This is a still image from the film "Czech Dream" by Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, 2004.
What do we learn about ourselves and the world around us when we fall for a carefully constructed deception in our encounter with art? Contemporary artists have lately presented us with many examples of such experience — from imagined art projects to invented historical figures, from nonexistent supermarkets to ersatz archives, from faux advertising campaigns to bold fictionalizations of historical events. This new genre of artistic strategies has gained the name of "parafiction," or the type of art that seamlessly weaves reality and fiction together.
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Learn more when art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty presents "The Subject of Parafiction" at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 22, at the Akron Art Museum, One South High St., in downtown Akron.
The free lecture is part of The Catherine H. Campbell Memorial Art History Lecture Series, which brings prominent art historians to The University of Akron. The late Catherine Campbell, a 1988 graduate of the Mary Schiller Myers School of Art at UA, established the series that now continues through the generosity of her family and friends.
Parafictional art presents fiction as fact. Experiencing such art is like taking an involuntary roller coaster ride through what we thought was reality and its expected ways of functioning. Lambert-Beatty explores whether confusion and doubt in parafictional art is merely a product of an artist's whim, or whether it teaches us something important about ourselves, and about the kind of selves we might learn to be.
Lambert-Beatty is a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of "Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s" (MIT Press, 2008), and the essay “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” in October magazine.
For more information on the Campbell Art History Lecture Series, contact The University of Akron’s Myers School of Art at 330-972-6030.