Editorial

This collection takes as its point of departure the metaphorical dimensions of friction caused by various artistic and cultural practices. It positions itself within a heterogeneous field of study that looks at art’s various transformational potentials that do not need to be limited to art institutions and art historical dispositives. Rather, these collected essays focus on the intersections, fusions and tensions between art and its particular social, cultural and political contexts. The volume thus encapsulates several central aspects of interart studies (cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s introduction to this volume). The moment when art questions, re-assembles or (re)creates social relations, economies, ecologies, histories, memories, political geographies, soundscapes or cartographies, we can speak of fictions of art which do not necessarily remain in the sphere of the imaginary or phantasmagoric, but transcend into the factual, the speculative, the material, leaving real effects and traces in the very social contexts in which they take place.

Yet these moments where fictions of art eventually enter into established truth regimes (of the social, of politics, science, culture or religion), they are usually contested and conflictual. Therefore, we propose the specific image of friction rather than the ‘blurring of boundaries’ or the gentler concept of inter- or trans-relationality. Friction, in this sense, is first of all a moment of contact, a process that might create energy, movement, or conflict as well as blockage. Thus, we are interested in moments where fictions of art create such dynamic, energetic, and often generative antagonisms.

F(r)ictions of Art reflects the inquiries of the last years of research of the Graduiertenkolleg InterArt, which not only interrogated extended understandings of art practices but also provided a forum of exchange about different approaches to art and art’s politics in the Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies, the Research Architecture PhD program at Goldsmiths in London and the InterArt doctoral program at the Freie Universität Berlin. It is perhaps fitting that this reflection consists of many essays concerned with the epistemologies of looking back, of being in time with and of the possibility of collective exchange. F(r)ictions of Art finds its authors in a state of hopefulness and precarity – concerned with not only new historiographic approaches but with charting the unknowable future and about the complex snarls and residues of non-linear time itself.

The volume opens with a section which looks more closely at the concept of friction – exploring conflicts, dissonances, and disjunctions as well as productive moments between different images and imaginaries. W.J.T. Mitchell looks to the “salvage artists” of Israel/Palestine to circumscribe artistic inquiries into the frictional modes of existence of the binational state. The artists’ ‘salvaging’ here takes on different dimensions: morally in its relation to the conflictual co-existence in Israel/ Palestine, politically in its relation to the past, and aesthetically in the re-working of rubbish and ruins in order to not only imagine but begin to forge new social relations. Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld draws on her experiences as a filmmaker to theorize documentary techniques as rematerialisation – the way in which the image migrates between different contexts, compressions, codecs and formats, and how these migrations are then enfolded into the image’s texture. María Iñigo Clavo demonstrates the friction between curation, postcolonial theory and material histories of violence in her analysis of the Brazilian exhibition Mestizo Histories. She ultimately points to the interventionist work of Jaime Lauriano as a way to make these points of disjuncture visible and political. The section concludes with a line of flight into the next – Simon O’Sullivan’s allusive and generative meditations on the “fictioning function” of art practice. His reading of specific artistic practices with contradictory juxtapositions at their heart fold out into larger claims about the fictioning processes’ ability to create “Erewhons” – “no-place[s] and a no-time[s] [...] when and where other things become possible” – a theme to which the authors of the following sections refer.

Many authors tackle the metaphor of economic speculation directly. Frederik Tygstrup turns to the concept of speculation to trouble boundaries between fact and fiction, a nexus between speculation and fiction which runs throughout the middle section of this volume. Tygstrup traces the way in which speculation has moved from the province of big data to financial speculation at the epistemological core of modernity. He concludes with the knottier question of the way in which speculation might help us understand the fictive properties not only of fiction itself but of public and political discourse more broadly. Emily Rosamond’s meditation on the axiom “All Data is Credit Data” argues that financial tech companies that use personal data as credit data suggest a larger trend towards the “datafication” (we editors might pun: data-fiction) of moral goodness. She concludes with an analysis of artworks that suggest the power of art to frame and contextualize the relationship between data and reputation. Runa Johannessen uses speculation as a mode to understand the “future more vivid” tense of the state of Palestine offered by artist Khaled Jarrar’s Palestinian passport stamp.

Indeed, both Johannessen and Mitchell theorize the promissory work and the performative dimension of Jarrar’s conceptual intervention – while W.J.T. Mitchell focuses on political but also humorous aspects of creating a national symbol in a state of occupation, Johannessen’s reading is fundamentally temporal, stressing the concrete utopian potential Jarrar’s stamp as an everyday and contemporary mode of enacting the state of ‘not-yet’. The authors in this section posit that (economic) speculation forms a kind of contrafactual state which can be read either as a form of ingenuity – or disingenuity. Theo Reeves-Evison, for example, charts the grey area between lies and fiction in order to make clear the real social effects and conceptual residues that artworks foregrounded in deception have once the lie is exposed – in his reading, then, lies and rumors can be as robust and durational artistic practices as fiction.

In the final section, four essays bring together the technologies of friction from the first section with an interest in new times and places from the second. In his analysis of the cultural function of biennials and their seemingly endless “competing for contemporaneity”, Peter Osborne contrasts different historical problematics of ‘the contemporary’: the critique of anthropology, the socialist postcoloniality, and the contemporaneity of the global capitalist modernity. Critical about the durational extension of the contemporary backwards – the question “when did the present begin?” – he asks explicitly, “When does the present begin?”, or even in the future tense, “When will the present begin again?” Under this aspect, his text resonates with Iñigo Clavo’s more historiographical approach to institutional critique. Tina Turnheim further complicates the question of when the present will begin through her analysis of the “retro-futurist” Nikes from the 1980s film Back to the Future released for sale in 2015: “advertised as the future in the past, and sold as the future in the present – these self-referential finance instruments make sure that the future retroactively ‘will have been’.” Lily Kelting also questions tidy distinctions between the past and present in her reading of Southern food icon Paula Deen’s 2013 legal deposition, in which Deen conflates the antebellum and Jim Crow South with the present, situating this “temporal estrangement” as the result of a friction between history and nostalgic myth-making (as Simon O’Sullivan might have it, fictioning). Lastly, this issue closes with a contribution by Christoph Wulf. Wulf’s essay – much like Kathrine Dirckinck Holmfeld’s – cautions that any image is necessarily incomplete (in this case, an image of the human: whether a statistical average or selfie). Though these imaginary representations might never fully capture the complexity of a human being, what delicious fictions are produced by these failures, fissures, and gaps. We hope that this volume, in its international and interdisciplinary range but also through its blind spots, generates many more.