And while I have been lying here perfectly still: The Saskia Olde Wolbers Files (2009)

And while I have been lying here perfectly still: The Saskia Olde Wolbers Files, Toronto: Art Gallery of York University, 2009.

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And while I have been lying here perfectly still: The Saskia Olde Wolbers Files (2009) was a book within a book. Its very form was an interpretation of the artist's work. The content, too, was an oblique interpretation, again mimicking the artist’s subject but through the genre transformation of a publication type. It was all fiction. Modelled on the Black Cat pocket books published by Grove Press in the 1960s, with a price tag to match, the book was a series of case studies—but as if written by Edgar Allan Poe. Each of Olde Wolbers’s fantastical video projections was the subject of psychological or psychoanalytical study, as if it were a patient. The doctor, though, had died; his wife prepared his papers for publication; an editor presented them. Each is an author within the book; so is Philip Monk. The problem is that the doctor was an expert in pseudologia fantastica—pathological lying—but he himself was a pathological liar. The question remains: which of his case studies are real and which, scandalously, fabricated?

“I am aware that—in this town, at least—there are many physicians who (revolting though it may seem) choose to read a case history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of neuroses, but as a roman à clef designed for their private delectation. I can assure readers of this species that every case history which I may have occasion to publish in the future will be secured against their perspicacity by similar guarantees of secrecy, even though this resolution is bound to put quite extraordinary restrictions on my choice of material.”

—Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”