On Lying

According to moral philosopher Sissela Bok, a lie is “any intentionally deceptive message which is stated.” Expanding this more precisely into three main hallmarks of lying, the liar must (1) communicate some information, (2) intend to deceive or mislead, and (3) do so while knowing full well that what he says is not true. Furthermore, proper liars can be split into two specific types: compulsive and pathological. The former suffers from an uncontrollable urge, while the latter lies in service of some perceived end. There is considerable overlap between the two, though the distinction is neither absolute nor exhaustive. Falsehoods beyond these poles can take the shapes of white lies, omission, concealment, exaggeration, and so on. If this definition and these categories can be taken as starting points, then we may proceed into the explicit terrain of the non-truth as well as its murkier zones. 

On Lying unravelled from a series of encounters. Someone I dated and someone I was becoming close friends with both habitually avoided the truth. After the romance ended, I picked up an essay from my shelf–Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying. It took longer to discover the friend’s pattern, though by then lying had already become something of a recurring motif. __ The path of a lie is seldom linear. Perhaps, on the surface, one “gets away with it.” However, from the initial act an unknowable network of smaller paths diverge, ones that require further coverups. The liar must keep track of his story so as to “keep it straight.” In wading through all of it, lying gradually lost its negative tenor, becoming a structure through which information could be manipulated, suppressed, performed, distorted, or made believable. The entanglements of personal experiences, chance encounters, and meandering research became like a beacon on the enterprise of the lie. 

Wilde formats his essay as a conversation between Cyril and Vivian, two men who debate the virtues of lying. Cyril opts for the conservative track, defending the primacy of fact while Vivian establishes an argument for its inspired alteration. Rather than treating falsehood as a necessary evil, Vivien treats lying as an aesthetic imperative. He laments being “Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance,” alternatively championing the fertile landscape of the imagination. Fidelity to truth-telling is accordingly rendered a disadvantage, as it constrains the possibilities of invention. Wilde capitalizes on the provocation in the essay’s conclusion, writing that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.” It is the artist’s prerogative to mold reality, as opposed to merely representing it. 

Bruno Zhu’s Lesson for one to six months old is a frank incitement toward deceptive behavior. Composed of baby onesies that spell out “STEAL,” the word in this format takes on an instructive spirit. To lie, cheat, and steal is the unholy trinity. Earlier iterations in the series read “WHORE,” “AMEN,” and “GIRL,” each wracked with historical and cultural associations, loosened up by Zhu’s irreverent treatment of language. He transforms the infant garments into vehicles for an ambiguous moral quandary. Whether meant to encourage, deter, or merely present, they introduce the terms before furnishing the rules, suggesting that codes of conduct are levied well before they can be comprehended. Furthermore, the word “STEAL” is named without contingencies. Who steals, from whom, and to what end are left unspecified. Under a certain set of circumstances, the presumed “offense” might even pass for virtue. 

Where Zhu isolates the act, Clara Schmidt reframes its terms entirely. In you must be good to be Robin Hood, she tackles the myth of the titular character. According to the tale, Robin Hood assumes different disguises to conceal his identity and outwit his adversaries. Its origins remain relatively untraceable: circulated orally for generations, the legend first enters literary record in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which was published in the late 1300s. By the following century, the ballad Robin Hood and the Monk provides the earliest narrative devoted to the outlaw. In the time since, the story has taken countless forms, though its essence has remained relatively stable: a man situated outside the Rule of Law bends truth’s parameters in service of the greater good. Schmidt approaches this contradiction through approximation, her amalgamated materials becoming a portrait of the figure. Sticks and feathers gesture toward his bow and arrow, the ostrich leather refers to a quiver. The objects participate in a sleight of hand just like their referent, semiotically positioned as a thing they inherently aren’t. 

Lying becomes more consequential when elevated from the individual to the institution. At the midpoint of Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network, the erratic protagonist Howard Beale launches into one of his televised sermons. Referred to as “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves Scene,” this speech is his attempt to dismantle the televisual medium, with Beale proclaiming that “The only truth you know is what you get over this tube.” He cautions, “when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network.” His warning ultimately gives way to complicity: “If you want the truth, go to God, go to your gurus, go to yourselves because that is the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear, we lie like hell.” The media machine is not merely capable of spewing lies, but structurally organized to manufacture and feed realities regardless of facticity. 

Narrative film is irrevocably attached to storytelling; an apparatus contingent on invented “realities.” Its sibling medium, the theater, is also reliant on a literal staging of fictions. The mechanism of performance is fundamental in both cases, chiefly materialized through the speech and gestures of actors. 

The slippage between person and performance surfaces in Julija Zaharijević’s paintings. Here, portraits of American actors sync up with the rising popularity of looksmaxxing, a digitally driven subculture of young men obsessively attached to the calibration of appearance. The specific figures Zaharijević depicts are beacons for the aesthetically-oriented online community, selected for their high scores on the PSL scale. The pseudo-scientific grading system imposes an “objective” formula for one’s attractiveness. The artist is attentive to this co-option of a classically feminized position: the body subjected to a host of “improvement” technologies like cosmetic procedures and extensive grooming routines. Bordering the definition of lying as the false communication of data, looksmaxxers engineer the terms through which they are perceived. Such optimization functions in opposition to the precedent set by actors, who fabricate a temporary identity. The editing of one’s image is a more enduring fiction, where optimization gradually folds an idealized set of attributes into one’s reality. Zaharijević, however, effectively shatters the coherence of her subjects by breaking the portraits into four quadrants, undermining the fantasy of an objectively perfect face.

