Edition 79
Counterfeit Culture
- Published 7th February, 2023
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-80-1
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Treading the tightrope between art and lies, Griffith Review 79: Counterfeit Culture lifts the curtain on fakes, frauds and forgeries.
Edited by Carody Culver, Griffith Review 79 questions how we discern what’s real and what’s not in a time of influencers and identity scams, counterfeits and cosmetic surgeries, disinformation, fake news and threats to democracy.
From the imitation game and the uncanny valley to con artistry, trickery and sleights of hand, artifice makes the world go round – but is everything as it seems? And does it matter? Or should we all sit back, relax and embrace the ecstasy of the unreal?
Listen to Quan Yeomans and Ben Ely discuss thirty years of Regurgitator with Ian Powne from 4ZZZ. This is the unedited version of a conversation for Griffith Review 79: Counterfeit Culture.
In this Edition
The future is hackable
Deepfakes point to a future that is simultaneously euphoric and apocalyptic: philosophers have positioned them as ‘an epistemic threat to democracy’, journalists have called them ‘the place where truth goes to die’, futurists have portrayed them as the digital harbinger of a mass ‘reality apathy’ in which even video will be a lie.
From Russia with love
The ‘socialisation of women’ narrative arose from journalistic innovations associated with the First World War. In response to an unprecedented demand for up-to-date news, the Australian press had embarked on rapid technological change. Editors installed steam- and rotary-powered printing machines, established distribution fleets of automobiles and trucks, and hooked up their newsrooms to telephone lines.
Rogues’ gallery
In the age of technological optimisation, we are equally as preoccupied with entertainment as we are with devoting leisure time to projects of self-actualisation. The contemporary success of art museums rests on their ability to compound the entertainment value of an amusement park with the promise of an educational experience.
Detachable penis
Three years into my transition during the 2021 lockdowns, my online shopping habit became a full-blown addiction. One of the weirder things that I purchased was a petite crocheted penis and testicles, hand-stitched by a crafty ‘bear’ called Devon. Each package was made-to-order, so I could choose everything from the shaft length to colour and testicle size. I could’ve even added ball hair.
The trick that tells the truth
As subjects of late capitalism, we’ve become inured to the amoral cynicism inherent in relentless corporate marketing; yet both the good faith of our human nature and the susceptibility of our lizard brains ensure that we also remain receptive… In 2020, the disjunction between AGL’s public relations and the truth of the company’s business practices was highlighted and ridiculed in the public realm, ending in a court case of profound significance on Australia’s twisted road to belated action on climate change.
About face
Our image-centred world has elevated what writer Jia Tolentino calls ‘Instagram face’, a racially ambiguous assemblage of ethnic ‘greatest hits’ – wide cat-like eyes, big lips, smallish nose, high cheekbones. Few people will have a face that fits this template… But, whatever, you can pay for it.
The future of art fraud
Over lunch with the international art auctioneer, I told him the art dealer – a mutual acquaintance – said she would ‘support’ my work at auction. She explained that if an artwork didn’t receive enough bids during an auction, she would bid to buy it for a higher amount. Then there would be a public record of my work being sold for the value assigned by her, which she would show people when reselling it privately.
No name for the country
For the past thirty-odd years, Hideo has worked exclusively in Japanese, publishing several novels and collections of criticism and essays. Why Japanese? is a question he is often asked. It harbours a kind of suspicion: why would a native speaker of the English language, the language of power and prestige and capital … give it all up in favour of a comparatively minor language, a marked and ethnicised tongue?
Will we dance when it’s over?
These men are simply lost to the storm, no longer spoken about. But why does the response to the loss of human life, and a reckoning with their intentions, feel just as detached as the reaction to the disappearance of a cartoonish avatar? The stakes in our real world have reached a point so high, so close to apocalypse, that they’ve disappeared entirely. We are gripped by a nihilism and unnerving sense of unreality, and so we don’t receive the messages others are trying to send to us.
Art, AI and figuring the future
There is an eeriness in the anonymous way DALL-E and Midjourney create art… The artist is nowhere and everywhere, like a ghost inside the machine. We see the rendering of images, but nothing that makes the design process more relatable.
The money shot
Pornography challenges our very constructions of what is ‘real’. It complicates questions about how we understand ‘real’ consent, for example. There may not be anyone forcing young people to follow the pornographic script. But with so much influence on young people’s sexual imaginations, pornography is setting the cultural context within which they do sex and gender.
