At least since Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise (1935-68), artists have been making work claiming the label of Museum. Marcel Broodthaers, Claes Oldenburg, Ilya Kabakov, and Michael Blum explore this form, alongside David and Diana Wilson and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. Assembling artefacts and labels in carefully authored contexts, these works fuse museum poetics with the means of literature and conceptual art, operating as fictive museums. Adapting the concept of fictive art from Antoinette LaFarge, the thesis develops the fictive as an as-if cognitive mode, problematising distinctions between literal and figurative, and revealing meaning to be an inherently spatial matter.

This research identifies, (mis)labels, and takes par t in the fictive museum as a genre of contemporary art practice, accessioning it as a performative method to ask what fictive museums can do. The John Affey Museum (JAM) explores alternative modes of museum poetics to address the same questions. Using social media as performance platforms to restage research-as-practice, JAM forms a collection~assemblage of things: references; images; writing; performances; sculptures; academic publications; temporary exhibitions in gallery and performance spaces; and a long-term installation in Warrington Museum’s ethnology collection. JAM is accompanied by a museum catalogue in the form of an anthology of quotations, and by this thesis, comprising twenty short essays or (mis)labels for the fictive museum. The thesis proposes a sculptural, diagrammatic approach to knowledge production: an Image of thought (Deleuze), reimagined as associative constellation in fictive space.