GABRIELE EVERTZ: EXALTATION
Minus Space, 16 Main Street, Suite A, DUMBO, minusspace.com

SUSAN ROTHENBERG
Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, Lower East Side, speronewestwater.com

MICHAEL ST. JOHN: DEMOCRACY PORTRAITS
team (gallery, inc.), 83 Grand Street, Soho, teamgal.com
ASHES/ASHES 56 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, ashesonashes.com

DAN WALSH
Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, Chelsea, paulacoopergallery.com

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Bill Jacobson: figure, ground at Julie Saul
March 16 to May 26, 2017
535 W 22nd St #6F (between 10th and 11th)
New York, NY, 212 627-2410

Two current gallery shows in New York neatly draw upon the Romantic tradition in ways that raise questions about the place of Romanticism in contemporary culture. Soulful encounters of the individual with the immensity of the world is a theme explored variously by Susan Bee in “Pow! New Paintings” at A.I.R. Gallery, and Bill Jacobson in his show of new photographs, “figure, ground,” at Julie Saul. Each approaches, whether intentionally or contingently, and from different angles, aspects of the Romantic legacy. As the natural world, where encounters with the sublime were previously staged (and thus was, historically, one site for reverent awe at man’s place in the moral and material universe), comes under ever-greater threat, and as new ideological perspectives have come to dominate thinking about the self, one might wonder what Romanticism means today.

Bee’s exhibition at A.I.R., the non-profit cooperative gallery for art by women founded in 1972, refers explicitly to imagery in the early art of the Romantic canon, paying homage to paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch. Works such as Melancholy and Blooms Day (both 2016) borrow directly from those artists — from Munch’s Melancholy (1894) and from Friedrich’s Woman at a Window (1822), respectively. Here, people lose themselves, wonder at powers larger than themselves. That adoration is further heightened by Bee’s use of emotive, expressionistic paint handling and high-intensity color.

Likewise, in paintings based loosely on film stills, couples kiss and cuddle. The brightly colorful patterning Bee applies to her appropriated images becomes, in this suite, cosmic and psychedelic, as if each person is fully becoming one with the other in a trippy union, fulgent with emotional outpouring radiating in colorful waves. Although elements of narrative remain encoded in the gestures and poses of those intimates, it largely gives way to deep absorption in their unifying admiration.

A formalist experimenter, Jacobson has previously constrained his pictures in blurred black-and-white portraits of lone men, and in pictures of large, colorful sheets of paper staged in various natural and man-made sites, resembling misplaced monochrome paintings or Suprematist compositions. Like Bee, at Julie Saul, Jacobson produces images of people with their back to the viewer — another apparent reference to painters such as Friedrich, Thomas Fearnly, or John Constable. Staged in natural settings, they experience the landscape while tacitly inviting us to look at the same view. Unlike Friedrich, though, who often used this same device, Jacobson’s shallow depth of field focuses on the figure and leaves the natural setting in which they stand blurred and hazy.

Another series, called Lines in My Eyes, also relays, obliquely, the interiority of his subjects in photos that closely isolate bare body parts: a collarbone and shoulder in Lines in My Eyes #7219 (2017), for example. Like figure, ground, Jacobson switches between color and black-and-white photography as needed. Each model’s full body is unrevealed, and often even their gender remains unknown. The viewer is invited to reckon with them intimately, scrutinizing skin and joints, as if familiar with the sitter.

One thing that Romanticism emphasized was individualism, the experience of being a small human in a large world. In contemporary America, individualism invariably verges upon the solipsism of self-improvement, self-affirmation, self-love, self-definition. Such values seem to be emphasized in every magazine, newspaper, and blog in the English-speaking world but they often overlook the need to universalize and think beyond one’s own interests. The way such Romantics as Friedrich emphasized the emotional state of the individual was to paint them with their back turned, as here, too, Bee and Jacobson depict their subjects. The viewer’s perspective is not preeminent, but neither is the subject’s fully understood. Instead, both are left in a state of compromise, but in a way that opens up possibilities for community and, indeed, communion. One hopes that this facet of Romanticism might find greater purchase, as it would seem that deep and resonant empathic responses to the world may be essential, if mankind is to continue.

