The New Mexican’s Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment & Culture July 6, 2012

To tell the truthiness @ SITE Santa Fe he term “truthiness” was presented by comedian Stephen Colbert on his television program The Colbert Report in 2005 to refer to situations we believe to be true or want to be true, whether or not they are factual. Colbert used the word in reference to statements made during the presidency of George W. Bush such as the justifications given to launch T preemptive strikes against Iraq. The Bush administration’s reasons Michael Abatemarco I The New Mexican ranged from Iraq’s possible harboring of terrorists suspected of collaborating in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to the belief that Iraq was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Today, truthiness can refer to a more nebulous, although common, aspect of our day-to-day lives: belief in the veracity of our convictions, leaving little room for critical thinking. In More Real? Art in the Age of Tr uthiness, Elizabeth Armstrong, contemporary art curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, has pieced together an exhibition, in To tell the collaboration with SITE Santa Fe, establishing truthiness as an artistic concern and a global phenomenon. While More Real? is not intended to replace SITE’s biennial, it was developed at the level of previous SITE biennials in terms of its international scope and its quality. Architect Greg Lynn was hired to design a new facade for the space. More Real? has its first run at SITE, and the show travels to truthiness the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in March 2013. More Real? explores themes of authenticity in art, the role of institutions and political powers in creating reality, and art itself as a construct. Take note: More Real? ends in a question mark. You might be asking yourself “more real than what?” “That’s what art is,” Armstrong told Pasatiempo, “using artifice to speak a truth.” Armstrong organized her exhibition around three thematic considerations: deception SITE Santa Fe exhibit tackles questions of reality and fact /courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery rk Yo © Thomas Demand/Artists’ Rights Society (ARS), New Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty Images Thomas Demand: Presidency V, 2008, C-print mounted on Plexiglas, 36.25 x 55 inches

32 July 6 -12, 2012 and play, status of fact, and reshaping the real. These themes leave plenty of room for overlap. This is a show that asks us to read between the lines, so to speak, to carefully consider and evaluate the nature, not only of what we see, but of how we see. “Have we come to the point where we see past illusion?” Armstrong asked. “One of the things I was trying to get at was that there’s always new ways of creating an illusion. Take the example of reality TV; I think we’re at the point where most people don’t think it’s really real. It’s become so unreal. It’s Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart doing a fake news show. The real news show was no longer necessarily trusted. In the political culture, reality isn’t a matter of consensus, it’s a matter of who’s got the loudest voice and the most power to fabricate information. When The Daily Show came out, people came more and more to this fake news show to get the real news than they did to the broadcast news. To me that was emblematic of the breakdown of journalism to be an authority or, at least, a voice of truth and fact. At the same time, we had an administration that openly spoke about creating reality.” More Real? features work by Thomas Demand, Leandro Erlich, Omer Fast, Sharon Lockhart, Jonathan Monk, Ai Weiwei, Mark Dion, Jonn Herschend, Eva and Franco Mattes, and many other artists. The show is not overtly political. Artifice Exhibition organizer Elizabeth Armstrong, courtesy Minneapolis Institute of seems to be the main subject, and the artists tackle it in a variety of mediums and Arts © 2009 Minneapolis Institute of Arts ways. Demand’s group of photographs, for instance, appears to show the interior of the Oval Office in the White House but, on careful inspection, things do not will probably not notice that some of the figures never move. Others, familiar with seem quite right. Faces in framed pictures glimpsed on the Oval Office furniture Hanson’s work, will see through the ruse immediately. are indistinct. The titles on the bookshelves are blank, and nothing can be seen Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases are presented as authentic relics from Neolithic-era through the windows, even though the curtains have been drawn. Demand’s Oval China but not in a way that calls attention to them as historic artifacts. Instead, Office is, in fact, a paper model. Weiwei has covered them with industrial paints. By doing so, Weiwei brings up Lockhart does a similar trick with her photographs of ’s realistic questions about how we value such objects. Does defacing a relic makes it less sculptures of people. She staged people interacting with the sculptures for a series valuable? New values are established by turning a collection of vases into a of photographic prints. Only a close examination of the images reveals that some of the people — the Hanson sculptures — never change position. Some visitors continued on Page 34 iwei We Ai Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Phantom Truck, installation view at 12, 2007; Ai Weiwei: Colored Vases, 2006; Neolithic vases (5000–3000 B.C.E.) and courtesy the artist and Getty Images industrial paint; 51 pieces, dimensions variable; courtesy the artist

