In a little glass room on the mezzanine at Portland Center Stage’s Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW 11th), artist Liz Haley will tell you anything, just ask. Of course her answers may be lies, she doesn’t promise to truthtell, only that she will answer you while hooked up to a custom made polygraph machine. Polygraph is Portland artist Haley’s latest project, this time for PICA’s TBA Festival.
If, as was acknowledged yesterday at the noontime discussion for PICA’s TBA Festival between members of the Dutch performance group Kassys and NYC theater group Nature Theater of Oklahoma, all theater is lies and levels of fakery, it’s only slightly more lie-y than real life in which CEO’s, the President, and your lover tell you varying degrees of their own self-serving truths with various degrees of sincerity. And what about art and performance? Artists may make work with the conceit of getting at truths, but are just as prone to the convenience of untruths (great how we keep saying truth in the plural…as if there can be more than one! Where are the absolutes?! Is it all shades of grey? Oh.)
Would you take a polygraph test? Is there anyone you’d care to hook up to the polygraph? How much truth is too much? Consider the questions you will ask Liz Haley (friend or stranger) and what they say about you? What will you ask knowing that the performance/installation is videotaped?
Haley’s program notes quote Mark Twain, “A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.”
Liz Haley is holding regular office hours at the Gerding Theater at the Armory tonight until 7 PM and Friday through Sunday from 1-3 PM.
WHAT TO DO NOW?