15 May 2017

Adrian Piper, The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1-3

Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin

Reviewed by Vera Wilde

The sweeping arches and skylit ceilings of the Hamburger Bahnhof accentuate the Registry's Potemkin grandeur, with its gold lettering on towering walls, smooth touchscreens, and neat workers. It also conveys emptiness, with reception desks that lead to no interior. The trappings of power it uses, like the former train station housing it, lack their usual content.

This physical inversion - of the outer, routinized part as the inner, substantive one - mirrors its conceptual inversion. Corporate settings demand false selves. The Registry requests true ones. True to the artist, who invites viewers to contract to trustworthiness-related commitments. True to oneself, as the contracts revolve around authenticity. And true to other registrants, who alone share Registry access.

Science shows that most people lie in order to seem more socially desirable, under-reporting risky behavior and over-reporting moral behavior. This is a registry of probable liars.