PASATIEMPO 33 More Real? continued from Page 33 a description of weapons manufacturing labs in Iraq and trucks allegedly used as chemical-weapons decontamination vehicles and for transporting contemporary art installation. There is also some question as to whether or weapons. The evidence presented to the Security Council was used as a not the vases really date to the Neolithic period, establishing Colored Vases justification for the preemptive strike against Iraq. But vehicles such as those as another component of the exhibition’s element of deception and play. described by Powell were never found. “I say to myself, I’m going to build These are the intricate levels at which More Real? is pitched. While that truck,” Manglano-Ovalle said, “but the piece is more a representation of trompe l’oeil developed as an artistic practice that fools the eye with a high the speech than it is a representation of the truck. This is not Colin Powell’s degree of realism, our fascination and delight in it derives from seeing past truck, because that truck didn’t exist. It is a kind of twist on what is real. the illusion. More Real? offers similar challenges. “As a curator, as someone It’s a fabrication of a fabrication.” who deals with art objects, I don’t want to lose the element of fascination Here is an actual object that appears to contain, in accord with Powell’s and wonder, but I do want to give those objects a context for the power I descriptions, apparatus related to weapons manufacturing. “A lot goes into think they have. I didn’t want to neglect the fun, illusion, deception side, the fabrication of it, but the real artistic gesture is in hiding it and, through and the resurgence of interest in that on the part of artists, and connect- hiding it, revealing it. If you go back all the way to the ancient Greeks, ing that to what it means to our culture. I can understand why Middle ‘phantom’ means to make appear, to make visible. But it doesn’t insinuate Easterners might speak in parafictions because it’s too dangerous to speak that what you’re revealing is anything truthful or that the revelation is real. the truth, but why is it happening throughout the whole world? What does It could also be a trick.” that say about us?” Manglano-Ovalle’s artistic response to Powell’s speech is not intended as Among the most powerful works in the exhibit is Iñigo Manglano- an indictment. “It was actually a great speech. I often talk of that speech as Ovalle’s Phantom Tr uck, an installation that does not give up its secrets one of those epic monologues, like the speech Ulysses gives to Achilles to easily. Walking into a space with, at best, dim lighting, the visitor is con- convince him to stay in the war. A precursor to Phantom Tr uck was a film fronted with a full-scale replica of a truck that, because of the dark space, I made called Oppenheimer, which was based on my search at that time for reveals itself slowly as the eyes adjust. “This piece had its impetus at a live a modern Virgil who would guide us through our contemporary inferno. moment,” Manglano-Ovalle told Pasatiempo while he was installing it. The Oppenheimer is a key figure, and I think Colin Powell will ultimately become artist was referring to Colin Powell’s infamous 2003 speech to the United a key figure, a kind of flawed, tragic figure. We were undergoing an epic Nations’ Security Council, in which the then secretary of state delivered moment. That speech was our Trojan Horse.” ◀

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14 December 2002--23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003, chromogenic print; 72 x 121 x 2.75 inches (framed); Art Foundation, Santa Monica; image courtesy the artist and The Broad Art Foundation

34 July 6 -12, 2012 details

▼ SITE Santa Fe’s More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness

▼ Panel discussion 2 p.m. Saturday, July 7 James A. Little Theater, New Mexico School for the Deaf, 1060 Cerrillos Road $10, $5 students & seniors; available at the door, at www.sitesantafe.org, and by calling SITE, 989-1199