Outside, Mona Lisa
Where bushwalking is concerned, Tasmanian maps are not an authentic picture of the landscape. They’re fine if you want to stick to well-known trails, but if the track has been assigned a T4 rating it won’t be on the map. Sometimes that’s because the route is so rough it would be misleading to mark it as a track, but sometimes it’s that for a range of management and environmental purposes, the PWS just doesn’t want many walkers going there.
Tell me a story
As QAnon members circulated their vernacular and practices across social networks, their acts and ideas became increasingly visible, and individuals began to recognise the behaviour as sanctioned, expressive acts within their community. In other words, adherents of QAnon began to recognise and conform to their very own folklore – one that explained who they were and described how they should act in given situations.
Living in kayfabe
On free-dress days, I wore my sister’s dance tights to school because they made me feel like I was a real wrestler. I would’ve worn my Speedos if my mum let me. Other kids stared at me and asked ‘What are you wearing?’ and I’d tell them that this was my wrestling gear.
Strike a pose
I grew up when women were viewed as decorative, appraised for their sexual currency. It’s hard to disassociate from powerful formative experiences. Particularly my childhood observations of glamour fused with my interest in the macabre.
A passing phase
I went to Tim’s Guitars years ago and I saw Grant Hart from Hüsker Dü do a solo thing and he had a Q&A after the solo. And some guy went, ‘How often do you practise guitar?’ And then Grant Hart said, ‘I never practise guitar, practising guitar gets in the way of my personality.’ And I was like, ‘Oh wow, that’s actually really true.’
Taxidermy
Reddit, I click. One post notes that mammals are difficult to taxidermise because it’s hard to find a dead mammal to practise on without hunting one yourself. It’s not like u can buy a dead animal with the skin still on at the butcher, BigKen62 posted. Try marine, TommyFishes America replied. I hover the mouse over the word. Then, click it.
Wax
I touch the wax of their pickaxes, then run my hand along the wax rock of the walls. One man squats a few metres away from the others, holding a pan. As I move towards him, I notice a label with descriptive text about Victoria’s gold rush, a reminder of the foundational gruesomeness of the enterprise – the colonial history of world’s fairs, or zoos, here insisting on itself in a minor carnival of the macabre.
Cusp
We were going to visit Patience’s supervisor Callista, a tenured senior lecturer in literature and cultural studies, though her strange, ageless grace made the word senior feel like a misnomer. I knew Patience would have chided me for this, saying it showed both my ageism and internalised misogyny, so these were among the thoughts I kept to myself.
Same old new village
We pass the food market, and the dining hall, where each morning I would take my grandmother to eat yong tofu, hot noodle soup with fishballs and stuffed tofu. She said she always wanted to eat, but in reality she wanted to show me off to her old friends.
Radical love
People ask me how to manifest their greatest desires because I am clearly living the life of my dreams. I am renowned for my healing work and own a vast business empire connected to it, although this has not always been the case. Prior to my unlimited success, I dabbled in various careers but never settled on any, feeling there was more to existence if only I could grasp it.
Self-portrait in Joy Hester pocket mirror
All hail my inner bones, things have been troped yet now heat up. Being Bowie gone to Berlin, genuinely out of ideas and summoning Brian Eno wearing just plain black things (with tiny gold crucifix at neck!). Yes I have been in my gaudy California and then a long...
Lesbian search terms
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Dot and Ern
Like the hawk of fabric shears, cockatoo calls cut raucous through sheets of white sky – the sole sound as I walk where they chomp on bottlebrush, rip through callistemon, flower the path with filament trash, thrown like...
Roxy Music Has The Right To Children
The fun people had on TV then! The hair, and not only the hair, but full monster
suits.
Run River: An exercise
Little space in this town for dead game.
Steal a teal Corvette, hit the drive-in,
Find the tatty shop. They serve a fish dish.
Vaudeville
If the magical colours aren’t even across the page, it’s a failure of art according to aesthetes. An obscenity of blues and reds, they say.
The Wrestling of Art
We’re tired of the caged horizon, the canned emotion. But the spectacle of the crimson world is a real slobber-knocker of a struggle.
Featured Contributors
Sam Elkin
Sam Elkin is a writer, lawyer and radio maker and author of Detachable Penis (Upswell, 2024) and co-editor of...
Anna Broinowski
Anna Broinowski is a Walkley Award-winning filmmaker and author who documents counter-cultural subjects. Her films include Aim High in...
Alex Philp
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Kasumi Borczyk’s work has previously appeared in Meanjin, The Independent, Rolling Stone and Kill Your Darlings, among others.
