Vera Frenkel: l'invention d'une artiste [Vera Frenkel: the invention of an artist]

• Published in: Parachute 2002-01 (105), p.92-107
• Main Author: Bénichou, Anne
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: fre
• ISSN: 0318-7020

Examines the fictional forms at work in the video installations of the Canadian artist Vera Frenkel (b.1938). The author explores the different personae Frenkel adopts in Signs of a Plot: A Text, True Story & Work of Art (1978), Stories from the Front (and the Back): a True Blue Romance (1981), and Body Missing, the last of which tells the story of a bartender assembling information about art works stolen by the National Socialists during the Second World War, and describes The Secret Life of Cornelia Lumsden: a Remarkable Story (1978-86), a multi-part project centred on the fictitious missing Canadian novelist Cornelia Lumsden. She also explains how fiction shifted into fact when a journalist of the same name publicly confronted the artist during a lecture, further blurring the line between authenticity and artifice, addresses Frenkel's equivocal relationship with her invented doubles, as manifested in Her Room in Paris (1979), And Now the Truth (A Parenthesis) (1980), Attention: Lost Canadian (1986), accompanying statements, and later works alluding to Lumsden, and reflects on the underlying critiques of institutional and authorial practices inherited from modernity.