Public Penetration: Issues of Voyeurism, Surveillance and Contemporary Public Art
Panelists: Anna Novakov (moderator), Dennis Adams, Laura Kurgan, Tony Labat, Julia Scher
Audience: The most money spent on surveillance, I imagine, is surveying space or the universe for other signs of life. Are you interested in that?
Kurgan: I'm not interested in that and I'm not sure that counts as surveillance.
Audience: What I find so interesting about the whole thing is how you were talking about your trips to the beach or the park that could be determined by someone at some point, despite what you may want people to know, that encroachment on privacy.
Kurgan: That's not entirely true. You have to understand that six meters resolution means that if something is six meters big it is only one pixel, so despite all the hype, you can't read the license plate on a car. You can't get inside a house.
Audience: I understand that, but considering the future, that is where I think it will get to.
Kurgan: You are probably right, but I think your Social Security Number might be more dangerous to you right now than a satellite image of your home town.
Audience: Is the hype a way of personalizing it and making it seem something we can relate to more? I don't think it will ever be used for your license plate. It seems this military tracking isn't designed for sending postal mail more accurately, but for sending bombs, which don't need to be that precise. I think it is marketed on that level of intimacy in order to allow people to develop an intimacy with it and to think they are being considered on some personal level.
Kurgan: I think you have a good point, but not only to personalize it, but to give the military another function in the post Cold War era. As soon as you, as a civilian, can use technology, the military has gone beyond it. A lot of the industry is about spinning off. That is why boat owners can use GPS; the military is probably onto other things. That is the way technology works. It's important to look at technology against that background, not to think of it as something that can just do things for you.
Audience: An interesting theme that has come up in a variety of the presentations here is knowledge is power. Knowledge may be power to some extent, but surveillance, whether on a personal level or on a national level, is not power, I think. I don't think there are personal surveillance cameras to find out who the criminal is but, because you are already working on a basic assumption that everybody is a criminal, you will record until you have something of relevance to respond to. If I don't have the power to respond or change something, the knowledge isn't getting me anything.
Scher: Surveillance generally operates not unlike police forces, in that it is used as an arm of authority; it does not contain authority within it. It is not imbued with power itself. The other thing is that, in the relationship between you and a force more powerful than yourself, such as a government, the goal of that force is for you internalize the feeling that you are being surveyed, even when you aren’t. At the end of the surveillance day, at the end of any high-tech prison conference around the world, the conference speakers will say that at the end of each guard's day, our goal is to have a blank guard sheet, that no infractions are ever made, that it never gets being the thought, because "it" is in place. This massive tool of engineering to achieve a state in which you might believe or construct in your own mind a path to self-surveillance is the goal of much surveillance. Something that is moving forward, without our cognition of it directly, is that in the general state of surveillance on mathematics, the math itself is under surveillance. Underneath the e-mail and software program, underneath the operating systems, underneath even the systems diagnostic engineering are the the numbers, the math, and the numerical loads are under surveillance; even the numbers and their address are being surveyed. It’s not just your letter to the gas company being surveilled.
Novakov: Maybe some of our speakers can address the issue of equipment. Is the equipment at some level fetishized? Is it used for purposes of seeing more? Is there a fascination with something because it is the latest technology?
Scher: I'd like to use a quote from Celeste Olalquiaga "Haute Future," like haute couture, as a way to describe the headlong plunge into the purchasing and consumer development of technology. Where things were once in the hands of professionals, they are now home products. In the New York Times Magazine you see an image of a woman in a sleek suit and a gas mask, to combine sensuality, sexuality, the glimmer and the hope of sleek control without contamination, further elevating your own brain as a result of having an intercourse with technology. That is what is being marketed. You are not complete without Dennis's prosthetic–or juicy–hand gear for locating your own body. Graham Beal, curator at LACMA, once described looking at "where you are, to help understand what you are" in art, as the role of the artist. This becomes fuel to ignite a machine of an interface with architecture as well, so we end up facing a lot of the same problems as gear-heads or tech-heads.
Novakov: Tony, in your piece, one of the things that was interesting was the visibility of the film and camera crew. What role did that play?