Note: A book of Jacobson’s figure, ground series accompanies the exhibition, with texts by Bill Arning, Robert Glück, and Barbara Stehle, and another, 945 Madison Avenue, with photographs from the Breuer building cleared during the Whitney Museum’s departure from the site, is due later in the spring.

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September 9 to November 6, 2016
396 Johnson Avenue (at Morgan Avenue)
Brooklyn, 718 456 0396

There is, of course, something exciting about corpses. The fascination is often puerile in the contemporary world, centering on death’s foreignness, emphasizing gore and horror, rather than, like, the ontology of permanent lifelessness. Probably a lot of people in developed nations encounter (human) death most in mediated depictions, as in violent video games, movies, TV, and the arts, such as, famously, Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20), John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918–19), or the Chapman brothers’ Hell (1999). Calvin Marcus’s exhibition of new paintings at Clearing Gallery, “Were Good Men,” his third solo show there, employs similar imagery, with nonchalance.

Marcus is 28 years old, working in Los Angeles, and the show suffers from some of the problems that appear common to young painters hailing from that city: here are 39 repetitious paintings; each 101 1/2 by 79 inches and called either Dead Soldier or Grass (all 2016); blandly and proudly derivative, especially of Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist imagery; and hung way too close. On uniformly ochre backgrounds, smears of green grass blades loll in flat clusters and fields. On some lay the mangled carcasses of decorated soldiers, each in a casually rendered uniform. Their tongues fall from gaping mouths. Their skin is mottled and discolored; blood seeps from bullet wounds, crushed skulls, peeling flesh.

Marcus has something of Michael Krebber’s wan touch and Sue Williams’s garish caricature. The dead’s rendering is nearly goofy: their decrepit stillness, open eyes, approach something like black comedy. Under the show’s somber title, honoring the dignity of fallen men who’ve worked to kill, their grimaces can be spooky.

Curiously, the paintings suggest, but subordinate, the realities of war and violence. The wounds are cartoonish. The caricatures are called men, but boys typically form the bulk of military personnel, and, increasingly, drones. The paintings represent conflict generally, without particular political or social ideas. Even if Marcus grimly needles platitudes about soldiers and sacrifice, the imagery nonetheless upholds the mythology of grown men dressed brilliantly, fighting bravely, and dying valiantly in combat — a display of masculinity rather than a dead kid whose body is ornamented by 60–100 pounds of gadgetry. One might wonder why most of the canvases are abstract gashes of green oil stick, or why multiple panels are not combined into a few mural-sized artworks. They’re very quiet images, both visually and ethically.

In February 2015, the death squad ISIS released a video that mimics and exceeds images of war that we encounter in all kinds of media (both fiction and non-). It shows the execution of a 26-year-old Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, whose plane crashed in Syria. The video employs sophisticated production and a high-concept narrative structure, asserting that Jordan is a US-puppeted religious apostate, and therefore the pilot must be righteously murdered. Al-Kaseasbeh gives a coerced statement and is taken to buildings allegedly bombed by Jordanian pilots like himself. Intercut footage shows local first responders pulling civilians from a similarly demolished building. At the ruins, al-Kaseasbeh is put in a cage and burned to death, extinguished by a backhoe dumping the building’s rubble on his char. The video closes with a computer-animated dossier of further targets comprising a hit list of Royal Jordanian Air Force pilots.

Apart from its artfully staged and layered signifiers, the ISIS video shows actual war, in extremis. Unlike a lot of famous Western depictions, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Slaughterhouse Five (1969), The Things They Carried (1990), which portray battle as a dignified, contemplative and tragic space, with men dying for causes that are both noble and questionable, the ISIS video shows, abysmally, what war is, aside from rules of conduct and myths of heroism. It is blood and death in search of political and economic advantage. Although some are very gruesome, few of Marcus’s cartoonish figures ever have the horror of a figure being perceptible as an actual dead person.

