With her new book, Lives of the Imaginary Artists in Cold War California, Monica Steinberg takes us into the world of artists who concealed or fabricated their identities, using pseudonymity, obfuscation, anonymity, (auto)biografiction, imaginary portraiture, heteronymity, role-playing, doubling, and alter ego. These real artists, through their creation of imaginary artists, engaged with the political climate of the Cold War era, resisting political overreach and art historical conventions. Here, Monica Steinberg discusses these fantastic artists and reveals the story behind the book’s wild blurbs and the surprise crossword puzzle found inside the back cover.

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What drew you to writing about “imaginary artists”?

The book began with some well-placed jokes. Not jokes as in “ha ha,” but rather subtly inserted, phonetically punning artists’ names—Jenny Saypaugh, Eric Hammerscoffer, Ben Lux—sprinkled throughout the material residue of the West Coast, post-1945 art scene. Who doesn’t enjoy a bit of clever nominal play? These and other witty noms de plume kept appearing, again and again, as signatories on artworks, postcards, personal letters, and published and unpublished writings.

The artworks and quotable materials attributed to and/or said to depict these imaginary creators were neither anonymous contributions nor were they associated with unacknowledged, marginal figures operating on the outskirts of the art world. They appeared exactly where one would expect to find active participants in the emerging California avant-garde. They were present in the usual ways while also not being present in any ordinary sense of the term. The imaginary artists produced work, published poems, left traces of their lives, and accumulated documentation of an institutional, bureaucratic, and personal nature, even though the people the names indexed did not, in fact, exist.

The draw of what I term imaginary artists was, on one level, their humor and fictionality, but on another level, their (il)legibility. They were legible within the contemporary art scene but largely illegible within subsequent historical narratives. That is, what is striking about imaginary artists is that their names and artworks are so often overlooked in secondary accounts such as art criticism, historical scholarship, and even archival finding aids, where they are often filed alphabetically within general correspondence or consigned to folders labeled “unknown.”

All the while, the materiality of their existence both documents a life lived and simultaneously shows how that life was created. Certificates, business cards, postal exchanges, exhibition checklists…these do not merely record the endeavors of creators so much as they build the life-stories of the fictional artists, their entrances and exits, and their encounters with the ‘real’ artworld.

History writing is an uncertain exercise, and imaginary artists are themselves constructed from a combination of documentation and myth. The uncertainty they generate is both an attribute and a consequence of their practice. Their work is a (timely) reminder of the way history is built, and the ease with which historical narratives can be (re)shaped.

Can you talk a bit about the importance of humor and play in the work of these artists?

If an artist is imaginary, whose self-expression is on display? And how can an imaginary artist write an autobiography, paint a portrait (or self-portrait!), or have a retrospective exhibition? These questions capture the absurdity and complexity at the core of imaginary artists, and the difficulty of any art-historical attempt to factually document and narrate such forays into fictional creativity.

Even the artists themselves—both the actual creators and their imaginary counterparts—warn viewers and readers that their statements are as likely to be fabricated as they are to be factual. Details change from one account to the next, and sometimes even within the same interview; contradiction is a creative exercise. This playful obfuscation pits artist-issued (auto)biografictions against the urge to verify, forcing art viewers and scholars alike to contend with a paradox in which the expression of a larger idea is, perhaps, at odds with the historical record.

This (in)formative wit is particularly visible in projects such as the fictional and heavily credentialed Fat City School of Finds Art (FCSOFA). The imaginary artist Dudley Finds served as the founder and nominal dean and administrator of the FCSOFA, while the (real) artist Lowell Darling worked as the School’s “head”—both in title and in origin. “Congraduation” events were held, and degrees—some with detailing such as embossing and foil stamping—were issued. All graduates were inducted into the “fatculty,” granted tenure, and placed on permanent unpaid sabbatical. Finds and Darling were both issued institutional identification cards, both had business cards, and both corresponded (sometimes even with each other) on official FCSOFA letterhead.