Labat: I cannot talk about surveillance. It doesn't interest me. Neither does the art work. They are just tools. I can only talk about art. It's what I do. I am not a hardware geek. I hate it. They are just like a pencil, a hammer: discarded technologies. I don't need it. My point was just that, to me, those things are a given. I could talk about that in a different context, but I think that the meaning inherent in the hardware, like me intentionally making sure that the camera people are in the frame, is a given in the composition that each piece of hardware, just like the monitors in the installations, already have their own metaphors built in. They have a given meaning. They are signifiers. We talk about that in a larger picture in a context of making art, not in the context of how the military is using it, or how people are using it, or how it is affecting our homes. For me, it is a given in the composition. There is a work by an artist named Ingo Gunther, who did an amazing project about ten or fifteen years ago with pointing the satellite at the conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was fascinating. That is an aspect of an artist using it to provide information that the military was not providing to the people. He sold his images to the press and media. That is function. I am interested in things functioning, not using hardware as an excuse for illustrating themes so we can sit here in a sort of pretentious way and talk about them. I would rather read about it. That's my point.
Audience: You were speaking earlier about the glamorization of this kind of technology and the way it is being sold as an appeal to sexuality. I also see that it has an indirect, push/pull relationship with a disconnected omniscience. Gathering in so much data, being able to take in so much data at one time seems to pull you away from the world. This form of observation seems to empty a lot of the emotional content of how we look at the world. Do any of you have some thoughts on that or dispute that?
Labat: I do. Maybe that's my problem, I try to look for a soul. I don't know if that is what you mean.
Audience: I am not talking about omniscience in terms of power, but in terms of removal.
Labat: Are you talking in terms of making art?
Audience: Yes, within the context of making art, but I think there is a cultural aspect to it, too, in the way we can pull away and take in more and more information.
Scher: I think there is a culture of surveillance and a culture engaged in the act of making surveillance images, that use those materials. Surveillance is separate from actual experience, it is a secondary represention of an actual moment in event/space time. I think that runs parallel to, for example, the crisis of intimacy in America. I think a lot of these tools and machines (tools of the electronic stage, like e-mail, and video cameras) do play into that crisis. There is a removal there, but I don't know if they are the same. The discussion isn't about surveillance per se, but about public space. The power matrixes and the control issues that come up in public space are critical issues that we all share. What happens to the cultural context we have and redeveloping it as individual poetic beings, or are we losing track of the importance of our work?
Novakov: There has been a long history of separating ourselves from our world and looking at things passively at a distance. Television can be seen as part of this. There is a reason why television is as popular as it is. It is the quintessential twentieth-century technology. You watch, and it does stuff.
Scher: In Tony's work, he's doing multiple simultaneous roles. You've thrown in car parts, sexuality, breasts: fights, guy stuff. Dennis went in the street and became a vehicle, a transport mechanism and a share mechanism for this kind of recoverability and recirculation of imagery, using video, film, stills. Do you ever use video? We have all used the screen as a site of power and control, as an issue that we deal with in the production of images. The production of television includes all of us, since we live in a world which is more and more experienced as television, if not as surveillance. It adds another layer to experiencing an artist using video, because we do know a lot about it.
Novakov: I think that, in a lot of contemporary art, assuming the role of the active observer is a way of gaining leverage. It is about starting something.
Scher: You brought up earlier the role of the watcher on the streets of Paris. And here we all have questions about what is the role of the watcher in everyday life, what is watchfulness today? What is the role of an artist who tries to create objects or images from extreme forms of watchfulness? That is an important question.
Novakov: Maybe Dennis could address that.
Adams: To stimulate watchfulness one first has to scramble the codes of display. Otherwise, we are only creating more spectacles. That means resisting the conventional circuits of information by creating new interfaces of communication. I can’t think of anything less critically ripe than a web site. The frame of the screen is already in place from the first moment of transmission. In the wake of that image every piece of communication is compromised. For me, it has never been enough to simply infiltrate the given frames of communication. The task is to invent new instruments, or at the very least create hybrid ones. New interfaces suggest the possibility of new intimacies. I want to link up with those first Constructivist experiments, produce fragile new instruments of communication that are not yet programmed as transmitters, not yet speech indentified.
Audience: On the other side of intimacy there is alienation. I felt your "You Are Here" project had a deep sense of loneliness, because you used satellites to locate where you were. Can you talk about technology and the issue of alienation and abstracted representations of self? I am also interested in how you use technology to define different spaces.
Kurgan: I appreciate your interpretation, but it is not so much dots being drawn from outer space. There is a very important relationship between a single individual, a machine and the satellites that are there. For me, it is not so much about intimacy, but about how private and public are very hard to distinguish these days, in part because of electronic media and surveillance technologies. The idea of site specificity is something you need to call into question now, because something can be both very site specific and non site specific, especially in relation to something like the Internet. How do you define that as a site? That is why I see my work as much more architectural, because it is trying to define a terrain or landscape in which you inhabit spaces, although you don't know you are inhabiting them. It's not about alienation.