It’s worth noting, however, that there may be some benefit to depicting war distantly and mythologically. During the current election, Americans have been bombarded with messages that our military must be “stronger” against enemies, including vows to murder families, to use torture for the purpose of causing horror, to indiscriminately bomb civilians, to expand authoritarian controls on travel and constitutional rights, celebrations of extrajudicial executions, and other incitements to cruelty. More than assuming America in the role of global policeman, they show America claiming the executioner’s mantle. It may be hypocritical or unrealistic, but declaring an interest in fantasies like restraint and justice in war, or, in this case, who wages war and how, provides us with an ethical line against which we can judge — probably condemn — the implementation of power, can hold it accountable. Paintings of dead men might raise the question: Why then are wars fought by indigent kids and robots on behalf of elders? Why are good men dead men? Why are soldiers’ sacrifices repaid with banalities and substandard medical care?

It is vital, though, that such a fantasy be held against the truth, for comparison, to retain the hypocritical gap in order to maintain the taboo against violence. The multivalent clusterfuck called the War on Terror was heralded with a spectacle so viscerally grim that it has become a presiding trope for American viewers. The image has not been supplanted, in part, because of the refusal (and sometimes inability) on the part of the government and media to show exactly what the war consists of: through the practice of embedding journalists; the Pentagon’s ban on photographs of military coffins; few outlets show what it looks like in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan; a recent statute in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual gives latitude to the military to treat journalists as “unprivileged belligerents,” a class similar to spies; and various media having legitimate concerns about showing snuff videos, like that of al-Kaseasbeh’s murder. The contrast between the fantasy of war’s glory and the reality of its indignity is, perhaps, necessary, but their gulf is filled with a river of gore.

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Noah Dillon, associate editor at artcritical.com, valiantly stood in for advertised panelist Sarah Nicole Prickett, who did not attend.

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May to October, 2016
941 North Street (at Hurlingham Drive)
Greenwich, CT, 203 869 0611

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

Guests to the opening of Jonathan Horowitz’s “Occupy Greenwich,” at the Brant Foundation, may have been very surprised: whereas the multimillionaire paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, typically open the spring exhibition at their art and study center with a pig roast, the carcasses of dead animals forced open and staked on the grounds, this year’s attendees were greeted with vegan catering. Horowitz is vegan, and dressing as a slaughterhouse the beautiful Connecticut estate surrounding his show seems likely to have undermined his work, some which speaks to the politics of what people eat and why.

Even before it opened, the show embraced some surprising contradictions. It runs the gamut, in a way, speaking to a number of social and political problems. It was promoted with a full-page ad, reproducing Horowitz’s print Go Vegan! (Stephanie) (2016), with the slogan underscoring the portrait of a seductive young woman. Horowitz is gay, but he also understands that pretty girls sell better than pictures of cute animals, which are often paired with that exhortation. (Though women are also often referred to with metaphors for penned animals, obviously.) At the bottom was the show’s sardonic title, equating the carefully executed exhibition of expensive collectibles with an anarchist takeover of the exurban enclave.

“Occupy Greenwich” touches on a number of seemingly partisan themes, often with messages that are superficially evangelist but which also include a subtext of uncertainty or perhaps even irony. That’s especially useful as America’s political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, in spite of the fact that people don’t lead polar lives and usually have beliefs and practices that differ radically from common stereotypes about, say, vegans, Republicans, working class voters, queer people, gun owners and so on.

Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008), staged in one early room, is a cartooned, life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman being crowned by a small boy standing on a chair, with the sculpture’s title cast into the base, in a corny comic font. Next to it, a whole wall of similar figurines — the size of paperweights and cast in the style of 1970s Sillisculpt statues, titled We the People are People Too (2008) — are marked with affirmations that “Young Mothers Are People Too,” “Socialist Medics Are People Too,” “Donald Rumsfeld Is A Person Too,” “Ellen And Portia Are People Too,” “Fetuses Are People Too,” and others. It’s not at all obvious how sincere Horowitz is being in his parodic coronation of Mrs. Clinton and the insistence on a common humanity shared alike by working people and Rumsfeld et al. It is absolutely essential to remember that everyone is a person, but it’s also important to recall that both of those politicians were managers of massive death, and putting them on the same scale as mothers, doctors, and embryos, etc., is discomfiting.

