ART CITIES:N.York-Paul Ramírez Jonas
Paul Ramírez Jonas’ work ranges from large-scale public installation and monumental sculpture to intimate drawings, performances, and videos. His practice is characterized by a bracing, albeit nostalgic, idealism rooted in a faith in human resilience. An exhibition of two new interactive works by Paul Ramírez Jonas is on presentation at the New Museum in New York.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: New Museum Archive
With “Half-truths”, Paul Ramírez Jonas employs the mechanisms of bureaucracies and law as a starting point from which to consider truth. The exhibition 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 continues to pursue a body of participatory work focusing on aspects of trust, the exhibition including two works defined by transactions between the audience and the artist, “Fake ID” (2017) and “Alternative Facts” (2017).. 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 license) —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 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.
Info: Curators: Johanna Burton, Shaun Leonardo, and Emily Mello, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 15/7-17/9/17, Days & Hours: tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org
