Why Artists Are Blurring the Line Between Real History and Pretend

Comments (0) By Catherine Wagley Thursday, Dec 20 2012

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In September, at the Highland Park alternative space Public Fiction, Small exhibited one of the murals, which looks like a castle in the clouds. It hung behind a "sphinx headdress" on a black marble pedestal. It all felt like art, a collection of objects carefully crafted by an artist to comment on culture, collapsing symbols from different mythologies. So it was surprising to discover Small had gotten the mural from the Luxor and the headdress from an actual archaeological dig — albeit an unconventional one.

When Cecil B. DeMille made his first Ten Commandments film in 1923 (he later would make the one starring Charlton Heston in 1956), he built a massive set in the desert in a town called Guadalupe. The set included 21 sphinxes and four 27-ton statues of Ramses II. DeMille left it where it was after filming, burying it in sand dunes near Santa Barbara. He wrote in his autobiography, "If a thousand years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope that they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America."

PHOTO COURTESY OF DANIEL SMALL

This mural, which used to hang behind the check-in desk at the Luxor Las Vegas, is one of many fake artifacts Daniel Small is collecting.

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By the time Small found out about the buried set two years ago, documentary filmmaker Peter Brosnan had already tried for years to get permission from the county to excavate. Small joined in the effort and the excavation happened in October. Many set pieces were too fragile and fragmented to remove, but tables in Small's Echo Park studio now are lined with objects from the dig, including that sphinx headdress. He also just received funding from the Creative Capital foundation to fabricate a full-size replica of a sphinx head like those DeMille used (excavating and restoring one of the buried ones, if even possible, would be a long, expensive process).

He imagines exhibiting all these objects — the fake sphinx, DeMille artifacts and Luxor murals — as a history museum might, with the artifacts arranged in high-quality cases. Past, present and future, real histories and reinventions of histories, would all be there on the same level playing field.

When you think about it, this situation isn't so different from how reality feels — the layers of movie references, history book entries and our own imaginations all mingle when someone brings up something like "the Sphinx."

Maybe projects like this resonate right now because they are the anti-truthiness, a push against that trend Colbert satirized. Instead of letting things that feel true become truth, they're compelling because they detail how difficult it is to distinguish fact from perception. It's like what David Shields talks about in his book Reality Hunger: being "futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are." While fictional frames pull you further into fiction, putting a documentary frame around art promises some sort of news of how the world works, which is what we want art to help us figure out at this moment — when too much information is available.

So even if L.A. is a place where you have a Greystone Mansion murder to suss out or a Ten Commandments film set burial site to excavate, the thing that has seemed "so L.A." for so long — meshing reality with fantasy — actually seems, suddenly, just "so right now."