A stairway leading to galleries downstairs is lined with Go Vegan! (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002/10). Each low-resolution-pictured person eats (currently, formerly, occasionally) a vegan or vegetarian diet, including Vincent van Gogh, Prince and Franz Kafka, among many others. Similar mosaics are found in vegan restaurants, online, and on posters produced by PETA. But they’re also dubious; Horowitz commends the plea and also slyly digs at its cheesy, superfluous celebrity endorsements, which seem to put animal-cruelty-free eating in the same basket as Coca-Cola and Nike.

Downstairs, a large room recapitulates Horowitz’s November 4, 2008 (2008) installation, originally staged at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, wherein viewers watched live election returns in a room divided between red and blue, FOX News and CNN, on back-to-back LCD screens. Here is the same set up, balloons poised to drop from the ceiling. The TV monitors are still playing the ‘08 election, and all of 24-hour cable news’ on-screen signs of urgent immediacy — rapidly moving graphics, breaking updates, a scrolling crawl at the bottom, and more — all this stuff that’s meant to convey nowness, is, eight years later, manic, diminutive, impotent.

The last installation, I, Hillary (2016), is a room empty save for a spare white bench, desk and chair, and an ink-jet printed and framed low-res portrait of Mrs. Clinton. From a small PA system comes Horowitz’s voice, giving a meandering, rational and sort of defensive account of the show and his support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. He describes how capable she is, and that her policy aims seem pragmatic and reasonable. Although Horowitz sounds like he’s speaking extemporaneously, if haltingly, his remarks also seem canned, robotically parroted from Clinton surrogates, partisans and pundits. Many of the same claims were repeated at the Democratic National Convention in July and have been found in the opinion media for the past year — the thrust being basically that he’s not crazy about her, but thinks she’s capable and will do a good job and have you seen how insane the alternative is? Horowitz’s minimizations of Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street money and influence are followed by preemptive defenses about working with the Brants at their ostentatious estate, drawing a sharp parallel between her compromises and his own.

“I guess I am not a big proponent in general of supposed ideological purity,” says Horowitz in his monologue. Probably few people are. More than that, though, Horowitz seems deeply interested in apparent contradiction, performativity, appropriation and allusion, both in politics and culture, and in his own life. One can hope that poking at those conflicts and misconceptions might lead to better elections, or maybe more civility. Or perhaps even just a few more vegans.

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June 23 to August 5, 2016
83 Grand Street (between Wooster and Greene streets)
New York, 212 279 9219

The same day “Golden Eggs” opened at Team Gallery, the UK voted for the economic insanity of leaving the European Union, following on another economic insanity of austerity, privatization, and cheerful steroidal encouragement of the financial sector. The vote to leave was, in part, a severely misguided reaction against wealth concentration and the technocratic institutions of Brussels, Frankfurt and London, which have for decades segregated citizens and underserved them, or even put a boot to their neck. “Golden Eggs,” with work by 10 artists organized by Alissa Bennett, performs a similar kind of disaffection as those referendum voters, though framed by the analytic reflectivity of Marxism (probably at least a little sardonically) instead of the reactionary know-nothing populism that just made a basket case of Britain, that has threatened other European nations for almost a decade, and which is threatening the US election.

Bennett described the show to me as a kind of answer to Art Basel, which had concluded five days earlier. That fair was, this year, seen as something of a test of the market’s continuing hypertrophy, coming on the heels of an apparently lackluster run of auctions. And the outlook was judged to be good. Wasn’t everyone very glad that the party is likely to continue?

A large red-and-white painting by Gardar Eide Einarsson, The Next Recession and Where to Hide (2016), summed up the mood of the show succinctly: a giant arrow hurtling toward the lower right corner, imitating a graph of a crashing global market. It’s a brusque, cool image that invites both terror and dispassionate admiration. It’s appropriated from a January 2016 cover of Time Magazine, headlined with the painting’s title in fearful, capitalized letters. Einarsson’s painting excludes the original text, which had also ominously crowed about China and boasted a clever report from Davos, meaning the World Economic Forum, another Swiss confab for market makers, then congregating leaders and representatives of the most powerful businesses and nations on Earth to discuss economic policy, as they’ve done for 45 years. Although the meeting intends to help guide capitalism toward the benefit of all, it has prevented neither the greatest worldwide consolidation of wealth in almost 100 years, nor the costly, global, economic supercatastrophe that’s been playing out since 2007. In fact, it’s probably done a great deal to enable those twin phenomena. Einarsson’s bolting arrow isn’t predicted by or aimed at Davos, but is cast by Davos; it’s everyone else trying to find where to hide.

