Even if ambiguity can leave us cold and wide of the margin, these days you cannot fault someone for being bereft of a stable sense of self. He did his best to impress upon his interviewer the validity of his views, but there had been ample warning from multiple sources against it. He was the sort of character that could not be trusted to give a straight statement. They filmed him anyway because they needed the footage and shortly thereafter he became a viral sensation.

Unpopular method though it may be, sometimes something can be deduced if we start with the simple statement-driven facts. The trouble with this is that the details need to hail from a reliable source; preferably someone in direct contact with the event yet not overly invested; a third-party account for example; fact must be distinguished from interpretation. Here, we must pause to consider the role of partial truths and lying by omission. The problem is that the gaps between the statements invite interpretation, inclined as a mind can be to connect the most disparate pieces of information into a narrative of its own. I say “own,” but this narrative is typically based on a prefigured blueprint drawing from a past experience or influence whether they know it or not. People find comfort in the familiar even if it is apparently negative, and are never in full possession of their own thoughts. Truth-seeking and meaning-making always involves an element of unconscious bias.

A statement posed for deductive reasoning has a basic sentence structure and can disguise itself for fact. It is often too late when misapprehension comes into collective awareness; to go back to the beginning to unpick a “bad fact” at the foundation would unmoor everything built after or upon it. The real implication of doing this we do not know and for obvious reasons we do not want to find out. The result, then, is that there is a portion of people that accept what is given as truth, while the others that cannot accept it live alongside them. Of course, there are lots of variants and other stances.

It is technically hard, if not impossible, to say how people are apportioned, but the friction is palpable in the most ordinary of moments. When a squabble breaks loose over breakfast cornflakes, for example, or on a hot evening when national disaster strikes so the live news is switched on and there the clip of the to-be viral sensation is playing and a family member takes it upon himself to provide passionate, unwanted meta-commentary. I guess this is what they mean when they say we live in a post-truth world.

See below for related exercise.

From the below paragraphs, identify which sentences relay fact and which offer interpretation:

1. Elsa Werth’s Magic Stick series involves rough-hewn, painted wood batons, two of which are exhibited here. Poorly rendered on the batons are the ubiquitous banner graphics “breaking news” and “world news,” which we frequently see overlaid on live news stories, and have been associated with the phenomenon of live-update anxiety. The rather brutal and jagged materiality of the Magic Stick juxtaposes the seamlessness of the banner graphics that slide in and out of view, which also points to the union of enchantment and disenfranchisement. That they are displayed leaning against the wall imparts a sense of threat; the potential for the baton to be activated or weaponised. When viewed from another angle, the Magic Stick can also be appreciated purely for its colour, shape, and more abstract qualities; like a Jessica Diamond, Barbara Kruger or Ree Morton, for instance.

2. Peter Hoffmeister’s Phantom Nation (2017/2024) comprises a series of selected “document-objects” that take the shape of paper stacks. These were painted black then sanded back, revealing surfaces etched with details from declassified government files in The National Archives and the FBI and CIA’s Reading Rooms—publicly accessible resources that exist, in part, to satisfy the Freedom of Information Act. The artwork engages with ideas of transparency, opacity and the shadow machinations of centralised power. Existing redactions in the files fortify these ideas, but also possess a formal quality that we appreciate in an arts context. Its contents can be surprising; the file on Pablo Picasso, for example, perceived as a threat to national security for his association with the French Communist party, perhaps. The unknown reach and authority of the surveillance state is manifested spatially by a column-like plinth towering over visitors’ heads, atop which sits a single, unreadable document-object.

3. Elsa Werth’s artworks El Mundo (9 March 2020) and Le Monde (16 July 2024) issue from an ongoing series, wherein daily newspapers are transformed into atlases through a process of obliteration. The artist is specific about using newspapers headed with “the world;” the newspapers’ body text she then methodically covers over such that only the names of countries and oceans mentioned remain. The graphic framework of the newspaper is also kept intact, single lines that suggest the drawing of meridians and parallels. The result is an atlas or infographic that is shaped by the logic of supposedly global news coverage, an exposition of the locations repeatedly mentioned and the absence of those that appear to have been systemically ignored.

4. Peter Hoffmeister’s Withdraw Your Support (2017–ongoing) extends from his 2017 (Bill)board commission, a large-scale public artwork featuring a distorted scan of the White House on the reverse of the American twenty-dollar bill. The work consists of a 1960s-style briefcase filled with “sizzle cards” that will be taken out intermittently and offered to visitors for scattering. “Sizzle cards” are a guerilla street advertising technique that draws attention to itself by looking like a folded twenty-dollar bill that has been dropped. Unfolded, the fake bill might have read WE BUY GOLD to promote a mom-n-pop pawn shop, for example. In its place, the artist has printed the call to action WITHDRAW YOUR SUPPORT. Contrasting with campaigns around voting and participation, this messaging advocates its alternative: the use of purchasing power to boycott or withdraw.  

5. Elsa Werth’s artwork edition More or Less was conceived against the backdrop of the 2023 French pension reform strikes, though they speak of political shifts more broadly. Inspired by the reductive language surrounding the heavily mediatised event, a pair of dice engage their thrower in a serious but playful game with words. One die is sided by the words “more” or “less,” while the sides of its counterpart read “work,” “consume,” “produce,” “tax,” “pay,” “earn.” Converting the relative conditions of livelihood into binary terms and action-ables, the edition addresses semiotic power, productivity and the maintenance of life.

–Elaine M.L. Tam