Truth is Dead

Alison Jackson’s work is about voyeurism, our need to believe, and simulation. She cleverly uses actors or employs lookalikes of celebrities and public figures to produce convincingly realistic paparazzi or documentary style photographs of the intimate, often salacious, imagined private lives of many of the world’s most famous and infamous ‘icons’ or well-known individuals: Donald Trump, the British Royal Family, Marilyn Monroe, Kim and Kanye West, Elton John, David and Victoria Beckham, are but a few who feature in her works. Through studying the media and publicity industry created phenomenon of the ‘cult of celebrity’, Jackson seeks to explore the difference in contemporary celebrity culture between ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, ‘original’ and ‘copy’. A premise blurred, confused, and uncertain so that likeness and fantasy can be mistaken for the real and the believable. Her work also rests on the more radical thesis about celebrity culture fascinating us simply because it is an invented reality: a simulation or hyperreality where the very definition of the real has become something entirely possible to reproduce. Indeed, it is her interest in celebrity culture as simulation which shapes Jackson’s art. Her photographs, she contends, are not ‘fake’, or a stress-test of ‘truth’, but as ‘real’ as anything else in the strange hyperreal world of celebrity culture.

 As you explore the catalogue it is tempting to think that you are being tricked by Alison Jackson’s employment of doppelgängers in her photographs of ‘Donald Trump’, the ‘British Royal Family’, and ‘Celebrities’, to suppose that she wants you to suspend your disbelief, to be star struck and play along with the spying and the voyeurism of peering around the corner of celebrity culture to see what is going on ‘backstage’ in the lives of the famous away from the public gaze. You may think that this is the motivation behind Jackson’s work being portrayed not as images of complete fantasy, but often granted a patina of credibility through their connections and associations with pre-existing facts, rumours, assumptions, prejudices, and gossip. Perhaps the photographs of the uncannily styled actor ‘Donald Trump’ in this catalogue play to your desire to be swindled: to want to believe the scandalous rumours about the President’s extra-marital relationships that are reported in the gossip columns of newspapers and magazines; to believe that Donald Trump is an extreme racist who might associate with the Klu Klux Klan and credibly appear in a facsimile of one of photojournalism’s most famous photographs: ‘The Burning Cross’ taken in Wrightsville in 1948. However, as tempting as it might be for you to deploy such a reading of Jackson’s photographs, to assume that her photographs mirror the ‘real’ lives of celebrities or even simply depict your suspicions or fit the mental image you have about this or that celebrity, you would nevertheless be avoiding the artist’s claim that her photographs are not an imitation, distortion or exposé of celebrity culture.

Alison Jackson’s art and photographs aren’t about lifting the veil that perhaps shrouds the private lives of celebrities, nor are they about proving that the camera lies, about revealing that seeing is deceiving, or even that there is a blurred line where truth ends and lies begin. Rather her photographs are an unusual glimpse at celebrity because they are asking you to consider how in celebrity culture everything is ‘on show’, always already overexposed, immediate and immanent, to such an extent that there is no illusion, enigma, mystery, or scandal to be revealed. Her photographs are startlingly realistically staged affairs that do not pretend that there is a ‘reality’ to critique behind them, there is no original real for these photographs, there is no exterior or ‘outside’ to the exhibited photographs beyond the bubble of celebrity culture. Jackson is not asking you to decode the photographs, for you to think of them as somehow political or ideological critiques of this or that celebrity, or to think of her photographs as seeking to unmask the ‘truth’ of celebrity culture, because her point is that it is the simulation itself, the culture of celebrity, that is obscene, and that the simulation that is ‘celebrity culture’ is immune to any obvious critique beyond social commentary precisely because it intrinsically throws into doubt any distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’, ‘true’ and ‘false’, or ‘original’ and ‘copy’. A celebrity world where there is no separation of image and world, of sign and referent, of signifier and signified, of abstract and concrete, or eye and world, disallows the opening of any critical space or gaze on the obscenity of celebrity culture.

Alison Jackson’s photography is of a virtual concoction and performative flow of appearances not indexed to the truth. That said, it is not the meaning, but the performativity of her photographs that we need to look at, if we accept the contention that celebrity culture in an age of mass mediation is no more than a media construction. And doing that is hard, it is difficult to let go of the traditional habit of modern or enlightenment thought that above all wants and seeks meaning, demands that there be something more than just images, desperately wants to reject the idea that there is nothing (no truth, no real) waiting to be revealed behind images and representations, that needs to ‘analyse’ images to ‘find’ or manufacture meaning because it just can’t accept that images do not overlay the world but are that which the world lays on for itself. Jackson’s challenge to you is precisely this: can you question your belief in representation and verisimilitude? She argues that it simply does not matter that she utilises actors and lookalikes. The fact that they are not the ‘real’ subjects is not important so long as they look right precisely because she is showing you what you already know – that it is the image, the ‘icon’, the ‘aura’, of any celebrity that is what is important and seductive about them.

Alison Jackson’s photographs are not only funny and well-staged, not only designed to titillate the public and make you do a double take, but are also thought-provoking because they are a challenge to take the action of her photographs seriously. She is not imitating, feigning, counterfeiting, representing, explaining, or merely presenting celebrity culture, but is provoking us to consider the possibility that her photographs are the world of celebrity culture. It does not matter that her photographs do not, and are not intended to represent any actual event that has taken place, nor that will take place, precisely because her photographs have agency in-themselves, with nothing behind them they are not the causes or effects of actions, but are actions in their own right. Jackson’s photographs are a part of, not apart from, the cult of celebrity. The fabrication of her photographs absorbs the consequences of cause and effect and creates an ‘implosion of meaning’ that initiates simulation. Jackson’s spoofing of any celebrity only ever serves to make them yet more famous, to exist only more intensely in the public imagination, to get even more attention, to make them more real than real: that is to say, hyperreal and obscene.

Alison Jackson is a BAFTA and multi-award winning English artist whose works have attracted extensive TV and press coverage. She trained in London at both the Chelsea College of Art and Design, and the Royal College of Art, and has subsequently worked across many media and arts platforms: in television, film, theatre, digital, books, opera, and commercial advertising. Her photographic portraits, life-like sculptures, films and videos have been exhibited in numerous galleries, museums, art fairs and public collections worldwide including Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Text by: Richard G. Smith
Richard G. Smith works at Swansea University in Wales. He is the Editor of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, and his most recent book is Jean Baudrillard: the Disappearance of Culture, Uncollected Interviews (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).