THROUGHOUT his adult life, the jurist and politician Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a noted writer. A selection of his aphorisms first appeared in 1597 as a collection of essays that were widely reprinted. “Of Truth” is the opening essay in the last edition that he published in the year before he died.
As Solicitor General 1607-13, Attorney General 1613-17, and as Lord Keeper 1617-18 and later Lord Chancellor 1618-21, Bacon was well versed in the mendacity of government ministers and of MPs. “‘What is Truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
I have not yet established how often he visited Norwich, although he had good occasion so to do. His half-brother and fellow MP, Nathaniel Bacon (1547-1622), represented Norfolk in the Parliaments of 1584, 1593, and 1604, and King’s Lynn in 1597, and is buried in Stiffkey Parish Church. As a Puritan, he was a leading spokesman against episcopacy.
In our world of Fake News, digital copies, and the increased potential of AI, the exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre on the UEA campus brings Bacon’s question to Norwich. It is timely, if not particularly novel.
Photoshop and Polaroids have long made it possible to remove awkward people from wedding photographs or to add false candidates to graduation pictures. The ready market for fake photo ID can be only encouraged by the new measures against fraud at the ballot box.
Since 2000, the interior of the Mole Antonelliana (1889) in the heart of Turin has housed the National Museum of Cinema. There, in a permanent exhibition, “True or False?”, visitors find a precisely reconstructed lounge in an English suburban semi of the 1960s. From the “comfort” of a moquette-covered settee, one views two televisions; and newsreel footage and documentaries appear alongside cinematic recreations: the assassination of JFK, the Beatles’ Manhattan concert in 1967, the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, and so on.
On the same recent visit to Piedmont, I was able to go to Asti, where the famed Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio was at the centre of an exhibition in the Palazzo Mazzetti. It is permanently held in the most distinguished Milan art gallery, the Ambrosiana. Had I been in Milan, I could have seen the Basket of Fruit there, too.
The original had been taken to Asti; the digital reproduction by the company Cinello was advertised as such in Milan, unlike Caravaggio’s Syracusan Burial of St Lucy in an exhibition two years ago in Lucca, which deceived the visitors and, even in the catalogue, was not identified as a copy. Caveat spectator.
The Norwich exhibition looks at an alternative narrative for what President Nixon might have read, had the July 1969 moon landing failed. Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta from MIT have perfectly recreated a living room from 1969. A Bakelite model Dalek is next to the TV on the sideboard, and on the shelves are an illuminated globe, a lava lamp, and a little metal pendulum of a tight-rope walker on a metal column; an aunt gave me the one that I still have.
© Stuart Franklin and Magnum PhotosStuart Franklin, “The Tank Man” stopping the column of T59 tanks. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. 4 June 1989
On 18 July 1969, the American writer William Samfire had sent Bob Haldeman the text of the speech that Nixon would deliver after first telephoning each of the “widows-to-be”.
“AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN: A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to ‘the deepest of the deep’, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.”
The artists have modified the CBS footage of the moon landing, adding footage of Nixon’s resignation speech and dubbing it to present the false recording. The exhibition tells us how to spot “Deep Fake” imagery; but questioning truth and representation is nothing new to art.
In 1929, the Belgian Surrealist summarised the debate famously: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” In antiquity, Pliny tells us, Zeuxis, in competition with Parrhasius, painted grapes so realistically that birds attempted to eat them. Zeuxis then tried to lift the curtain to see the picture Parrhasius had undertaken, only to discover that the awning was a painted image.
Nothing in this exhibition is quite as provocative or carefully performed as the ancients, but the Big Question remains: What is Truth?
A second exhibition of photography, “The Camera Never Lies: Challenging Images Through The Incite Project” (until 20 October), brings together what we might deem iconic images from the 20th century.
Three famed photographs of Tiananmen Square from 1989 are images that are not circulated in China, where the identity and fate of the brave student in his white shirt remain unknown: propaganda and misinformation.
“What is Truth? In Event of Moon Disaster” is at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norfolk Road, Norwich, until 4 August. Phone 01603 593199. www.sainsburycentre.ac.uk