The Invention of Truth

Curated by Gabriela Vainsencher
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street, New York
September 14th - November 17th, 2024

View installation images here

Tirtzah Bassel
Omer Fast
Louise Lawler
Katie Paterson
Sarah Peters
Zorawar Sidhu
Kara Walker
Betty Woodman

“History is not the past—it is the method we have evolved for organizing our ignorance of the past.”

– Hilary Mantel

“We can imagine falsities, we can compose falsehoods, but only truth can be invented.”

– John Ruskin

The Invention of Truth looks at the ways artists use history as material in their work: distorting it, building upon it, responding to it. Each artist in the exhibition uses history to tell a story about present realities. Some draw eerie parallels between the past and the present moment, some reenact the past with ‘a twist’, while others create a whole new version of the past in order to imagine what our world would be like if only history had gone a little differently.

Tirtzah Bassel's painting project "Canon in Drag" not only flips the genders in famous works of art but also imagines a world in which a female perspective is the dominant one. In her 2021 gouache on paper work “Mother Severing the Umbilical Cord (After Goya)”, Bassel takes on one of Goya’s darkest and most disturbing pictures, that of Saturn devouring his own children, and turns the image of the parental monster on its head: in her version, the mother is biting off her newborn’s umbilical cord, rather than decapitating the baby. Instead of an act of infanticide, we are witnessing a mother desperately using the only tool she has, her teeth, to save both her and her child’s life.

Omer Fast’s 2002 “CNN Concatenated” was created as a visceral response to the events of 9/11 the preceding year. Fast had just moved to Germany when the attack on the World Trade Center happened, and he was in the process of learning a new language, German, at the time. He began ordering VHS tapes from CNN, documenting and preserving the channel’s response to the attack and its geopolitical aftermath. He created a massive database of every word spoken by CNN’s anchors, and then spliced their words into a 18-minute long personal monologue, plagued by doubt, fear, self-blame, and uncertainty, feelings that don’t usually get much play in our contemporary 24-hour news cycle.

Katie Paterson’s conceptual oeuvre is represented in this show by “Future Library (certificate)”, 2014, a two-sided foil-block print on paper. By purchasing editions of this certificate, collectors supported the creation of Paterson’s actual artwork: the planting of a forest in Norway which, according to the artist, will “... supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years’ time.” Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unread and unpublished, until the year 2114. The manuscripts will be held in a specially designed room in the new public library in Oslo. To date, writers include Margaret Atwood (2014), David Mitchell (2015), Sjón (2016), Elif Shafak (2017), Han Kang (2018), Karl Ove Knausgård (2019), Ocean Vuong (2020), Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021), Judith Schalansky (2022)”. In creating an artwork she will not live to see completed, Paterson is turning our present into the past: conserving our moment in culture and time for future generations.

Louise Lawler looks at both the history of art and the history of patronage and power that has always surrounded it. She complicates the way we think about art in museums, private homes, and galleries by drawing our attention to the works’ specific history of ownership, known as “provenance”. In “Rest on the Flight into Egypt and August Sunlight” we encounter the edges of several gilded-frame paintings resting on a storage shelf in Harvard University, with just a glimpse of the images painted on them. The two works partially shown are, on the lower left, Rest on the Flight into Egypt 1570 by Paolo Veronese (1528–88), and, on the lower right, August Sunlight 1916 by Charles E. Burchfield (1893–1967). It’s the Lawler look: a privileged view of an artwork behind the scenes at a collector’s home or a museum’s vault. But the privilege comes with a Lawler twist - we can’t see the masterpieces, we can only know they are owned and stored.

Zorawar Sidhu’s series “Ideal Violence” is a series of unique prints on paper, drawing parallels between art historical martyrdoms, abductions, and state-sanctioned murders with contemporary acts of violence. Sidhu prints these prints using not ink, but sanguine and haematite, naturally occurring chalks named for their resemblance to dried blood. Sourced directly from Florence, Italy, these are the same drawing materials used by Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters. Each work is displayed in a hand-made 23K gold frame, evoking the aestheticizing, and thus normalizing, effect of museum display practices. For the contemporary scenes of violence, the victims of which are all persons of color, their gilded frames propose veneration within a canon from which they are typically excluded. Sidhu’s eerie juxtaposition of past and present images of violence reminds us not only that there is nothing new under the sun in terms of the horrors man inflicts upon man, but that given enough time, even the most blood-curdling acts can get steamrolled into a palatable image under the weight of aesthetics.

Kara Walker’s “Sugar Baby”, as it was colloquially known, was a 2014 Creative Time commission for the defunct Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg, before it was gutted and turned into luxury office spaces. Shown here are rarely-before-seen preparatory works for this installation, whose full title is: “The Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant”. In this colossal artwork, Walker appropriated and conflated multiple racist tropes of the female Black body in America with the sphinx, guardian of the Ancient Egyptian pyramids. The Sugar Baby’s head is a kerchief-wearing Mammy with exaggerated facial features, and her body is hyper-sexualized, calling to mind both a sex object and a caregiver. In “Untitled Sketch for Domino Materials” the figure is rendered in molasses and graphite.The former material represents the past–the exploitative sugar industry and its impact on global history–and the latter represents the present–an artist taking history and using it to tell a story about our contemporary moment.

Betty Woodman is known for taking the ancient craft of ceramics and throwing it into the fray of modernist and postmodernist conceptual sculpture. Woodman spent the first half of her career as a production potter–teaching ceramics in Colorado and Italy while making pots, bowls, and vases. In the early 80’s Woodman undertook a shift in her practice that defined her work going forward: while she continued to make historically-inspired vessels on the wheel, she began tearing them up, flattening them out, and putting them back together in novel ways, creating a new, self-referential language. Woodman’s work retains the memory of the rich history of ceramics–the most ancient known artform after cave paintings–while remixing it into our contemporary landscape. Woodman’s use of the negative space between and around her sculptures and wall-hangings transforms her discrete forms into installations, further complicating the relationship between Classical art and craft and contemporary practices.

Sarah Peters mashes up ancient iconography with a sci-fi-inspired comic sense. Her cast bronze sculptures take as their starting point a venerated art-historical past, and recast it in an almost cartoonish contemporary light. In “Pleasure Principle” from 2023, we encounter a figure that at first glance looks like a classic Assyrian male, referencing their immaculately coiffed facial hair. Peters extends the guy’s beard. And extends it. And extends it some more. Until he has turned into a Brooklyn hipster: a young man who is literally relying on his massive beard to prop him up. Named after one of Freud’s primary concepts, by which the infant mind is completely dominated by the seeking of immediate gratification and physical pleasure, this sculpture reimagines the classic male figure as a contemporary man-child.

The Invention of Truth takes its title from a novella by Italian writer Marta Morazzoni, which intertwines two narratives: one is the making of the famous Bayeux tapestry in 11th-century France, as told through the eyes of a female embroiderer. The other follows the legendary art critic and polymath John Ruskin in his old age, as he gets lost in the French city of Amiens, reflecting on his life. The two stories don’t meet, they exist side by side in this book, and the reader is invited to make connections between the two. Perhaps all stories, whether they are about one’s personal journey through a single lifetime, or an epic in which the futures of nations are determined through bloody battles, are equally constructed tales about how we decide who we are.

Image: Tirtzah Bassel, The Anatomy Lesson of Louise Bourgeois Boursier (after Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn), gouache on paper, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.