Audience: But I get a feeling of alienation, because we are so small in those spaces.
Scher: Surveillance sees all and then selects.
Audience: It is like a nightmare.
Scher: Do you know Bentham's panopticon? Now it's 3-D, interstatial, interorgan, all sides, same time. Lucent Technologies in New Jersey is working on machines that do the whole room in more than 3-D. You can see a whole room and hear all the sound’s reflections at the same time.
Imagine a self portrait in a convex mirror time 5000.
Audience: I like the panel, because it includes the creative processes and strategies of surveillance and criminality and survival.
Adams: Ultimately, we all just want to be loved. That's it.
Scher: I'm not so sure I agree.
Adams: I'm sure you won't agree.
Audience: I would like to talk more about the flaneur. Where do you think this is all going? Are we all becoming more feminized in how we look at ourselves?
Novakov: I was using the word "feminized" in a particular historical context. If you read the nineteenth-century writings by male writers, you will see that they thought of this "feminization" as a crisis. The city was self-destructing because it was losing its masculine nature. From my point of view, it is interesting to look at the city as an organic body, a male body. (Citing Napoleon's interest in the obelisk.)
Audience: But with the development of the flaneur, women became more aware of being looked at.
Novakov: The flaneur begins to lose his power at the point when the city becomes feminized.
Adams: The flaneur represents the last window of aristocracy. Disengaged from the body of the ruling class he anders the streets with only his dignity in place. Only his eyes connect with the masses, his soul preserves its link to a failing history.
Audience: So now the last aristocrats are artists and grad students?
Novakov: The flaneur is also associated with the writer.
Adams: Zola's "The Lady's Paradise" is the best example of this idea of the shift in the nineteenth century, about the birth of the department store.
Audience: To what extent is the general public aware of the technologies that are available to them? And what are some of the better resources to keep abreast of those things?
Scher: Awareness is not enlightenment. It is a path. There are many websites devoted to the marketing and high-brow distribution of surveillance goodies and tricks. I would refer you first to the Net. I would refer you to Gary Marks and his website. He wrote the book, The Maximum Security Society, and is working on a book that should be out next year on the culture of surveillance. In New York City, there's a spy shop, there is CCS. You can buy tiny transmitters and radios. Even Radio Shack has goodies. The major closed circuit television houses have links to spy houses as well. That is, houses that sell gear to rig on to regular cameras to do spy jobs. There is a fabulous trade show every year at the Javitz for surveillance goodies. The industrial spy trade show and industrial prison trade show are also excellent places to see fascistic gear. There is also the Metropolitan Burglar and Fire Alarm Association. They can tell you about local individuals. Architects also have a say in this, in what they install in their buildings.
Kurgan: To take the opposite side, inasmuch as you can find anything that you want to find, I think there still are a lot of things that are secret. For instance, I have been doing a lot of research on data storage facilities and electronic banking and you cannot get inside one of those buildings. It is very difficult to understand what the technologies are that are providing protection. The buildings themselves are like fortresses. On the one hand, it is the things that are spun off that are readily available, but if you want to go one inch behind that, you have to become a spy to get access. I get equipment from everywhere and you can get just about anything. But I often hit barriers. You realize that things are getting dangerous, when you can no longer find the information.
Scher: To get real goodies, like a missile rocket launcher for a nuclear bomb, you can go to Pakistan now.
Audience: A flip side to that is in Belfast. In Belfast, the main British surveillance headquarters are in one place. It is the only place that has never been bombed. Where is it? It's on the top of the Catholic nun's retirement home. No kidding. It is so pervasive in the city that everyone knows it's there. In the same way, in Los Angeles, there is a helicopter beaming down at least once every single night. The acceptance of this public surveillance is amazing. It is the opposite of what you are talking about. The scary thing to me is the acceptance of the public nature of this technology.
Scher: Ten years ago, people were protesting and one of the speakers yesterday spoke about public demonstrations and what role they had for artists and that is an issue we probably don't have time to discuss here, but it is important. Also, you are all sitting on powder kegs if you are a photographer and are involved in photography or video. You as the imagemaker have an enormous amount of individual momentum and you should use it.
