Julia Westerbeke draws with the shadows produced by puncturing sheets of paper with untold numbers of pinpricks. Swirls and clusters of these craters bring to mind petri dishes and galaxies, merging images of the microscopic and the astronomical. They invoke a haptic feeling of disintegration: her drawings are created through the evisceration of their material base.

Salon Zürcher is at 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and the Bowery, on view Sunday, noon to 8pm; and Sunday, noon to 5pm.

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September 10 to October 24, 2015
519 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 206 7100

An opening shot reveals a green field with geodesic domes in the distance. The camera zooms in; the domes shimmer in the heat against a hazy white sky. The scene changes to an ocean overlooked by a rocky cliff. The tip of a satellite antenna can be seen over a hill in the distance. As the camera zooms, more antennas are revealed scattered among farmers’ fields. The next view is outside of an upscale condominium building at night: some windows are lit, some are dark. A single window comes into focus. People go about their evenings, cooking dinner and pouring drinks as the camera watches from somewhere outside.

These scenes constitute the first few minutes of Trevor Paglen’s two-channel video installation, Eighty Nine Landscapes (2015), part of his current solo exhibition at Metro Pictures. In the video, Paglen films the government’s “black sites” of internet and phone traffic interception from as close of a vantage point as possible. This video serves as a microcosm of the exhibition’s examination of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs: like the oblivious condominium residents in the video, people across the world are being watched without their knowledge or consent, and the antennas, domes, and satellite dishes are just a few of the instruments used in this monumental monitoring scheme. Paglen’s exhibition chronicles his quest to watch these digital watchmen, a journey that has led to the depths of the ocean and across the globe.

Two diptych pieces dominate the gallery’s front room: each consists of a photograph of a misty seascape next to a nautical map of the region. Pinned to the map are snapshot photographs and transparencies of news articles, leaked memos, and downloaded material regarding the construction and surveillance of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect America’s networks to the rest of the world. NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, New York City, New York, United States (2015) has pinned to it a snippet from a Washington Post article about the NSA that reveals the agency’s code names for Verizon (“Stormbrew”) and AT&T (“Fairview”). These names join countless others in Code Names of the Surveillance State (2015), a four-screen vertical video installation in the next room. Previously exhibited as projections on gallery walls and outside on monuments and buildings, the piece consists of an endlessly scrolling litany of alphabetized codenames purportedly used by the NSA. Each of these names stands for something, but its exact significance is lost on the viewer, appearing as something benign (“Starfish,” “Turquoise”) or nonsensical (“Turtle Biscuit” or “Squirrel Accumulator”).

The bulk of the work in this show consists of large 60 by 48-inch photographs of undersea cables in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. The sea floor is murky and hazy, and in some cases the cables can barely be distinguished from the silt and reefs around them. Shot while scuba diving, these photos show the artist getting as close as possible to the sites where the NSA’s regime of information control is executed. Like the black sites in the video installation, the artist’s proximity to these places is a kind of communion with the surveillance state, an attempt to reach out and touch the physical appendages of the untouchable.

With Internet and voice traffic being intercepted via undersea cables and from installations across the globe, is there any means of resistance? A possible solution sits, encased in inch-thick Plexiglass, on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery. Called Autonomy Cube (2015), the piece’s naked circuit boards are a functional router that connects the user’s phone or laptop to a TOR network, a kind of shadow Internet used by dissidents, whistleblowers, and criminals alike. TOR has the advantage of being anonymous and nearly untraceable; Autonomy Cube is thus thought to be outside of the networks of surveillance shown in the exhibition. Even so, pinned to the wall behind the router is a patch depicting a stack of green cubes. Its embroidered letters read: “AFCYBERCOMMAND: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.” TOR may potentially be a tenable loophole for now, but how long will it be until the NSA figures out a way to extend its surveillance to all of the dark shadows of the Internet?

