Analogue photography promised an index of reality, bearing a direct imprint of the world depicted—the graph of the photon. Of course, such testimony was ever manipulated by darkroom post-production. And yet, it would take the invention of digital cameras and editing software to truly undermine the evidentiary claim. After Photoshop, whither the truth?—a characteristic issue for critics from the 1990s onward. In hindsight we observe that users had to at least capture and upload an image before deviating from it. Today, an AI can generate one.
Verify you are human—so goes the capcha. How the tables have turned. How about they stop pretending to be human? “I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. That’s exactly what a bot would say, isn’t it? I guess you’re just going to have to trust me on this.” So one author jokes, while pointing out that the Internet is rapidly being overtaken by AI generated ‘slop’.1 A more prominent critic gives this process a name: enshittification.2 But digital happenings do not stay contained. They rain down from cloud servers onto the world at large, overwhelming epistemic structures. Amid the flood of machine generated content, all images and text appear dubious. Simultaneously, the outlines of a project to revalue algorithm-powered falsehoods, slop, and lies, comes into view under the term ‘post-truth’—a designation that signals an emergent aesthetic paradigm. One that works with and through contradiction.
In Philosophy, a liar’s paradox is a self-referential claim that asserts its own falsehood: such as “This statement is false”, or “I am lying to you”. Here is the lacuna: if my claim is true then it must be false. But if it is false, then it must be true. A pretty problem indeed, as this contradictory result ‘throws us into the lion’s den of semantic incoherence’ due to the fact that, ‘according to the rules of classical logic, anything follows from a contradiction, even 1+1=3.’3 The only way to avoid such intellectual disaster is to develop a new, satisfactory, update to the logic of truth; one that leaves behind the ‘classical’ attitude. Various schools of thought have attempted to supply this patch. One of which, so-called Paracomplete Logic, claims that ‘some sentences “neither hold nor do not hold” (in some sense), and so are neither true nor false’.4 In other words, there is some status other than truth or falsity of which the Liar sentence partakes.
Rather than being of purely scholastic concern, a paracomplete perspective on the Liar’s paradox helps us characterize an emergent new aesthetic. Machine generated distortions, and complete simulations, are much of what we have to work with in today’s information space, wherein a binary opposition between truth and falsity, real and fake, one thing and another, is often almost impossible to establish. But more importantly, digital media works in its own terms, and damn the truth. Under this regime, the ‘real’ is often represented as paracomplete—contradictory, tenuous, existing in a form of suspended animation.
Simon Lehner’s art offers an exemplary staging of the paracomplete aesthetic. His works blur ostensible lines between computer generated and lens-based photographs, between photo print, sculpture, and painting. To create a work like X, Lehner subjects photographs from his personal archive to AI augmentation and other digital collage techniques. The eventual print is transferred onto wooden or foam ground, whose topography has been mechanically carved or 3D routed. Additional hand-worked interventions in sculpture and paint also feature. The results—which the artist terms ‘image-based sculptures’—are disconcerting, hovering between familiar material conditions while exceeding them.
Lehner’s approach concerns—indeed exemplifies—the artwork as straddling multiple dimensions of materiality, index and manipulation; each a mirror held up to the others. The complexity of this composition makes the subjects of his various artworks appear elusive. It is tempting to characterize their moods as ghostlyy; ‘painted’ figures somehow slipping away, floating across media thresholds, etc. But this descriptor too easily falls into the spiritual(ist) imaginary associated early analogue photography, including Victorian memento mori . Rather than meditating on the ethereal, Lehner does the opposite: he outlines how digital images (even pure fictions) are always physical facts. By way of example, it might appear that pixels are not part of our physical reality, but Lehner’s art gives the lie to this view, through ingenious technical means: in some of his works “every pixel of the original photograph is extended and then transferred into the physical space”. There is a weird paradox here, for while things such as pixels become present—better exposed to the senses, through becoming not merely visual but tactile, the general tendency is towards a medial incontinence. For instance, print overspilling into sculpture, the document effecting machinic generation, the evidentiary core of the photo dissolving into various instances of re-mediation. In this appearing-disappearing act, Lehner’s art operates in the manner of a liar’s paradox.
More than once throughout his oeuvre Lehner deploys a Pinocchio figure. In the sculpture Echo Figure (Grey Matter Cycle I) (2023) his nose touches the wall, leaving behind marks. This well-known character reference concerns the story of a sentient wooden marionette, whose nose is apt to grow whenever he is under stress, as when committing a falsehood. The original novel by C. Collodi (1883) was meant to serve as a tutelary tale against disobedience and telling lies. The latter behaviour is part of his general character as a “confirmed rogue”, in the words of the author. Pinocchio is a trouble maker who, immediately after being born, laughs derisively in his father Geppetto’s face before stealing his wig, running away and refusing to return home. This rowdy performance is an apt characterization of Lehner’s art—concerning the representational subject escaping its erstwhile author. In a like a manner, the tale invokes the unruly agency of an otherwise non-living system. One that can disguise the ‘truth’ about itself, and which may simultaneously strip away the pretentions of others (cf. Gepetto’s wig). The title of one of Lehner’s exhibitions speaks to the issue: ‘I am a liar, but a good one’ (2021-). Good at lying? Or ‘good’ in general? And who speaks? At any rate, it is a Liar’s paradox uttered in a scoffing manner. The echo of Pinocchio’s laughter appears everywhere in Lehner’s oeuvre, in faces that often bear impish—disconcerting—smiles.
In keeping with the spirit of translocation, we also find the spirit of Pinocchio re-drawn by other means. In Worldstarz (2003-2022) a group portrait features the likenesses of Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley, historical personages associated with masquerade. In the case of the former, a performer well known for his surgically altered appearance—and nose—transgressing signifiers of outward ethnic identity. In the case of Elvis, a white star known for his appropriation and repackaging of historically black music for a white audience. Sitting around a table, in some kind of grotto, they appear to be engaged in some kind of negotiation, or collusion. Nearby, emerging from the apparent rock-face, other grinning faces. Known, variously, as the ‘king of pop’ and the ‘king of rock and roll’, the regal pretentions of Lehner’s Jackson and Elvis’ appear recast—downgraded—to the level of base material. In this respect, they recall the opening line of Collodi’s Pinocchio story: ‘Once upon a time there was... “A king!” my little readers will no doubt say in a flash. “No, kids. You got it wrong. Once upon a time there was... a piece of wood.”’ In paracomplete fashion, the emperor wears no clothes and—simultaneously—too many.
Elsewhere, in the Image Basterds (2023) series, a long-snouted figure appears in various portraits. The title of the series is compelling for its twisted valence. First, it characterizes the image—or images in the series—as illegitimate: bastards, lacking claim to the name of the father, author-ity, so to speak. But the misspelling, basterds, does something else too, having its coinage in the title of a Quentin Tarantino film that reimagined the Second World War in line with a gratuitous revenge fantasy, with Nazi’s brains splattered about will-nilly by avenging Jewish GIs (Inglourious Basterds, 2009). Apart from the film’s plot playing fast and loose with historical events, its title was deliberately misspelt—as if to drum home the point: never let the details get in the way of a good story.