NEW YORK, NY.- The New Museum is presenting the exhibition and artist residency “Paul Ramírez Jonas: Half-truths” as the second iteration of the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s annual R&D Summers, a research and development initiative that emphasizes the New Museum’s year-round commitment to community partnerships and public dialogue at the intersection of art and social justice. “Paul Ramírez Jonas: Half-truths” is on view on the Museum’s Fifth Floor from July 5 to September 17, and also includes a series of public programs. The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Shaun Leonardo, Manager of School, Youth, and Community Programs; and Emily Mello, Associate Director of Education.
With “Half-truths,” Ramírez Jonas (b. 1965, Pomona, CA) employs the mechanisms of bureaucracies and law as a starting point from which to consider truth. “Half-truths” explores the contours of social contracts, without which institutions meant to uphold collective governance become arbitrary while remaining powerfully consequential in people’s lives. Ramírez Jonas will continue to pursue a body of participatory work focusing on aspects of trust, the exhibition including two pieces defined by transactions between the audience and the artist, Fake ID (2017) and Alternative Facts (2017). The conditions of these encounters are devised by the artist and informed by the site, but also require the open-endedness of direct engagement with a voluntary public. The project also includes related public programs and, adjacent to the gallery, a Resource Center presentation that explores pseudonyms, identities, and modalities of naming employed by artists, writers, and other individuals for various political and creative reasons.
Fake ID invites visitors to empty their pockets of materials containing information that determines currency, credit, access, membership, and citizenship status. Through a process of exchange and inquiry with each participant, a facilitator deconstructs photocopies of their documents—school IDs, transportation passes, credit cards, and licenses—to create a new identification card. Through human exchange, Ramírez Jonas aims to enunciate the possibilities of self-determined constructions of identity within the datafication of state, corporate, and social systems.
Alternative Facts turns lies and fantasies into ostensibly truthful public documents. The first untruth designates the facilitator, often the artist himself, as a notary. Each subsequent certification process yields two documents, one for the viewer to keep and another to be collected in the installation. The cost of this legal transformation requires payment of a gold coin, which the facilitator will assist in creating by chemically altering visitors’ spare change.
The poetics of these works speak to a political climate in which authoritarian tactics seek to delegitimize the participatory checks and balances of democratic truth by pronouncing the media’s dishonesty and declaring the falsehoods of public servants to be “alternative facts.” Relative meaning, the plurality of truth, shared authorship, and the equal right to free speech were once more commonly employed to assert marginalized voices. But with such sentiments of alternativeness being co-opted by oppressive forces, “Half-truths” asks: is it possible to collectively create and agree upon truth?