The people at Basel and Davos can be seen as the market’s invisible hands, though perhaps “occluded hands” would be a better name, since although many of the participants at each conference are certainly recognizable, there’s almost zero transparency in what they do. Hans Haacke’s kinetic sculpture, The Invisible Hand of The Market (2009), anoints the whole show, hanging high on one wall. It’s a large box, with the title written out like a billboard. In the center, a large, open hand tilts from side to side, its innards ticking metronomically. The disembodied hand greets, waves, grabs, swats, remains out of reach, and dominates. It quotes Adam Smith, capitalism’s godfather, and his proposition that the private vices of individuals can, in their self-interest, invisibly, almost magically, develop into public benefits. However, Smith was speculating about the disembodied power of crowds, not the secret pillaging of oligarchs. And what is the social benefit of a global art-as-investment frenzy remains unclear, even more so when vast quantities of artworks bought in Switzerland remain there, sealed in indefinite storage at the Geneva Freeport, constructed to sequester collections and avoid taxes, and maybe trade and deal and hide. Given bad incentives — such as those that reward opacity in the art market, or that repay, with taxpayer money, dumb, massively over-leveraged financial bets — private vices may instead yield results which are simply vicious, yield a market whose aims and procedures are warped to favor wealth accumulation rather than innovative cultural production or social good. Karl Marx asserts that this is capitalism’s inevitable trajectory, not merely an accidental flaw.

Alex Bag, in Coven Services (2004), shows what such market forces look like as products for ordinary consumers (not citizens). Her video strings together several ad parodies, with interludes consisting of segments from a published sex tape starring the heiress Paris Hilton, shot in infrared, so that she and her paramour are rendered in green and black. This is riffed on by Bag, in clips where she plays PFC Jessica Lynch in green Army fatigues, selling Halliburton; a green witch named Eli Lilly dosing nubile children with Prozac and Satanism; and by a guy in a night-vision segment pimping the “warm, sticky infojaculate” pumped to consumers by AOL-Time Warner. She weaves a narrative of the interconnectedness (read: “collusion”) of the military, politics, capital, and entertainment in the construction of a totalizing ideology of consumption and obeisance.

Three text-based works — by Barbara Kruger, Jessica Diamond and Bjarne Melgaard — sneer at the developed world’s socioeconomic turmoil, bringing to the surface a primary contradiction. Diamond’s wall drawing declares “I HATE BUSINESS,” which is the product of her own business. Two prints by Kruger, wonder, respectively, about the relationship between being successful and feeling “FAKE,” and “IS BLIND IDEALISM REACTIONARY?” Melgaard snipes, “THE WORLD iS FULL OF RiCH CORRUPT CUNTS.” But his oeuvre is known for its ostentatious kind of cuntiness and opulence, and here is also included one of his sculptures, mounted with beauty products and a Brioni jacket. Embroidery over the interior breast pocket, conspicuously visible, indicates that it was made specially for Melgaard; I have no clue what a bespoke coat costs, but suffice to say its retail price is at least several thousand dollars. None of these artists would be considered rich from the vantage of patrons in the transnational capitalist class who fund so much of the art market. But, looking upward, they seem rich, and it can feel really impossible for emerging artists to gain purchase among such established figures. The art market, like other markets for other labors, is built in such a way as to suppress or exclude the emergent and retain the privileges of the already established, even the blasphemous establishment.

