This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture by Heather Jessup

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture by Heather Jessup Ian Reilly Heather Jessup. This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019. 227 pp. $45. To unsettle, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “to undo from a fixed position; to unfix, unfasten, loosen.” This loosening or undoing can refer to a general state of things or to institutions more broadly and can lead to the “forc[ing] out of a settled condition.” The forms of disorientation produced by the act or process of being unsettled is at the heart of Heather Jessup’s book, This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture, a fascinating exploration of the generative role deception plays in contemporary art in Canada. Jessup’s work is a sorely needed vindication of hoaxing, artifice, and art in twenty-first-century culture, especially within the context of progressive, future-oriented thinking regarding Canadian identity and culture. For Jessup, hoaxes offer “the experience of re-seeing” (2) made possible by “a momentary glitch in the system that gives pause” (10) to consider the epistemological foundations of culture and the colonial assumptions underpinning its fullest expression. Hoaxes assist in this process through carefully crafted disruptions designed to introduce questions, dislodge routines, and even overturn routine assumptions. To first ground then later reinforce her larger argument about the constructive and transformative power of hoaxing, Jessup enlists the works of Canadian artists and writers Iris Häussler, Brian Jungen, Jeff Wall, Rebecca Belmore, Erín Moure, and David Solway. Together, these figures serve as enticing points of departure for interrogating some of the dominant cultural institutions of our era—museums, art galleries, libraries, publishers, and universities—all of which can be said to be ever-resistant to change. In holding up our most respected cultural institutions to greater scrutiny, the disturbances precipitated by artful hoaxes (and other related forms of critical questioning) can produce the conditions for greater openness and transformation in what remain rigidly hierarchical places. The scholarly work on hoaxing establishes that hoaxes are highly variable, unique, and context-dependent, sparking a wide variety of responses and interpretations among viewers, readers, and audiences alike. As Jessup observes, what scholars rarely engage in are attempts to “embody the style, work, or praxis of hoaxes themselves” (4). In this regard alone, Jessup’s methodological, writerly, and analytical contributions breathe new life into both the scholarship and popular appreciation for the sophisticated manoeuvring at work in contemporary hoaxing. In “Part I: A Novel in Three Dimensions,” [End Page 139] Jessup engages in an “observational model of inquiry” as she guides the reader through Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber exhibit. In her retelling of Häussler’s 2007 haptic conceptual art show at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange site, Jessup recreates the experience of being hoaxed for the reader. Without divulging too much information here regarding this elaborate and engrossing case study, we are afforded an overview of the elements that make the hoax convincing: the guided tour, the authority of the museum, the credibility of the objects on display, and the fellowship of experiencing the story among other similarly invested museum-goers. In carefully depicting all of the aspects that shore up the exhibit’s credibility, the reader’s attention is also diverted toward cues, nods, gestures, and oddities meant to signal the future revelation of the hoax. This simple formula—“the basic deception plus the reveal” (53)—makes possible what Häussler calls “a disruption of the repertoire” of the contemporary gallery and museum experience. For Häussler and Jessup, these disruptions can assist in recalibrating one’s perceptions, thereby reinvigorating one’s experiences of self-reflection and learning in museum and gallery spaces. In “Part II: Unsettling Images,” the book turns to the decolonizing artworks of Jungen, Wall, and Belmore. In a chapter dedicated to artists and artistic practices rooted in decolonization, Jessup draws on the relation between art and ethnography as a vehicle for exposing and dismantling colonial ways of thinking. The reverse ethnography of each artist works to question the extent to which archaeology and ethnography serve as...