"Is the truth really what's important, or is it the coloration of this background?"
- Gavin MacFadyen, Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, from Goldin+Senneby's documentary Looking for Headless

In a lecture delivered last year at UC Berkeley entitled "The Misadventures of Critical Thinking," philosopher Jacques Rancière proclaimed that there is nothing to be seen behind the curtain of appearances; there is no truth that will be revealed through the process of critique. Instead, there is only what we see and the logic that governs its visibility. Using Martha Rosler's photomontage Cleaning the Drapes, from her series Bringing the War Home (1967-72) as his primary visual aid, Rancière stated the failure of the critical tradition is its assumption of the public's general incapacity to make sense of what they see, and by extension, the narratives that are being played out in front of them on the 'stage of appearances.' In other words, the failure lies in the notion that a hidden truth exists behind the reality that we are responsible for, but which we fail to see.

The Man Behind the Curtain, the current exhibition at Mission 17, aptly suggests that we know full well that there's someone pulling the strings. To reveal the secret of who or what that is, is--in some sense--beside the point. Indeed, the three projects assembled by Assistant Director/Curator Laura Mott, ask the more pressing questions of "How were the strings pulled?" and perhaps most importantly, "How are we to interpret what happens once it's done?"

In the main gallery, the Swedish collaborative Goldin+Senneby present a multi-faceted work investigating an offshore company in the Bahamas named Headless Ltd. Like the purported company it scrutinizes, the project resists transparency. It's unclear whether Headless Ltd. even exists. Instead, Goldin+Senneby present viewers with a complex and densely packed narrative.

Goldin+Senneby with Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones (filmmakers). Looking for Headless, 2007-ongoing; three-part documentary commissioned by IASPIS and The Power Plant, video still.

For example, much of the work has been delegated--or perhaps more appropriately, outsourced--to a host of authors, economists and journalists that are both fictional and real. This aspect is thrown into stark relief via the three-part documentary Looking for Headless by filmmakers Kate Cooper and Richard John Jones. (Screened in sequential installments, installment two is on view through July 4 and installment three from July 5 to 18.) While the documentary focuses on many of the project's key players as part of an inquiry in to the legal structure of Headless, Ltd. and the world of "offshore," it also self-reflexively navigates the discursive scaffolding that the artists have built around the project. Further complicating the documentary is a novel bearing the same name by author "K.D." Featuring many of the same players seen in the documentary, the novel links the company with a secret society founded in the late 1930s by Georges Bataille known as Acéphale, from the Greek a-cephalus, meaning "headless." Part travelogue and part academic paper, Looking for Headless features a story within the story by the writer John Barlow, who, along with Headless Ltd., is the subject of the novel.

Seth Lower. Mimesis is Not Adaptive Behavior; installation view of documentation and car parts from crash site.

Sharing the main gallery with Goldin+Senneby--and literally installed behind a large black curtain dividing the space--is San Francisco-based artist Seth Lower's commissioned installation and video. Mimesis is Not Adaptive Behavior (2009) revolves around the staged death of a Texas man named Clayton "Clay" Wayne Daniels, a.k.a. Jake Gregg. Through a combination of photographs, found documents, and artifacts ostensibly gathered during Lower's independent investigation of the incident, the artist narrates a story of a man trying to escape his past. For all its gruesome details, in which exhumed bodies, decapitation, statutory rape, incest, plastic surgery, forged documents, and--on a more mundane level--Lynard Skynard's Free Bird all play a role, Daniels's botched plan to reinvent himself becomes strangely poignant when paired alongside the Lazarus myth and a love letter written from prison.

Société Réaliste. The San Francisco EU Green Card Lottery Registration Office, 2006; site-specific installation view; www.green-card-lottery-eu.org.

In the office of Mission17, the Paris-based collective Société Réaliste has installed The San Francisco EU Green Card Lottery Registration Office (2006). Through a website full of dubious census data and immigration statistics, visitors are encouraged to register to enter a lottery to obtain citizenship to the EU country of their choice (http://www.green-card-lottery-eu.org/). The interface mimics sites that con migrant workers who are registering to enter the U.S. Green Card Lottery into paying a service fee. (A free and open program offered by the U.S. government, the Lottery annually offers 55,000 visas to people from countries with low rates of immigration.) While Société Réaliste provides the registration service free of charge, the work reflects on a micro-scale the broader narrative of an economy based on the foundational promise of a better life, particularly when considered in relation to the sites on which it is based.

The three projects in The Man Behind the Curtain transform the structuring logics of finance, forensic evidence, and immigration into sites of play in which the imagination can take hold. Destabilizing and reassembling narratives of identity, economy and trust, each project functions like a kind of challenge, or, more appropriately, an elaborate charade, requiring a good deal of time, effort and reflection. Yet the cumulative effect is far from tiresome. In fact, it is quite the opposite, as viewers are presented with a pared-down space in which to consider a reinvigorated critical art that is every bit as lively as it is captivating.

The Man Behind the Curtain is on view at Mission17 through July 18, 2009

Thumbnail image: Goldin+Senneby. Headless logo. Designed by Johan Hjerpe.

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