It’s tempting (and probably necessary) to extend this kind of critique, but it also smacks of the same myopia that always infects dogmatic demands for ideological rigor, or at least for the appearance of absolutism. In 2011, during the Occupy protests, TV personalities jeered at the protesters for leaving rallies to withdraw cash from Bank of America ATMs for lunch or whatever, as if the protesters’ coerced interaction with corporate behemoths was in some way hypocritical to that movement’s purpose. Einarsson, Haacke, Bag, Melgaard, Kruger, Diamond, and other artists here, as well as Bennett, have a license to criticize money and power. The meaning of their work, as pointed as it may be, is often secondary to its value for collectors. If the insults lobbed at capitalism provide good return on investment, then the market will reward its hecklers. These artists didn’t choose this, but they are illustrative. They’re collected at Basel by the kinds of people meeting at Davos, and they make a living. But Davos and Basel have true power, not them.

Marx, elaborated by ideologists such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, wrote of sharpening contradictions as a propulsion towards the collapse of capitalism (a longtime fantasy not likely to be realized anytime soon). As can be expected, those forces and contradictions play themselves out in every aspect of culture, from factories to studios. The depredation of middle and working class nest eggs, combined with the distribution of golden parachutes to speculators who were supposed to lose under the economic laws they had championed, has driven the contradictions to extremes. Will they crack? What happens then?

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It can be curious to find digital images in video: Jurassic Park (1993) still looks pretty sharp, while pixelated objects in more recent monster or action movies can stick out like a sore thumb. David Claerbout’s current show at Sean Kelly, his first at the gallery and his first in New York in eight years, plays both. His 2015–16 video, KING (after Alfred Wertheimer’s 1956 picture of a young man named Elvis Presley), digitally reconstructs, in the round, a 1956 photo of Elvis at home. The detail, while startling, in many places comes off as rubbery, like a video game. Nonetheless, it’s a wonder to have long-gone artifacts revivified, to walk through a still image. Even more striking is Oil Workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013), another digital reconstruction, which inhabits the other end of the spectrum: of completely convincing virtual detail. As the camera pans through a picture of laborers sheltering under a flooded overpass, one is challenged to distinguish between Bill Viola-like slow motion and uncanny, still reproduction. Claerbout’s careful vision allows us to revel in still images precisely because he makes them almost live.

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The way public discourse and policy are staged may seem ancillary to the actual processes of state and business, but are much more vital than one might assume, serving as a metaphor for the way that the true effect of a pact can be overlooked when focusing on flowery, triumphant assertions. Subtle signals of ostentation, power, and homeliness or populism are often on display in photo ops for the signing of contracts, declarations, treaties. Taryn Simon throws an unfocused but beautiful spotlight on these semiotics in her current solo, “Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” at Gagosian’s 24th Street location. Simon pairs brief summaries of political and commercial agreements with still-life recreations of the flowers present at the press events used to publicly seal such deals. Also included are pressed samples of the flora and lists of their binomens. Barnett Newman once said that “Aesthetics is for artists what Ornithology is for birds.” One might similarly wonder if decorous displays of authority are to politics what flower arrangements are to botanists.

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Catherine Opie has shows at both of Lehmann Maupin’s New York spaces — in Chelsea on 22nd Street, and on the Lower East Side at Chrystie Street. I kind of unexpectedly flipped for the one at the Chrystie Street location, with photos documenting Elizabeth Taylor’s home at 700 Nimes Road, near Beverly Hills, taken between 2010 and 2011. I say unexpectedly because although I anticipated that they’d be, like Opie’s portraits, gorgeous — they are — but I hadn’t anticipated how much I’d read from them. I don’t know much about Elizabeth Taylor or her movies; the films I like largely displaced her generation, starting in the 1960s and ’70s. I know she was glamorous and was connected somehow to Richard Burton and to Michael Jackson. Nonetheless, I find Opie’s intimate vignettes of Taylor’s opulent home and possessions, really revealing about who the actress was. That might be an illusion, but god, it’s a pretty one, and with diamonds, too.

“Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road” at Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie, through February 20, and “Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes” at Lehmann Maupin, 536 W 22nd, through March 5; 212 255 2924.

