They keep stretching the truth. It’s been quite a few weeks of my non-writing (and therefore increased-thinking) about Vera Frenkel and the fictional character Cornelia Lumstain that she’s created, as if Cornelia a writer and Canadian immigrant in Europe, lost between the two world wars and last seen in Paris where she rented a room. I was thinking mostly, who cares about an immigrant, moreover, one who’s lost and moreover, fictional? It’s a fake identity, just like everything is fake in the system. The system balances bubbles of narratives constructing the general stream, the holy political narrative. And Vera Frenkel, originating from the doomed Slovakia, maybe felt a little bit of the ultimate immigrant subjectivity. She used this sense of divine abandonment. She is a trickster, playing games with memory, history, fiction, and truth.
But how fake is a carefully crafted fake identity? We might play with words to the fullest and say that the truth will die one day and not because of lies, but because there will be too many truths. The bloody body of Earth pulsates with truths that no one wants to feel. And does it matter if I tell you the truth or not? What matters is that it’s my truth and my story. You still want to hear from me. “Truth is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My truth trembles with desire”. Roland Barthes just felt it.
Moreover, in times like this, individual mythology becomes a methodology to intellectual survival. We float like islands within the general stream of mass consciousness, locked in the nets of post-truths, where “post” means a social media post. A drop of hate. A piece of shit.
What I am to my inward vision, and what I appear in relation to the eternal, can only be expressed by way of myth. Hermeneutically speaking, any documentation or art can be considered a diary, full of individual and collective myths. Memory is a creative process. Strategically impressed people might incorporate false information into their memories if it aligns with the narrative presented to them. Vera Frenkel suits as a perfect example again. There is no lie in her fire. Cornelia Lumstain existed! Vera – Frankly!
The Secret Life of Cornelia Lumsden is the umbrella title for a series of major works (1979-1986) exploring the nature of truth and the power of narrative. A complex narrative. Vera shoots with details. Like, the title of the book that Cornelia was working on, was “The Imagined Grace of Fat People”.
Vera weaves together elements of video, installation, performance, and storytelling to craft a narrative that blurs the lines between fact and fiction.The installation includes furnishings and a 60-minute videotape of faux testimonials. She has this dark passion towards exile and absence, and the role of myth in historical truth and fiction. The Part 1 of the artwork, “Her Room in Paris”, “…exposes entrenched tendencies of Canadian culture: the artist-in-exile (absence as a condition of acceptance), frail hero myths, humor, deception, and latent colonialism. Colonial gender studies!
I’m becoming a geopolitical mystic myself. Exploring the liminal territories, refugee issues, immigration, identity, memory, I have a front seat contemplating the collapse of Western civilization, as Anestis greekly pointed out. Who will crucify me, I don’t care, as soon as I’m tortured. But why would I want the tortures?
Cause I believe in Joy.
Marina Timoshenko