▼ More Real? party 7 p.m. Saturday, July 7 SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta $60, tickets available at the door, at www.sitesantafe.org, and by calling 989-1199 ▼ Public opening Noon-5 p.m. Sunday, July 8, exhibit through Jan. 6, 2013 SITE Santa Fe No charge opening day, then by museum admission; 989-1199; visit www.sitesantafe.org for related events $23 prix fixe menu served all evening 7 nights a week

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PASATIEMPO 35 Altering SITE Architect Greg Lynn

Greg Lynn FORM renderings of architectural intervention at SITE Santa Fe, 2012; photos courtesy Greg Lynn FORM

36 July 6 -12, 2012 Paul Weideman I The New Mexican

he scoops are up at SITE Santa Fe. Inviting-looking, aren’t 2005, he was named as one the 10 most influential living architects they? The new facade/entrance at the museum comprises by Forbes magazine. In 2008, he won the Golden Lion at the 11th scoopy projections from the surface, which is painted like International of Architecture. gigantic white flower petals. If it arouses your curiosity and Lynn recently produced a jewelry line for Atelier Swarovski. “It’s makes you wonder what’s inside, there’s only one way to funny because these scoops at SITE Santa Fe are the same shapes I T find out. used in the jewelry. ” Inside is the rest of the exhibition More Real? Art in the Age of Asked about this predilection for blobby shapes, he answered, Tr uthiness, in which more than two dozen artists from around the “I think the language of spaces and volumes that I like are predomi- world deal with questions swirling around our experience and nantly curved surfaces, so openings and thresholds and passages intuition of multiple realities and pseudo-realities. The show opens I really like pulling from a flat surface into something more three- at SITE Santa Fe on Sunday, July 8, and at the Minneapolis Institute dimensional.” of the Arts’ second-floor Target Gallery in March 2013. It’s curated The architect has been increasingly interested during the past few by Elizabeth Armstrong, head of the MIA’s Contemporary Art years in composite materials and in using them to create organic- Department. looking forms. In the case of his Bloom House (2010) in Los Angeles, For the tweaked building forms, Armstrong and SITE chief curator the fireplace, bathroom vanities, and other functional elements appear and Phillips Director Irene Hofmann went to Greg Lynn, an architect to be emerging from, or stretched out of, the walls and floors. He said known as a digital-design pioneer the SITE scoops represent an evolution of that idea. Again, where and for “blob” forms incorporated does that notion come from? “Honestly, I think it’s just contemporary into houses, furniture, lamps, and culture. Everything I look at, other than architecture, is using the other objects. “Greg’s work is all language of surfaces. Cars and planes and all that kind of stuff really about taking things that have shifted from being frames with cladding to being different kinds of corners or other expected shapes folded and creased surfaces. I think it’s very related to computer and turning them into biomorphic modeling, because that’s one way things get modeled and conceived. forms, whether it’s a chair or a It’s also about plastics and composites, and it has to do with an building or a teapot,” Hofmann economy of material.” said. “Liz and I went to his studio, The four SITE scoops — two of them delineating a door and a and we told him about the exhibition window at the entrance and two used similarly in the lobby, leading and said we were looking at creating into the More Real? exhibition spaces — were fabricated from cloth an altered experience as you enter and resin in Los Angeles. Lynn’s ideas for this job were particularly our building.” Lynn recalled the conditioned by past encounters with buildings by two Italian architects. word “vestibule” mentioned in an “Something that triggered all this is that I saw some churches by Greg Lynn, designer of SITE’s early conversation. The bottom [Bernardo] Vittone outside of Tu rin last year. He did these elaborately facade and entrance line was for “a portal where you modeled surfaces, all in brick, but he got it to behave like all the go through a space and feel like different stone detail. He also did domes inside chapels that have, something is a little bit off or distorted or your view is a little bent,” instead of one oculus, dozens of oculi arranged around the domes to he told Pasatiempo. bring light in. That was something I was thinking about with these “We asked Greg to create what we could call a ‘disorientation room’ deformed ovals.” The notion of what he called “twisting and torquing that you would encounter once you walk in,” Hofmann said. “And geometry” also relates to memories of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Church can you change your experience of a building that you know well, of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, which he viewed in Rome a couple of or of the Santa Fe architecture that you know well, the stucco and summers ago. brown? So it will have a white, slick, almost space-age look. This will The curved shells at SITE also came from an image Lynn had of be the first experience of the show, this altered-entrance feature that sculpting or troweling adobe surfaces — “like decorating a cake,” as hopefully signals something interesting, something magical inside.” he put it — even though the museum is fundamentally only another of Lynn was shown photographs of past SITE exhibitions in which Santa Fe’s “fake adobe” buildings, this one with concrete-block walls. artists transformed the building exterior and architects did the When the exhibition is de-installed at SITE next January, the exhibition design. “So how about if I do something in between, do two scoops on the front will remain there for a while, as Hofmann something with the facade and then with the whole lobby space and requested. (Also, they were designed to fit into the access openings they could have some of the artists play around with the fact that on the building, rather than into the Target Gallery entrance at the you’re never sure if you’re in the show or you’re not?” second venue.) The inside scoops will travel to the MIA. The Ohio native has a graduate degree in architecture from “I wanted to try to make sure what we did in Santa Fe could be Princeton University. His studio Greg Lynn FORM, based in Los re-used in Minneapolis without tearing it down and redoing it,” Angeles, has been at the forefront not only of computer-facilitated Lynn said, “not so much from moral sustainabilitiy or anything, but design but of manufacturing complex forms using computer- it just seems crazy to do this thing, take a picture, and throw it in controlled machines. He is a studio professor at the University of a dumpster.” California-Los Angeles’ School of Architecture and Urban Design, Plus, isn’t it art? You’re not supposed to throw away art. “I would where he is involved in developing an experimental research robotics never call it art. What I do is never art; it’s always design. It just seems lab. He is also the Davenport Visiting Professor at Yale University. In silly to treat it as temporary. ” ◀