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Erika Blair: This is Only A Test at Rope
February 20, 2016
508 W. Franklin Street (between N. Pace Street and Pennsylvania Avenue)
Baltimore, MD

Erika Blair’s “This is Only A Test” was staged at Baltimore’s Rope Gallery the same week that a much-publicized legal battle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation intensified. Apple rejected the FBI’s demand that the computer company develop a method to hack its own phones so that the Bureau could glean data about Islamist mass murderers in San Bernardino, California. Apple rightly pointed out that the Bureau basically wants access to everyone’s phone. All this comes in the wake of previous failures by Apple to secure its users’ data, and 15+ years of government imperiously sucking up as much private information about citizens as possible.

At Rope, Blair presented a stark scene. Within the small gallery’s main space a short plinth supported a desktop HP printer. Three surveillance cameras were mounted around the room and the printer would regularly spit out photos selected by the artist from each camera’s live stream. Blair was sequestered in the basement, monitoring the scene on three laptops, a bit like the stereotypical spook from movies: slightly hunched in an industrial space repurposed as clandestine surveillance HQ.

At regular intervals, sound from massive speakers positioned next to Blair would rumble out a message appropriated from Chicago’s 1990s-era Emergency Broadcast System: “The Chicago broadcasters are participating in a required monthly testing of the Chicago emergency broadcast system. This system was developed to provide information to the public during an emergency. This is only a test.” It was deafening above, through the floorboards, and even more brutal below. The show ended up as a kind of three-hour performance — the artist enduring against extremely loud noise, against cramped quarters and discomfort, against the dreary monotony of a stakeout.

The EBS was developed so that the president (starting with Kennedy) could quickly reach the American public in the event of an emergency, presumably nuclear war or apocalyptic crisis. Although it now seems antiquated, other, less visible systems have usurped it. In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government announced a final victory over the insurgent Tamil Tigers by sending a text message to all of the nation’s civilians. And the Amber Alerts that pop up on cell phones are not only indicative of public concern for kidnapping victims, but also of the power of government and telecommunications firms to collude in both gathering information from and disseminating information to citizens, which is creepy. The feeling of benignity that attends the EBS system is actually a desensitization to the intrusion of power into private spaces, one now heightened by our habituation to even more intrusive mechanisms, including the proliferation of surveillance cameras and the legally sanctioned collection of data.

Viewers walked through the gallery, socializing and drinking beer, but eventually most of them ended up in the small storefront space near the entrance, standing or seated on the floor and windowsill, talking. This is probably in part because of the assaultive noise and the storefront’s greater seating opportunities, but one might also wonder if having your photo taken semi-surreptitiously over and over, and seeing it printed out in the middle of a room, have something to do with the main gallery’s emptiness. Given the opportunity, people probably want to avoid being spied on. Without explicit prodding, their behavior changed merely by the inhibitive coercion of inspection.

The forces shaping the battle between Apple and the FBI — and, more importantly, a broader conflict between the American people and their government — have also formed the nexus that Blair is exploiting. What she calls “surveillance capitalism” comes in seemingly greater quantities from the longstanding military-industrial complex, trickling down into regular civil life. You can buy surveillance cameras cheaply, and access them from afar. The technology that inspired Blair’s use of sound, long-range acoustic devices, has moved from battlefields to urban crowd control and dispersal, such as at several Occupy encampments during 2011. And LRAD operate by principles similar to the parabolic loudspeakers now sometimes found in galleries or museums trying to minimize sound bleed in exhibitions.

The fallout of the Kennedy assassination (another of Blair’s favorite subjects) culminated, in part, in the Church Committee of 1975 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations of 1976, which reinvestigated many of the preceding decades’ most infamous state crimes, and seriously discredited the legitimacy of the US government, starting with the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. People had known that covert surveillance had gone on, but the vast and intrusive extent of it was made plainly clear for the first time. Perhaps we’re seeing a replay of those same reconsiderations of federal power, 40 years later, as we remember that intrusion into the lives of private citizens is actually completely corrosive to democracy, even if, at the outset, the oversight seems restricted and beneficent. There is an opportunity coming, possibly, for people to reevaluate their relationship to political and policing authority, if it is felt and understood with the urgency one experiences as blaring sound waves rattle one’s skull. Each small intrusion is a test of what limits a community places on power. What’s the current threshold?

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