Fictioning painting: Or imagining an ‘outside’ to art history

This article seeks to explore the relationship between contemporary painting and fictioning practices, examining the implications for historicization, authenticity and authorship. Taking as a starting point the re-appearance of Walter Benjamin in 1986, I will trace the ways in which painting practice and fictioning discourse have intersected, drawing on recent interviews with the authors of these projects and ongoing research into artist novels. I will discuss Albert Oehlen’s 2021 film The Painter, which is set in Oehlen’s studio and documents the struggle to produce an abstract painting, asking why certain clichés are re-staged in fictional portrayals of artistic labour rather than re-imagined? I will develop a discussion of Oehlen’s use of parody by reading this film as a performance to camera, and will explore the ways that Oehlen plays with plausibility through the use of an actor, a semi-improvised script, and modelling the narrative on the historical precedent of Paul McCarthy’s 1995 video Painter. I will offer a case study from my recent practice-based Ph.D. research in which I worked with Bruce McLean to re-enact his 1969 artwork Underwater Watercolour to highlight the relationship of fictioning practices to archival practice and develop an understanding of fictioning as a performative form of historicization. I will situate these examples in relation to recent theory (specifically, David Burrow’s and Simon O’Sullivan’s survey of ‘Fictioning’ practices in art and philosophy and Carrie Lambert-Beaty’s concept of ‘Parafiction’), positioning my research within a broader discussion of a current trend towards fictioning practices in contemporary art.