An interview focusing on the fictional Finds’s creative practice was published in Avalanche in 1973: “Advertizement: ‘An Interview between Lowell Darling and Dudley Finds’.” The publication is (auto)biografictional in form and factual in its accounting of creative projects. Its title acknowledges the promotional aspects of such practices while simultaneously mimicking the format of an academic citation. Set in quotation marks, it includes the location and date of the ostensible interview and concludes with a period. The acute insistence on actuality in turn casts suspicion on such claims.

Here, humor and play are a bureaucratic, formal, and expressive exercise. Credentialing is taken to an extreme. Authority is performed through paperwork, documentation, and design. Authorship and even value, which are often bound to attribution, are situated as a kind of fiction.

In the Cold War context of expanding administration, verification, and surveillance, these practices impugn the routes through which legitimacy is conferred. Systems of names and identification function pro forma. But here, they are less performance-based than they are dependent on the performance of documentation itself, and the way that surviving notes, ephemeral materials, and even artworks combine intertextually to substantiate a very real fictional endeavor.

There are some wild blurbs for your book. Can you talk about the story behind these?

The artist-written blurbs on the back of the book turn literary convention on its head. Several of the blurbs are issued by imaginary artists speaking as themselves.

Dudley Finds (Lowell Darling), writing under the institutional banner of the Fat City School of Finds Art, extends the nominal play of his name, reporting that he read the book to find himself and that he is, quite literally, on page one. Eric Hammerscoffer (George Herms), with affectionate provocation, addresses the pseudonymous Pantale Xantos, an imaginary artist invented by Wallace Berman. Edward Ruscha offers evidentiary testimony, cagily confessing that he has assassinated the Information Man. Dr. Lux (Larry Bell), fully credentialed, turns the blurb back on itself, activating how this space functions less to describe a book than to authorize it. The King (Eleanor Antin) issues a proclamation that reinforces a fabricated sovereignty and calls for collective action that might preserve the kingdom.

Alongside these deliciously (and deliberately) ludicrous blurbs is the art-historical (official) endorsement of Cécile Whiting, who knowingly—and generously—serves as a foil to the artists’ interventions. Her contribution anchors and participates in the exchange, foregrounding the conventions of history writing that the artists playfully unsettle.

The blurbs are built on and out of the practices considered within the book. Instead of describing the content or restating the argument, they creatively extend it. They sculpt attribution and (auto)biography as artistic material. Indeed, what better way to blurb a book about historical uncertainty, fictional creativity, and name games than to have the imaginary artists pseudo-authorize the publication through their invented speech.

Your book has a special element to it in the form of a crossword puzzle. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Artist Wally Hedrick’s large, loose-leaf Official “Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Error,” Crossword Puzzle (OPASICTMECP) of 1976 was re-editioned especially for the print version of Lives. It is folded into an envelope on the interior rear cover, and the answer key is printed on the last page of the book. The puzzle’s title makes punning reference to the exhibition Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (September 3–November 21, 1976) in which Hedrick was participating at the time. The puzzle was, however, anything but an official museum publication, and it was not included in the exhibition itself. Instead, the puzzle was circulated among a small group of Hedrick’s contemporaries.

Hedrick, who invented the imaginary artists Jenny Saypaugh (pronounced with a French accent) and Harry Fallick, experimented with withholding and obfuscation, treating information (un)reliability as both subject and strategy. Reissuing the crossword in playable form is an aspect of the book’s broader consideration of information management and misdirection. Imaginary artists, after all, are intertextual puzzles.

The crossword puzzle also functions as a metonym for the practice of history writing; it is a provisional undertaking, pieced together from crisscrossing clues, best guesses, and multiple revisions. Although Hedrick’s puzzle does not (at least to the best of my knowledge) contain historical inaccuracies, it suggests that the facts informing it are themselves based on a well-tailored history of “Error.”

A final question: How did you arrive at the book’s title?

Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is history and biography colored by anecdote, invention, and myth. I took him at his word.

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Monica Steinberg is an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. She has contributed to exhibition catalogs published by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Imago Mundi Collection, and the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Art, and her articles have appeared in Crime Media Culture, Art Journal, Panorama, Oxford Art Journal, Art History, American Art, Grey Room, and the Archives of American Art Journal.

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