SESSION: Art History: Facts and Fiction?
This panel explores a neglected tradition in art history: the strategic use of fictional elements in art historical writing. It examines the scope of this underexplored practice, considering its benefits, challenges, and intellectual legacies in art history, visual culture, and material culture studies in the context of their intersections with broader interdisciplinary currents in the humanities.
The use of such elements in art history is long-standing. Vasari, for instance, drew on Italian novelistic traditions in The Lives of the Artists to craft compelling historical narratives, an aspect of art-historical writing often overlooked. Yet, as Hayden White noted, the writing of history is ‘at once poetic, scientific and philosophical.’
Across the humanities more broadly, by contrast, scholars have strategically adopted fictional perspectives to challenge prevailing conceptions and address archival gaps. Examples include Clifford Geertz’s ‘faction,’ which addresses the fiction of the neutral anthropological observer, and Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, which blends historical research with critical theory and fictional narrative to amplify the suppressed voices of the enslaved. Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation also deserves mention, combining fact and fiction to explore complex issues and imagine possible futures. Likewise, Gerald Vizenor’s ‘Native American slipstream’ employs time travel and alternate realities to explore ‘Indigenous’ worldviews, perspectives on history and conceptions of futurity, raising questions about art history’s engagement with such practices.
The session will feature presentations that engage the creative and critical possibilities of fictional strategies in art history through case studies, methodological reflection and accounts of personal scholarly practice.
Session Convenors:
Renate Dohmen, Open University
Marcus Milwright, University of York
Speakers:
Cynthia Robinson, Cornell University
An Angelic Apparition in the Generalife: Alhambra Scholar Goes Rogue, Starts Writing Novels…Wherein Her Characters Perform Visual Analysis (subtly…) (Online)
When she sees him from an upper chamber in the Alhambra’s summer palace, her heart stops. He holds a white-flowering sprig, expounding in Castilian on the purgative properties of arrayán. His face, lit up by the sun, makes her lower her gaze. But she’s not safe: his voice would make stones weep. Suddenly, she gets it. The garden, the fountain, the stucco blooms and branches. The light, the perfumes, the breeze that carries them—the whole symbolic universe. The poem, declaimed by the Sultan’s yes-man, asserts that the androgynous youth at the centre of this paradise is an angel, changeling incarnation of the garden and its elements. Bad poetry, but yes. Newly stricken by love and its attending sickness, she’s a believer.
She is Ysabel de Solís, taken captive, forced into concubinage, renamed Zoraya. He—a Jew from Burgos, recently of Florence, dressed to the Medici-vibe nines—is court physician to Muley Hacén, her owner and husband, whom she despises. She loves his doctor.
I’ve long analysed the visual culture of the Andalusī majlis through wine and love lyrics—which already place things in the realm of the unreal, termed majāz by medieval Arab linguists—that shape the medieval viewer’s perception via the transformational power of metaphor. This paper charts the continuation of that path: the combustion of the consciousness of a single subject assailed by love, inviting us to question our understanding of fact, interpretation, and speculation. Where, exactly, does the fiction begin?
Nanne Buurman, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München
Ghost Writing. On Political Framing in Art-History and the Spectral Afterlives of Militarized Narratives
This paper examines how fact and fiction intertwine in art-historical writing by analyzing the narrative frameworks through which the discipline constructs its worldviews and the blind spots these frameworks produce. Drawing on my research on the relationship between German postwar novels, such as Siegfried Lenz’s German Lesson and Alfred Andersch’s Flight to Afar, and documenta historiography, I show how art-historical narratives often align with broader regimes of memory politics. Fiction emerges not only as a literary device but as a structural element of historiographic world-making that can smooth contradictions and obscure political or historical responsibility.
A key focus is the convergence of artistic and soldierly subjectivities that recur in art-historical discourse and in literature addressing the Nazi past. Ideals of discipline, avant-garde heroism, and self-sacrifice frequently echo militarized imaginaries, resurfacing in aestheticized forms. Their persistence within narratives of artistic autonomy and modernist avant-gardism, I argue, has positioned art historiography as a “battleground” in contemporary culture wars, where the (new) right uses literary framing to shift discourse and assert cultural hegemony.
Finally, I reflect on my speculative writing practice as a form of “ghost-writing” that uses metaphorical framing to expose the epistemic scaffolding of art history. By foregrounding the fictionality and mediality of my narration, I aim to reveal the ideological residues, suppressed genealogies, and spectral histories that haunt the discipline. This approach, I contend, fosters a more reflexive and politically accountable mode of history-making capable of resisting calls for neutrality, objectivity, and tone-policing by the (new) right.
Denise Startin, University of Leeds
Excavating the Ephemeral through Performative Archival Practice: Fact, Fiction and Fieldwork
Contemporary artists are increasingly challenging the boundaries of the archive and authorship through fictional strategies and non-traditional materials. This paper offers a methodological reflection on the use of fictional personae as narrative interlocutors within my practice-led PhD research, demonstrating how non-traditional archives can challenge, extend, and reimagine art history’s archival practices. I argue that the strategic adoption of fictional personae forms a critical methodology for reimaging archival practice and opening historiography up to the speculative. Here, fictionalisation functions as ‘de-archiving’, investigating silences, absences and contested narratives within memory and history. Drawing on theoretical perspectives including Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation, and Hayden White’s conception of historiography as poetic and philosophical, I demonstrate how fictional personae developed in my project Letters to the Landscape, 2025, through the pseudonymous artist duo Vale & Howlette, facilitate a performative, polyphonic engagement with a physical archive assembled from eBay. These materials instigate embodied fieldwork and processes of archival reinvention, challenging what constitutes an archive and whose histories are preserved. My approach resonates with artists such as Erika Tan, Walid Raad, Susan Hiller, and The Otolith Group, who use found or fabricated archives to critique dominant histories. By asking how using fictional personae and digital archives like eBay can reshape narrative and memory in art history, I argue that integrating fictional methodologies with non-traditional archives constitutes a form of critical, speculative historiography and offers a transferable model for artistic and scholarly enquiry.
Caitlin O’Keeffe, York University, ON, Canada
Fictional Spaces in Contemporary Art and Historiography
Parafiction has emerged within recent years as a subversive and interventional approach within feminist art practices. Examples like Iris Häussler’s The Sophie La Rosière Project (2016)and Vera Frenkel’s The Secret Life of Cornelia Lumsden (1979)employ domestic settings, archival practices, and feminist strategies such as revisionism to craft counter-narratives in which history is transformed into a material object.In this way,parafictional art usefully responds to the conceptual challenges posed by the onslaught of post-truth politics in North America, the proliferation of misinformation, and the calculated rewriting of not only our historical past but also our present moment. In Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility (2009)Carrie Lambert-Beatty describes parafiction as the intersection between“imaginary personages and stories” and “the world as it is being lived.” Parafictional art encourages viewers to consider alternative readings of the past and how these speculations might shape the present or future. Put differently, artworks such as these, craft history, often reflect the view that history is produced and fundamentally interpretative. This paper asks what feminist art history can learn from the epistemological challenges posed by parafictional art practices. This paper explores feminist gestures of rewriting and fiction as a methodology, and how such tactics might be used to apply feminist perspectives to art history. I argue that parafictional art creates important pathways to questioning representations of truth and cultural understandings of history as infallible, emphasizing the need for self-reflexive scholarship and diverse curatorial practices.