Museum of Forgery

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Piazza S. Gaetano, Naples 1958/1992 [u]
29 x 21 cm
work on paper contributed to the oeuvre of John Baldessari; part of the MOF "generics" program; medium: baldessari.


America has become an obsessively DIY culture, in between extended bouts of tv watching. In honor of the subprime mortgage meltdown, which has suddenly made tinkering with one's home much less possible for many people, the museum offers a DIY forgery project that results in a unique small-scale artwork. Total material costs for this project will run under $100, especially if recycled items are used to the greatest extent possible. Final results will vary. Substitutions may be made for any of the items in the materials and tools lists.

The museum also holds that outsourcing forgery is ethically untenable. With DIY forgery, both the risks and the rewards accrue to the same individual.

Part of the museum's mandate is to examine the conditions under which individual works are accepted as art, or are excluded from that field. By extension, it also examines the process by which works cease to exist as art. With this in mind, the museum set up a virtual graveyard cum reliquary for unwanted art in 1995 called Box City. Currently, the only active area within Box City is the Potter's Field; an older, related project is Smothered Art.

Potter's Field is a free burial ground for art that is too impoverished, friendless, or 'worthless' to be entombed in a museum, including both original works and fakes of all kinds. It is so named because, like the traditional potter's field, it serves as a public burial place for the poor, the unknown, and the prohibited. The Potter's Field also serves as a conceptual model for real-world burial grounds that could be established to respectfully dispose of the 99.99% of all artworks that never make it into a permanent gallery.

Shark's Pocket is a generic duchamp produced posthumously by the Museum of Forgery. As such it is part of the Museum's program of "excessioning"; that is, of creating works that are then credited to the oeuvres of appropriate artists living and dead.

These generic artworks are a simple extension of the western tradition of treating art as a kind of brand-name product. In the world of commerce, highly successful brand-name products often pass into usage as common nouns, despite the efforts of the parent corporations to prevent this from happening. Kleenex becomes kleenex, Band-Aids become bandaids. Little-k kleenexes are not so much objects as categories of objects whose boundaries fluctuate constantly. Similarly, Mona Lisa the brand-name Leonardo has long since given way to the generic category of "mona-lisas" (whose number includes, among many other items, Duchamp's own L.H.O.O.Q.). Thus, a small-d duchamp is any object that it makes sense to categorize as by Duchamp. In this respect, the many objects that Duchamp did not make himself but nominated as Duchamps are also generic duchamps.

Taken From- http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~mof/gallery.html