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Jamie Shovlin is a conman, a trickster, the most artful of dodgers. His entire career consists of elaborate hoaxes. He has faked any number of artworks, quite apart from inventing the artists themselves, beginning with the teenage prodigy Naomi V Jelish (spot the anagram), whose words and images were bought wholesale by Charles Saatchi after her strange disappearance – though that may be a fiction in itself.
- Jamie Shovlin
- Hiker Meat
- Cornerhouse,
- Manchester
- Starts 18 January
- Until 21 April
- Details:
0161-200 1500 - Venue website
Shovlin was born in Leicester in 1978 (or so it is claimed by the various galleries that represent him). He was shortlisted for the Becks Futures award in 2006 for his terrific archive of invented memorabilia for the German cult band Lustfaust, who never recorded an actual record. You got their music by sending a blank cassette (they despised the record industry) and designing your own label. Only 30-second extracts of these bootlegs could be played at the ICA show – imagine thrash Lou Reed – because of threats from rancorous ex-members.
"Lust/Faust" written on a pair of plimsolls, Melody Maker ads, reviews of underground gigs, excitable postcards sent back and forth between fans – together they drew one in so deeply that a whole era was evoked. How much more wonderful if Shovlin had made it all up, the antithesis of Jeremy Deller's Folk Archive – and it turned out he had. The imaginative forgeries were superb.
In the intervening years Shovlin has reached back to 60s America, reinventing those bittersweet years of revolution with curious visual hybrids – a Bob Seger poster reprised as a Kenneth Noland target painting, a Chicago LP redrawn as if by Robert Rauschenberg, much meditation on Woodstock, the Black Panthers, the life of the Yippie Abbie Hoffman. Shovlin seemed obsessed with weird coincidences and connections and the sense of a fading dream.
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And somewhere in the middle of this the germ of a new pastiche sprang up. Lustfaust – supposedly – had once come up with a concept album for an imaginary horror film made in America in the 1970s. Shovlin decided to devise a movie to fit the fake construct. It would be scripted by his friend Mike Harte, titled Hiker Meat (spot the anagram) and composed of more than 1,500 clips from existing exploitation movies such as Torso, Friday the 13th and The Sinful Dwarf. A rough trailer was created and released on YouTube. As far as I can tell, the rest of it was never made.
But then along came a commission from the Cornerhouse in Manchester to shoot a real movie version of the fake (and non-existent) film, and you can see parts of it soon in the largest Shovlin show to date, opening on 18 January. A gallery full of props and memorabilia will set the scene, and the tone. "Thirty kids made it to Jamestown," shrieks the lurid poster, "how many will make it back?"
Here are the hiking boots, the shooting scripts, the production notes; the latex head of a giant worm that lactates black milk to keep the kids enslaved for ever. Clips, trails, interviews with the cast and crew, and a documentary about the shooting of the film – what else? – amount to a kind of total artwork in which everything counts. Atmosphere is all.
The cast and crew appear to be working on slightly different films. The cheery non-actor playing the heroine thinks it's all a great laugh. The composer is boringly formal, analysing the soundtrack of Dario Argento's horror flick Suspiria as if it were by JS Bach. Mike Harte – if he exists at all and this isn't someone else playing the role – ponders process and the difficulties of "recontextualisation", while Shovlin talks about "transgressing the original collage". The producer is just worried about pranging the vintage hired cars.
In Rough Cut, the documentary, you see them all fiddling about with props, fog machines and dodgy lights in the heart of Grizedale Forest in the Lake District where the shooting takes place. Everyone is plagued by summer midges. It is this mismatch of theory and practice, of self-conscious interviews and absurd accidents, that gives the film its piquant comedy.
Now it seems to me that a person can be too interested in pastiche. Google the name of almost anyone involved in Rough Cut and you will find fake websites, interviews, biogs, blogs and passing mentions planted like false documents in the archives. Shovlin is a tireless counterfeiter and this show has a parallel life online so persuasive that at least one journalist seems to think Hiker Meat really exists.
‘The generic figure standing menacingly in the fog’ in Hiker Meat. Photograph: courtesy and copyright the artist
But it doesn't, any more than the Cumbrian remake, which consists of little more than a trailer and the opening and closing sequences. These are funny, since they come so roughly edited that one hears actors and crew mumbling, laughing, flailing, complaining or generally reverting to themselves, before clambering back into the modest minibus. Practically all that is definitively achieved are the cliched stills – the period-perfect heroine with her 70s shampoo-ad hair and cheesecloth top, sniffing a flower as twilight falls; the generic figure standing menacingly in the fog.
Pan-backs show the worm cradled by his proud model-maker, the shooting script causing consternation, the colour grading that shifts contemporary Grizedale to 70s America going wrong, and then right. The charm of the anomalous or revelatory outtake runs through it all.
But what makes Shovlin's latest enterprise so different is not just the scale of it – many years and numerous colleagues in the making. It's the fact that the masquerade is entirely exposed. The band, the original horror movie, the collaged remake, the remake of the remake (as it were) – all are revealed to be fake. Even the crew, it seems, are impostors.
And yet there is something real and true at the end of all this, and the evidence is there in the paraphernalia of filming, the props and costumes, and in the documentary itself. What they show is something quite simple, something that happens every day: a lot of colleagues trying to get something done – a group portrait of people at work.
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