Review: Fake, EdFringe

Look, I’m a sucker for a magic show. I love the sense of wonder that comes from a trick I can’t figure out: it leaves me with the childlike sense of freedom that the world is full of endless possibilities ripe to discover. I know not everyone shares this sense of simple joy at being deceived – and to those cynics I say, boo! Not all life’s important truths need to be serious.

But the subject matter here is serious: what makes art worthwhile? What do we think is art? What separates a skill from a swindle? Built on the premise that Vermeer’s use of a camera obscura to create his startlingly lifelike paintings might be considered a form of trick, the show explores that artist’s career through the lens of other famous (and infamous) highlights of Western art history. In particular, magician and storyteller Chris Cook takes us through the career of forger Han van Meegren, whose own work was derided by critics as “unoriginal”, so he set out to make the greatest “unoriginal” painting of all time: a brand-new Vermeer. Interspersed with nimble card tricks, surprising predictions, and a novel take on the linking rings, Cook walks us through the triumphs of van Meegren’s career and his ultimate undoing – with a side nod to Dutch forger Alice Cohen working in the same period, whose near-perfect false papers saved the lives of hundreds of people during WWII.

One small critique: Cook’s assertion that women didn’t get a look-in to the Western art history canon until the 1970s with Georgia O’Keefe did make me wish I had the power to magically infiltrate the works of Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt and Artemisia Gentileschi amongst the reference paintings he uses to situate the show’s premise early on. Yet, his intention is to point out that women and other marginalised groups have indeed often been passed over by the taste-makers of the day, be they the experts who declared van Meegren’s forgeries to be masterpieces in the 1930s or the influencers and algorithms of today, so I won’t complain too much.

Some of Cook’s other art history facts might not be entirely load-bearing: he implies that Vermeer invented the camera obscura, when in fact it was a reasonably well-known apparatus among other Dutch artists of the time (even Da Vinci gives it a mention well over 150 years before Vermeer may have used it). As Cook’s purpose is more to entertain than inform, and the show’s questions about fakes and fakery are at their core about genuineness rather than validity, it would perhaps be appropriate to say: never let a good fact stand in the way of the truth.

There were many genuine oohs and ahs from the crowd in a show full of deft sleight-of-hand surprises, but my personal favourite was a harmonica’s sudden transformation into an entirely different material, a moment which made me laugh with childlike delight. Cook makes us laugh and makes us think, and makes us wonder, too.

Written by: Chris Cook

Fake plays at EdFringe’s Free Fringe until Sunday 24 August.