power, like the Bush administration, to produce submission via
the politics of fear (18). Fear is a gut- or brainstem-level experience, she argues, incom-
patible with the upper-level cognitive functions of skepticism and reasoning. Artworks
whose mode of reception is doubt thus serve a pedagogical function with political conse-
quences: they train us in ways of seeing and thinking that increase our resistance to the
racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and anxiety about terrorism that have been persistent-
ly mobilized in recent years by politicians in Europe and the U.S.

The same logic extends to a second condition for the emergence of parafiction as a tactic.
If you are like me, your first impulse when encountering such a work is to get yourself to
the internet as quickly as possible to look up Safiye Behar. One thing the project exposes
is how thoroughly the internet has become a part of consciousness for many of us, so much
so that Googling is a near-instinct. As it turns out, putting her name into a search engine
yields enough hits to sustain initially the plausibility of the character; you have to look at
each website, noting its url and reading the text (best if you can read Turkish) to realize
that Behar’s name rarely, if ever, is featured without a reference to Michael Blum as well.
To go through this exercise is to take a brief tutorial in a new kind of literacy. Media theo-
rists such as Henry Jenkins explain that the crucial skills for thriving in our current and com-
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible
cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

ing information environment—the world augured by Google and Wikipedia—are the ability
to distinguish sources’ various levels of reliability, and a proclivity to question the trans-
parency of information (19). Parafictional art trains us in these crucial competencies.

Of course, plays of fact and fiction are not unique to our moment. Fred Wilson’s Baltimore
project, like so many intellectual ventures at a time when postmodernist insights about the
social construction of knowledge were having their impact, even suggested the way the
global spread of capitalism might carry special problems of fact-discernment along with it.
For he centered at the entrance of his exhibition a trophy—which happened to be an award
given for advertising—in the shape of a globe emblazoned with the word TRUTH. In empha-
sizing the stories NOT previously told by the museum, Wilson had demonstrated that power
shapes facts, and not the other way around. But while Wilson pointed to such problems,
Blum performed them. If, as Kwon and others have argued, the previous model of social-
ly-engaged, historically-oriented art practice corresponds structurally to features of global-
ization and modernity in place by the 1990s, the newer art I’ve been discussing addition-
ally echoes—and intervenes in—the informational and political models that have accompa-
nied the most recent phase of this condition.

So, why are artists lying? Speaking out of both sides of their mouths, as it were, if not with
mouths full? Especially at a time when public trust is such a severely endangered resource?
Perhaps the answer has to do with the critic’s description of viewers of Blum’s project in
Istanbul “scurrying back” to re-view the installation after having the parafiction revealed.
This doubled reception is the peculiar mode of spectatorship required by art that resides
not in the imaginary or the actual, but the plausible. Such a project may organize its view-
ers according to the competencies needed for intellectual and political survival today. But
it also remakes them: the subject who accepts the exhibit at face value the first time
around is not quite the same subject who re-encounters it. As I can attest from experience,
seeing enough of this work changes one’s interface with the media, museums, art, and
scholarship. It’s not a red-pill thing, because you can never swallow and be on the other
side. Instead everything shimmers with the possibility of play. Maybe, in a variation on
today’s metaphor of talking with your mouth full, it’s like the red pill got caught in your
throat. And it’s not a postmodernist truth-is-a-social-construct thing, because the issue
isn’t epistemology, but trust. And this is interesting from the point of view of art and social
change. We may no longer have available to us the kind of hopes a Marxist like Safiye had—
or can be imagined to have had—for radical practice. But there’s this: more skeptical but
also more awake, a bit embarrassed but multiply educated, alert to playfulness and ready
for humor to erupt anywhere, the subject who scurries back into the art of the plausible
enters a changed world.

(1) Blum received a master’s degree from the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, prior
to attending the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie in Arles. Blum’s full c.v. is available at
his website, www.blumology.net.

(2) See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site –Specific Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible
cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

(3) See Andrea Fraser, “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and
Rendered in the Public Sphere? October 80 (Spring 1997)

(4) For example, Elena Crippa, “Michael Blum, A tribute to Safiye Behar, 2005, 9th Istanbul
Biennial,” e-cart 7 (March 2006), at www.e-cart.ro, accessed 5/1/2008.

(5) For example, T. J. Demos, “9th International Istanbul Biennial,” Artforum (November
2005)

(6) Michael Blum, interview November 5, 2005; presentation, Carpenter Center, Harvard
University, 18 March 2008, email to the author 6 May 2008.

(7) Marc Spiegler, “Istanbul Biennial,” Art Review v. 3 no. 12 (December 2005/January
2006), 141.

(8) Of course the project could as easily be described as parahistorical, since it is both part
of and at odds with the norms of historical scholarship and exhibition. But for me the polit-
ical stakes of the project as an intervention in contemporary circumstances remain clear-
est if we focus for now on the intersection of the fictional with the actual in this and relat-
ed work.

(9) See www.0100101110101101.org/home/nikeground/intro.html; the site provides links

to international media coverage of the intervention. From http://www.culture-
jamming.de/interviewIIe.html, Franco Mattes: The container was installed in the middle of
Karlsplatz and three fake Nike representatives worked in it and we’ve had a telephone line
for feedback…. The city council quickly denied their involvement in the campaign, claiming
the reason, that since World War II it is impossible to rename streets and places in Austria
unless the names look similar to other names. To avoid messing up the mailing system. The
citizens became angry for different reasons: Some argued about Nike exploiting people in
sweatshops all around the globe, others wanted a public referendum for such a big deci-
sion. But the main reaction was surprisingly: “If the city can make a lot of money out of
it… let them do it!”, or: “They own everything anyway, so why don`t we let them pay for
it? Maybe we can exchange the renaming of the square with less advertisement in the
streets.”

(10) http://www.theatlasgroup.org/

(11) www.theyesmen.org/en/faq

(12) In fact, in his 1993 project for Capp Street Gallery in San Francisco, An Invisible Life:
A View into the World of a 120 Year Old Man, Wilson inserted artifacts of a man named
Baldwin Antinous Stein into a historic house museum, and text about him into the muse-
um docents’ tours. This project certainly does explore the terrain I’m calling the parafic-
tional. However, unlike Blum in Safiye Behar, but like Zoe Leonard in The Fae Richards
Photo Archive, discussed below, Wilson’s viewers were clearly informed about Stein’s fic-
tionality (hinted at by his improbably longevity and announced at the exit of house tours).
Thanks to Huey Copeland for suggesting the relevance of An Invisible Life.
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Make Believe: Socially-Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible
cc Carrie Lambert-Beatty 2008 (some rights reserved)

(13) Nauman made a work in 1967 that beams in bright neon the phrase: “The true artist
helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”

(14) “How to provoke today? Alain Bieber interviews 0100101110101101.ORG on Nike

Ground,” Rebel: Art, 1 April 2004, http://www.rebelart.net/d0003.html, translation at
http://www.0100101110101101.org/texts/rebelart_nike2-en.html.

(15) In fact the biennial coincided—by happenstance or otherwise—with a Turkish maga-

zine story exposing the founder’s many amorous adventures.

(16) Interview with Michael Blum, 5 November 2005.

(17) Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

(18) Caroline Jones, “Doubt Fear” Art Papers (January 2005).

(19) Henry Jenkins, with Ravi Rurshotma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and Alice J.
Robiso, “ Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the
21st Century,” (19 October 2006), The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,
available at
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.2029291/k.97E5/Occasional_Pap
ers.htm, 43-6.