Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Through June 9
Prepare to have your worldview shaken, said Mary Abbe in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. This “savvy and sophisticated” group show about the sometimes fuzzy line between fiction and fact proves to be “a phantasmagorical mix of delight and despair, wit and wonder.” A video clip from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, the source of the term “truthiness,” greets visitors at the entrance and sets a proper tone “for the bemusing fabrications to come.” You’ll see monumental photographs of an Oval Office that’s actually made out of paper and confetti. You’ll see models and sketches for a 20th-century amusement park supposedly inspired by Sigmund Freud, plus a stuffed canary perched atop a caged stuffed cat. The 60 works on display explode with provocative ideas about “one of the big existential dilemmas of our time—what is really real today?” What’s “authentic” to an audience that’s no longer sure that there is such a thing?
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The premise is so interesting, in fact, “that the art in the exhibit doesn’t do it justice,” said Sheila Regan in the Minneapolis City Pages. We know we’re looking at artists’ creations, so the many works that present fictions as truths don’t fool us, even momentarily. Our disbelief can be used productively, though. Iris Häussler’s 2009 installation The Bequest of Ellen Stanley, for instance, lays out a detailed story about a mentally ill woman who could only find peace by filling her bathtub with clay and beeswax, thus producing the strange sculptures before us. “We accept that what we’re reading is not true, and therefore immediately get drawn into it”—like a reader beginning a novel. At a time when many people seem to prefer “simulated reality over actual reality,” we’re also just following the herd.
The exhibition’s pièce de résistance makes use of a more provocative fiction, said Gregory J. Scott in Minnesota Monthly. Phantom Truck (2007), created by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, was inspired by Colin Powell’s description of the mobile labs that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was allegedly using to develop weapons of mass destruction. Though the trucks didn’t exist, they triggered a very real war. Manglano-Ovalle, using Powell’s description, constructed a life-size replica of one of these mobile labs—in his words, a “fabrication of a fabrication.” When you walk into the dark space that contains the truck, your eyes only gradually make out its contours, and “the effect is incredible.” You the viewer have been recruited—“literally, in a physiological sense”—into making the lie real.
