Deception and Fiction as Forms of World-making in Contemporary Art

This article probes the grey area between lies and fiction in order to interrogate the effects such strategies have, both within and outside of the sphere of art. For better or worse, art works that experiment with the methodologies of fiction and deception have the capacity to generate real effects. In this article I propose to focus on two broad classes of effects: those that are somehow critical, that turn our attention back on the truth-framing devices that allowed for deception to emerge in the first place, and those that are inventive, that somehow secrete a new universe of reference. The kinds of epistemological choreography used by artists such as The Yes Men and Dora Garcia do not only expose rhetorical devices and truth-framing mechanisms, they also leave a ?residue? of their false content long after their truth-claims have been dropped. In this article I will argue that such works have a germinal as well as a parasitic relationship to truth and are involved in a world-making which is ontologically anterior to codifications of true and false