Tricksters or fakes, assistants or ‘toons, they are exemplars of the coming community*

Since the publication of his Autobiography of Howard Hughes in 1972, the life of writer Clifford Iriving has been nothing but adventure. The autobiography was a “fake” and unauthorized biography of the eccentric American aviator and film director Howard Hughes (1905-1976), an American tycoon billionaire who died in 1976 after being in recluse the last years of his life. That so-called autobiography, a creative concoction of Clifford Irving and his conspirator Dick Suskind, caused a scandal when the reclusive Hughes declared it a hoax, ending in the imprisonment of the authors.

In an attempt to revisit the process and controversy of the book’s making, or say, the life of one its authors, Clifford Irving himself, Miramax produced the film The Hoax, which was released last year. Lying somewhere between dramatization and fictionalization, this film is loosely based on Clifford Irving’s story, narrated first and most accurately in a book by him with the same title and first published in 1981. Not surprisingly, the film is far from and adaptation of his book, and Clifford Irving claims it a hoax in itself.

Fakes. Hoaxes. Re-makings. Multiple narratives. These are also the subjects of Orson Welle’s 1974 film F for Fake, wherein Clifford Irving plays himself—or not. Finally, we can get to know. This year, Clifford Irving published his autobiography, Phantom Rosebuds, and has been giving presentations in the US as part of the book tour. Phantom Rosebuds is published by Dexter Sinister and the exhibition as event as book tour, with the savvy title “The Clifford Irving Show,” is produced by art mogul Raimundas Malasauskas. To date, it has been presented in California at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in collaboration with 2012 in Los Angeles.

I had the luck of sitting next to Clifford Irving on an air-flight to China some weeks ago. It was a special flight, indeed, filled with coincidence and surprise. It was the perfect way to meet the man. Inspired by the writer’s lifetime and work, as well as by the self-designated Fake Market and shadow economies that I experienced while traveling in China, I interviewed Clifford Irving some days after we met on air. Click here to read this interview.

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Phantom Rosebuds was published in April 2008 in an edition of 500, on the occasion of “The Clifford Irving Show” at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, CA and Art 2102 in Los Angeles, CA. It will also be included in Issue 16 of Dot Dot Dot.

Clifford Irving Show is produced by Raimundas Malasauskas as part of F for Park, a project in search of a parallel science of beats and concepts.

* Title of entry drawn from: Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, translated from the Italian by Michael Hardt, U.S.A., Minnesota University Press, 1990-1993/1998, p. 11.