Audience: Tony, in your "Hooters" project, were you surprised by the fact that no one intervened or called the police?
Labat: No, I made sure that it would be stylized enough. There were three things necessary to strip away from the stunt guys: no character or motivation, no acting, no talking. It was not about that. It was a moment to decide, is this a sophisticated prank or is this about making it so stylized and fake? People don't show up and do fights with camera guys. It also brings in the Rodney King thing, of course. I saw the two people with cameras as actors as much as the stunt guys. They are part of the dance. When you slow it down, their body language is beautiful. I was not interested in the clientele at Hooters, to do that to them. Not to fake out the bouncers so that they come out. Of course I thought about that. Taking those things away from the actors was a way to avoid that and force the clientele to think about what they were looking at.
Novakov: The whole piece ended up being metaphorically framed, by the building. Here is a space with women inside of it, while outside is the space for men. An interesting tension develops.
Scher: There is another outside space share by men and women. It is the increasingly shrinking space of the teenager. In Rebel Without a Cause, teens leave the domestic space. Their fights are outside in the street. Sal Minio represent a gay male in the movie, but as a subtext. We become blocked. We don’t get to deal with Sal’s lust for the straight male’s power of cars and women. Here also an interesting tension develops for you as the viewer. Videotape can't tell the difference between real and fake and your work begs that question. What is real, what is happening? You have to consider yourself part of the action, too, as a viewer.
Labat: Like Dennis, I just did this Sunday evening and so I am still digesting this. I knew it was all there, but like he said, it takes a while for me to put it all together. There are a lot of layers there. I am struggling with it.
Novakov: I thought it was nice how Dennis's piece also had a lot to do with the frame as a metaphor. There is a physical framing, bracketing of space, allowing you to see. It turned out to be a complementary contrast: the two projects.
Audience: I'd like to ask a question about the mass production of clothing and the breakdown of the differentiation between Betty and hookers. I think that's possibly a reason, but a false reason, held out in the same way that the cartoon of the men looking at pictures of prostitutes is a false representation of them as identifying who the prostitutes are. I think it would behoove the prostitutes to be able to distinguish herself from Betty in order to do good business. I think that cartoon and that fear of mistaken identity is a false fear put out to make people censure themselves. I think the men knew who the prostitutes were and it was a way of reminding people that they were not in control of how they were represented.
Novakov: I never intended for "Betty" to think that she would be mistaken for a prostitute. It's the flaneur and the detective that are having a tough time distinguishing the two.
Audience: But I think that a hooker looking for business will advertise.
Novakov: The reality of it has nothing to do with the symbolic position that they occupy. Of course you can tell the difference between a hooker and a non-hooker. The idea was a symbolic invasion of space by out-of-control female sexuality. It is like the covers of the magazines, in which the nice girl turns out to be an ax murderer.
Scher: I don't know anything about the subject, but I think it's just sexier. I don't know about the men on the street, but the women at the time went to their houses and built the first aquariums. Kitch object collections were happening, with women at that time. Inside they were making their own little worlds.
Adams: Women were also the first shoplifters, according to Zola. I imagine what they really wanted to "steal" was the spell of the commodity and the power that the new display technologies of the department store held over them.
Novakov: Once again, there is male commentary about women and their lack of self control.
Audience: When I read Anna Novakov's article about the hospital delivery room, I felt that my body became a public space. Without any technology or mechanism, the male doctor's hand penetrated a private space of my body. That is still practiced.
Novakov: There has been a lot of interesting feminist writing done about gynecology as a field of inquiry. When gynecology was institutionalized, it was done in a way that outlaw midwifery, which was practiced mostly by women. You also have the position of a professional, objective observer in the male gynecologist. The woman becomes the object of intense, objective, clinical scrutiny.
Audience: What is the role of the artist? What is the degree to which technology serves to mobilize or passify? Tony, you were seeking earlier the soul of the machine. That soul was suggested by Fritz Lang in one of the iconic representations of social distopia. Dennis mentioned Constructivists, who were celebrating the revolutionary power of the state. They were not serving to critique the Bolshevik state.
Adams: Up until 1925 the Bolshevik state was still entrenched in fantasy. Its mission and the aesthetics of its transmission were up in the air. So while you’re right that the Constructivists were not critiquing the state, they nevertheless experimented with the instrumentation of communication in such a playful way that it had a critical aura. That’s exactly why those practices dissolved with the emergence of social realism under Stalin.
