Security Art

CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

It is a short leap from looking (fixing one's gaze upon another) to voyeur ism (taking delight in extended gazing) to spying (surreptitiously studying the actions of another). Surveillance, a type of spying, has interested artists and fascists alike since the birth of video technology. Clearly derived from the uses of video in military technology, surveillance highlights the sinister flip-side of the photographic gaze: intruding upon the unwitting subject with a camera. CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother was published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Totaling 655 pages, it does indeed extend from Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century design of the "penitentiary panopticon," in which prisoners could be observed 24/7, to present-day reality TV shows featuring participants willingly displaying their every move for the camera in hopes of claiming the jackpot at show's end. Surveillance, it seems, has actually ceased being sinister. It is now a means to a million-dollar grab bag.

The extraordinary accomplishment of CTRL Space, however, does not lie in being yet another critique of television, but in its comprehensive, scholarly, and visually engaging treatment of the many interactions between surveillance and art largely since the 1960s. From Andy Warhol, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman to Thomas Ruff, Diller + Scofidio, and Julia Scher, CTRL [Spac] is an exhaustive and enduringly useful account of this strange alliance between the techniques of law enforcement control systems and art. Organized by ZKM and curated by Princeton professor Thomas Y. Levin, a culture and media theorist, the exhibition responds to the fact that, in Levin's words, "Now more than ever we are under surveillance. When we use a credit card or an ATM, when we call on our cell phones or use EZ Pass, when we surf the web or simply walk down the street, we leave traces." It is here, in the traces, that art surfaces.

Video technology was irresistible to certain conceptually oriented artists when it became more affordable in the late 1960's with the introduction of hand-held systems. Artist Hermine Freed wrote in 1976: "The Portapak would seem to have been invented specifically for use by artists. Just when pure formalism had run its course; just when it became politically embarrassing to make objects, but ludicrous to make nothing . . . just when it became clear that TV communicates more information to more people than large walls do . . . just then (1965) the Portapak became available." Nauman and Vito Acconci initially turned the video camera on themselves in performances that were both solitary and reflective of their interest in sculpture (Nauman) and poetry and performance (Acconci). Nauman used surveillance in his 1969-1970 installations Performance Corridor and Video Surveillance Piece: Public Room, Private Room. In each, Nauman disrupts the art-viewing experience by making the viewer a participant, not a passive participant, but one whose perceptions and emotions he manipulates and sometimes distorts. In this sense he is in control, not unlike the security agent monitoring the moves of ordinary citizens. Nauman's intentions, however, are connected to the history of art and the perceptions of the art viewer, not to the gathering of data for legal purposes or intimidation.

Acconci, who is represented here only by his surveillance performance, Following Piece (1969) is actually more important to the story of surveillance for turning the camera on himself. In common with Graham, Nauman, and Peter Campus, Acconci was interested in collapsing boundaries between public and private space. By taping himself in works such as Theme Song (1973) and Command Performance (1974), he ends up subverting the very notion of surveillance by inviting people to look at him, laugh at him, be seduced by him. It is Acconci's and others' forays into performance and video...