PASATIEMPO 37 Rob DeWalt I The New Mexican Video art killed the reality star

“My name is Annlee,” says a computer-generated image of a girl staring blankly at you from a screen. “I was a frozen picture ... I have become animated. I am haunted by your imagination.” The ability of the imagination to run amok and create its own version of reality — based on limited or altered sensual information — informs the video-installation work presented as part of SITE Santa Fe’s More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness exhibition, a collaboration with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The emancipated image

n 1999, multimedia artist and fellow artist More Real? Philippe Parreno bought the rights to Annlee, at the time I a nameless, personality-deprived drawing created by a Japanese manga artist. The pair developed Annlee into an

— animated 3-D video character and invited artists to use her image in their work, in a sense breathing life — or at least a deepened sense of reality and identity — into an otherwise static image. Huyghe and Parreno named their Annlee character- development project No Ghost Just a Shell, and in 2000, Huyghe created a video installation for the project — Tw o Minutes Out of Time, which is at SITE as part of the More Real? exhibition. In 2002, the pair transferred their copyright for Annlee to Annlee herself, thus allowing her the freedom to

Santa Fe either “exist” or fade away — which may not even be possible, given that her video image makes its way to shows like the one in Santa Fe. At the end of Tw o Minutes Out of Time, which explores how image ownership and usage affect how the public perceives that image (is it art, or is it commercial art?), Annlee says, “Finally I felt nothing. I was gone.” SITE Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno: No Ghost Just a Shell (detail), 2002