On a purely categorical level, Zaharijević’s works present men whose chief job is to play pretend. The identifiable public figures make their living by embodying characters and communicating through fiction, thereby obfuscating a “real” identity to fully inhabit another. After all, the crux of the entertainment industry is tied up in its mandate: to entertain. In order to maintain an audience, the players must convincingly establish their fables as believable. In keeping with such artifice, Wilde writes, “What is interesting about people in good society […] is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.” 

Performance extends well beyond the stage and screen, it is embedded in the public institutions responsible for producing credible accounts of reality. Hence the well-worn joke: You can tell a politician is lying when their lips are moving. These “elected officials” are both managers of disclosure and creators of public narratives. Negotiating, strategizing, calculating how much Truth a general public can handle. To tell or not to tell, that is the question. Within the scope of the American justice system, truth is positioned as a fundamental goal, at least in theory. Before testifying, witnesses are called to swear that their testimony “shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Whatever follows this statement is then subject to a process of recollection, understanding, and mediation. Historians occupy a related post, as they’re tasked with plucking and organizing segments from the past into comprehensible accounts. Hence the familiar maxim: “history is written by the victors.” 

If plucking and organizing is the purview of historians, then Lea Stuedahl proceeds by a similar methodology. For her part, the artist meddles in the terms of photography’s veracity. She experiments with how this medium can circumvent the immediate reading of an image. In practice, she assembles compositions from found and self-generated aspects, yielding something akin to collages; these are not documents, but staged situations. They don’t immediately foreclose their own spirit, instead allowing the viewer to impose a coherent whole as he or she sees fit. The work thereby conceals elements of its own making and side-steps any claims toward a fixed truth. Where traditional photography becomes evidence, Stuedahl’s visual syntax is jumbled. Letters are not contingent upon the formation of words, music notes are not fixed to a score, and the stage lacks a discernible performance. Semiotic relationships are broken up and remixed such that recognition no longer guarantees cohesion. The floating signs deny a coherent grammar, ultimately disrupting the line between information and interpretation. 

Whereas in Stuedahl’s work, visual signs are intentionally cast without resolution, Ethan Assouline’s objects elicit a false sense of certainty. His constructions are deceptive by design; their surface readings contradict internal mechanics. Assouline accordingly exploits the possibility that appearances mask something completely different from what they purport to be. He builds sculptures and installations that present usefulness, joy, efficiency, and modernity just as gentrifying apparatuses do in and around urban centers. Along the way, however, deficiencies, inconsistencies, and failures begin to emerge. Assouline observes and refracts the architectures that allege progress but actually beget dysfunction. This discrepancy between appearance and operation extends to his unorthodox clock, which refuses standardized time and instead proposes its own measurement system. This opens one up to the possibility that temporality could be twisted according to perception. The experience of being-in-the-world thus takes on a whole new dimension, where seemingly immutable laws are thrown askew. 

Mia Sanchez turns the problem of discernment toward the production of facts. Her tripartite sculpture In and Out of Place draws its title from Andrea Fraser’s 1985 essay on Louise Lawler. In it, Fraser argues that the artist’s proclivity for “interference” reveals the machinations of institutional meaning-making. Lawler’s mobilization of framing, revelation/omission, authorship, and context as methods, serves as an effective model for the orientation of facts. She exposes how truth may be engineered through presentation, and how institutions are directly complicit in the formation and preservation of such systems. Sanchez pulls directly from this logic in her work, exploring the line between represented and constructed realities, probing it for fracture points and shared conditions. In the corresponding work, three scaled replicas of promotional columns in Basel are compacted. The advertisements plastered on their surfaces attach these objects to a “here-and-now” made unstable by shifts in environment. Sanchez toggles perception via size, as legibility is altered relative to the viewer’s position. Her investments in dimension and duplication connect the work to a broader notion of built reality, where even a faithful copy can produce a different account of the thing it claims to represent. 

Historically, gossip was understood as a weapon of organizing. Women, in particular, leveraged informational exchange as a means of accruing social and political agency. In more innocuous situations, these networks have been gamified. Sanchez exposes the structure of the “Telephone” game in her film, Rapporto, in which actors relay messages to one another, obscuring the transmissions with their hands. Naturally, the original statement gets muddled somewhere in the midst of circulation and its final delivery. Truth, in both In and Out of Place and Rapporto, is vulnerable not only to fabrication but to the very act of dissemination. 

Surface and permeability are also intrinsic to Mimosa Echard’s practice. She frequently employs contamination methods to intermix natural substances, synthetic matter, found images, personal effects, and other seemingly disparate entities. Concealment is leveraged as a means of generating desire and enacting protective measures. Revelation, on the other hand, propels a voyeuristic impulse that ultimately lays bare the very machinations of selfhood and its myriad visual expressions. In a 2024 interview with Ruba Katrib, the artist affirms such frictions, explaining that the work offers an “impression of giving something, but also protecting, or withholding. [It’s about] this ambivalence.” The layered composition Naked springs from such contradictory systems, its title pronouncing complete exposure while its material reality averts its full clarification. Disembodied eyes peer out from framed segments, like illuminated windows scattered across an otherwise anonymous building. The composition’s structure also mimics a splintered city grid, pointing back to the conditions in which it was produced. The specific images on its surface were gleaned from beauty salons around New York, markers of femininity that Echard catalogued while wandering the streets. 

Returning to Wilde’s provocation, falsehood becomes a generative act rather than merely a negative counterforce. The creative capacity to invent is rendered morally neutral, what matters is what the invention is made to do. Artistic invention, then, can be taken as largely autonomous. As Vivian proclaims: “Art never expresses anything but itself.” One can give credit to certain liars as engineers, romantics, weavers of tales, constructors of worlds, but not necessarily arbiters of truth. Truth becomes a belief system, a tangled network of ideas and notions that one takes as fact in order to understand living. 

– Reilly Davidson