Audience: Julia had an astonishing piece at P.S. 1, where you enter the gate and there is a pleasant voice speaking to you. Your recent work at Andrea Rosen provided an opportunity for me or anyone who entered the space to use a keyboard that was hooked up to the computer to manipulate the sound. But in each case I am left with an experience of utter passivity and impotence, because what I wanted to get into was the computer, to get into the nexus of the power and knowledge of those computers. In each case, while much of your work is to point out the distopic features of surveillance, I want to know more about the role of the artist in mobilizing the viewer to engage critically, to work in a politically active sense with a technology that seems so omnipresent and omniscient.
Adams: It is almost impossible within the confines of a gallery or museum to do what you are asking. The context overrides social or political mobilization, unless the target of the criticism is the politics of exhibition or the institutional frame.
Audience: I know you work in both a commercial gallery context as well as the so-called public arena. So, if strategies are different in both areas, how in the public arena can you suggest that mobilization?
Adams: Within a larger public arena messages can be inserted in unexpected ways. One can create disguises that, at the very least, set up conditions of mobilization. I also have more faith in non-art audiences. They often have a sincere willingness to interact with the work in intelligent ways. I’ve learned so much about the dimensions of reception by working directly on the street. On the other end, my work has often suffered in the museum/gallery context. There is always this feeling of being used as a hired gun to animate some fashionable cultural arena.
Scher: I have not motivated anyone to do anything. Nobody has taken political action because of anything I've done. At midlife, it posed a personal nightmare, so I turned to other things. I am doing a lot more voice projects and teaching. I have a great deal of fear and sadness about not making the world a better place through my work, which pointed out things I thought were dangerous that others were not seeing. As a young artist, I thought I could do that. It hasn't happened. So I keep trying other things. I do more autobiographical work than I would like to admit and it is a bigger struggle than I ever imagined it would be. I think my projects are 2% to 3% that I really love, that really work.
Adams: Many artists in the 1980s began to describe their work as "critical" instead of "political." In hindsight, I think this veiled their anxiety about their absorption into the marketplace. The political possibilities that seemed so evident in the ‘60s were everywhere being compromised. Barbara Kruger’s comment that "there is nothing outside of the marketplace" captioned the times.
Audience: Tony, when I was watching your work and the image of Diana Lopez, the first thing I recalled was walking down the street in Caracas when I was twelve years old in a white dress and being terrorized by the men on the street who followed me with their cars and comments. The comments about Betty brought to mind being in Paris when I was fifteen and walking down the street not being able to lift my eyes from the sidewalk, because if I did, some man would assume I was available and a hooker. It was frightening. Anybody who thinks that, in the nineteenth century, it was easy to tell who was a hooker and who not, is nuts. A lot of this stuff still exists. When I took ballet lessons here in New York, I had to run a gauntlet of men. My question to Tony regards a comment I'd like you to amplify. You said something like, God forbid that I should be a participator. You used the word participation, that there could be a confusion about whether you were participating at Hooters. Could you go into that?
Labat: Do you remember the quote from Sister Wendy? That was a very important quote, about the attention to the author and maker, as opposed to the work. I just mean separating the author from the work. The work is analytical.
Audience: I am not accusing you.
Labat: I am not saying you are accusing me. I am just trying to explain. The community projects onto the artist assumptions about the piece. Hooters already represents something to people. It is a charged place. I felt that. Many people said, good, art, it gives me an excuse to go see it. Me doing something there was an excuse for them to go inside the door. We have been talking about these issues for a long time. Who is in power? Who is in control? Who is looking at whom? That is a way to continue this dialogue. Is it really a male place? I went on Saturday night and it was really a family place in the suburbs, filled with kids. I meant it with a lot of humor.
Audience: I appreciate your humor, but I guess my final comment is that ambiguity can be dangerous.
Labat: So can humor.
Scher: Do you mean because the women were invisible?
Audience: No, because I think that it's always the responsibility of the artist to be clear about where their position in space is.
Labat: Not at all.
Audience: Just a short response about being mistaken for a prostitute. I think it doesn’t matter whether you are or aren’t; you are available. If someone is going to harass a woman, I don't think they care if she is a prostitute or not. You put up a slide that showed the passive voice as the objective voice and I think if you run with that you could say the more passive you are the more an object you are. The woman motionless in bed is the ultimate in passivity and she is the object.
Novakov: She is a painted image. She is painted by the artist who had a certain idea of what he wanted to depict.
Audience: But even in the real life incarnation, to be passive is to be objectified.