Hoax icon Alan Abel to attend "cultural guerrilla festival"

In Texas in the mid-1950s, a man was driving through the countryside when he suddenly stopped his car and pulled over to watch a cow and a male calf in full sexual activity. This is not the start of a B movie. It was the revelation that turned the young writer Alan Abel into one of the greatest media hoaxsters of all time. It occurred to him that he be able to make a name for himself and even create a work of art by starting an absurd conservative media crusade against animal nudity.

The ensuing project escalated until newspapers and radio and television networks were supporting his campaign for the production of pants, skirts and underwear for dogs and cats.

It may have been no more than a tease, but more than 50 years later, Abel is still giving lectures at universities throughout the world, and explaining his philosophy at exhibitions and festivals such as The Influencers. This festival, starting on 28 February at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea in Barcelona (CCCB), will be a forum for "guerrillas of communication, art and radical entertainment."

The hoax master will be speaking in Barcelona on his heterodox tactics for influencing popular culture.

Questioning history

Also present will be Laibach, a group of Slovenian artists and musicians; the Seville architect and agitator Santiago Cirugeda, and the Italian video artists Alterazioni Video. All of them will be there to "question the official history of popular culture," in the words of Bani, one of the directors.

Laibach will offer a review of some of their performances in the 1980s, when they combined the Nazi and Communist aesthetic styles, provoking angry reactions in official circles in Yugoslavia.

Cirugeda will be showing his architectural solutions known as "urban recipes" to combat speculation, ranging from an "insect house" in a tree to a penthouse in the form of a trailer perched on a roof terrace. The artist Trevor Paglen will show his digital works, such as Terminal Air, based on the research of the San Francisco journalist A. C. Thompson, and reproducing the network of flights and airports allegedly used by the CIA to take terrorist suspects to secret prisons. "Because real events, and not just television series, form part of pop culture," says Bani.

A feature event will be the projection, on Friday 29 February, of Abel Raises Cain, the documentary that Alan Abel's daughter Jenny has made about the story of her father's hoaxes, showing that laughter can be an antidote against the ills of the world.

[Copyright EL PAÍS / FRANCESCO MANETTO 2008]