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 Duane Hanson’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 Documenta 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); The Broad 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.