Parallel universes in Kraków “When I showed them my profile they said yes,” one woman recalls. “They were looking on the basis of features erusalem-born artist Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s List (2003), ... the fat were separated from the thin.” The Schindler’s List a 65-minute, two-channel video installation, offers a crew threw water on half-naked extras to keep them cold, Jheady contrast between fact and fiction that, at any shivering, and looking afraid, and the extras showered in given moment, can dissolve into a confounding coalescence mock gas chambers in nearly total darkness, adding to their of the two. “real” experience. In the video, Fast interviewed Poles who served as extras Fast takes a documentarian’s approach, folding reality and in ’s 1993 film Schindler’s List, which was the perception of reality together as the film progresses. As shot near Kraków. Parts of the movie’s set are still visible, the Spielberg’s List film crew rides past the former home of not far from the ruins of an actual Nazi labor camp, and as SS Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth, who is said to have shot some extras who survived the Nazi invasion and occupation imprisoned Jews from his balcony, an extra explains that of recount their experiences on the set, they also one of Spielberg’s cameramen shot footage from the same remember their real lives as children of the war and as location. A member of the Polish film crew for Schindler’s List survivors of the Holocaust. also explains that the presence of photocopies of Schindler’s Subtitles in this cleverly edited work were deliberately original lists of names — facsimiles of the real documents, if altered by Fast to blur the lines between recollections of the you will — made a horrible impression on many Poles and war and of time spent working on Spielberg’s film. Some of Jews involved in the Spielberg project. the comments made by interview subjects make for a dark Fast is a master of using popular forms of media and their exploration of war and the lengths some people go to (or may relation to pop culture and entertainment to turn reality on go to — this work is as much an exercise in narrative half- its head. He rarely makes the experience comfortable, but truths as it is a tribute to Holocaust survival) to recreate the Spielberg’s List lingers in one’s subconscious and in one’s experience as realistically as possible. conscience long after viewing.

38 July 6 -12, 2012 Eva and Franco Mattes: No Fun, 2010, online performance

Understatement of the year

rooklyn-based artists Eva and Franco Mattes contribute their disturbing side-by-side video piece/online performance titled B No Fun (2010) to More Real? First seen on www.chatroulette.com, a social-media website that links random people in a chat room, No Fun presents a staged (although very realistic) suicide. “I committed suicide in front of a public webcam chat room,” Franco Mattes explains on a website that hosts the No Fun video (it was banned from YouTube for “shocking and disgusting content”). “I was hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, for hours, in our apartment in Brooklyn, and random people could see the scene. Eva was shooting a video with all the reactions. Some laugh, some are completely unmoved, some insult the supposed corpse, some take pictures with their phones. Only one calls the police.” Because we know the suicide is fake, the Matteses remove the need for us to act as moral authorities on suicide as we watch bystanders point at, laugh at, and in one case masturbate to a purported dead human being. No Fun is, in fact, a perfect, if disheartening, example of the “bystander effect” upgraded to contemporary standards.

Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation: Dog Rolls, 2004; still from 89 Seconds at Alcázar

More scrambled reality here are other video-based works that follow More Real?’s predetermined path of deception and play, uncertain factual status, and reshaping of reality. T Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s nearly eight-minute video I Only Wish That I Could Weep was filmed on the Corniche, Beirut’s popular seaside walkway, reportedly by an intelligence officer in the Lebanese army assigned to video-capture suspicious anti-establishment activity from the back of a food truck. Each day after his shift, the officer would train his camera toward the sunset, and he eventually donated the footage to Raad’s Atlas Group, an organization formed in 1999 to document and research the contemporary history of Lebanon with an emphasis on the wars in the country between 1975 and 1991. Raad uses a visual language (video) to relay the officer’s longing to see the sunset at the shoreline — something the officer had never witnessed as a citizen of East Beirut. 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004), a video work by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation arts collective (www.rufuscorporation.com), was inspired by Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), a Velázquez painting of the Spanish royal court posing for a portrait to be painted by Velázquez himself in the mid-17th century. In the video, Sussman imagines what may have happened just before and just after the posing session depicted in the painting. She creates a lush, Omer Fast: Spielberg’s List, 2003; all images courtesy the artists and cinematic scene in which the possibilities for altering reality are as grand as the Minneapolis Institute of Art painting itself. ◀

PASATIEMPO 39