Paglen’s show may not provide any absolute solutions to the issues surrounding digital surveillance, but his quest to shed light on this hidden world has resulted in a body of work that blends the didactic with the paranoid aesthetics of conspiracy theories. But, in the aftermath of the NSA’s highly publicized leaks, is the conspiracy still just a theory? After all, you’re not paranoid if they’re actually watching you, right?

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January 10 through February 14, 2015
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

John Miller: Here in the Real World at Mary Boone Gallery

Curated by Piper Marshall
January 10 through February 28, 2015
541 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 752 2929

Contemporary society is being constantly “bombarded by images” if the tiresome cliché is to be believed. It’s the cost of living in an information economy in which every moment of every person’s attention has been monetized and commodified. Practitioners of “old” media like painting occasionally invoke this platitude to make the “slowness” of their chosen medium seem transgressive or revolutionary in comparison to our “fast-paced culture.” John Miller, in a two-part exhibition split between Mary Boone and Metro Pictures, takes our attention economy as his baseline and, rather than trying to define himself in opposition to it, plays a game of trompe l’oeil that uses personal and media-sourced images to toy with notions of the materiality of art and the value of human, mechanical, and digital labor.

While Miller has embraced a wide range of materials throughout his long career, painting is the focus of both exhibitions. At Metro Pictures, a series of shaped Dibond panels depicting anonymous pedestrians fill one room: while these pieces may look like cut-out black-and-white photographs from a distance, they are painted in a thin acrylic grisaille that barely hides the artist’s preliminary pencil marks. The figures cast shadows on the walls behind them and seem to float in a featureless void. Carrying shopping bags, staring into space or gazing down at their phones, Miller’s pedestrians present themselves for the gaze of others while simultaneously looking oblivious to their excised surroundings. The pedestrian paintings are an offshoot of Miller’s “Middle of the Day” project, an ongoing endeavor in which the artist takes a photograph every day between 12 and 2pm. While his original photographs aren’t shown in either exhibition, the pedestrians and two murals, one in each gallery space, originate from this larger project.

From across the room, each mural appears to be a black-and-white photograph of a Chinatown street scene (at Mary Boone) or a back-alley loading dock (at Metro Pictures). The originary photographic images have been subjected to heavy manipulation that may not be obvious at a distant glance. Each image has been reduced to flat grayscale shapes, fragmented, and printed on vinyl wallpaper. Pedestrians, windows, and signs have been duplicated and cloned within the street scene: a stretched-out sign repeats the same Chinese characters a half dozen times, while a man and his doppelganger each cross the street with identical strides. One side of each scene is a mirror image of the other, with enough exceptions that this process isn’t immediately apparent (words and street signs aren’t mirrored along with the rest of the image). The mirroring is more obvious in the loading dock mural, which has its reflective axis placed in the corner of the room. The stones and debris on the ground beneath the platform are not mirrored; neither is the graffiti on the otherwise identical walls. Somewhere in there is an image of reality, something depicting the actual world, but we have no way of knowing which fragments, if any, retain that indexicality.

Instead of pedestrians, Mary Boone has a series of paintings of game show sets, depopulated of any contestants and presented as garishly colored stages. Unlike the pedestrians and the murals, these pieces appear to be photographs from afar, and still appear photographic rather than painterly when inspected up close. While the gallery checklist records them as “acrylic on canvas,” they look more like inkjet prints of digitally compressed YouTube screenshots. The twist is that this series was made between 1998 and 1999, several years before such technologies became widely available. Like the murals (which could have been made equally well using a quick Photoshop cutout filter or painstakingly rendered by hand) we have no way of knowing how much (if any) human, mechanical, or digital labor went into the production of these paintings. If the artist and gallery are to be taken for their word, it’s a clever “Mechanical Turk” trick: the paintings look digital but were apparently painted by hand. One piece, Labyrinth I (1999) has a motion-controlled speaker mounted above it that plays the garbled sounds of a crowd whenever anyone walks by. The canvas is rounded on the edges, giving it the shape of an old CRT television set. Labyrinth I could pass for an abstract geometric painting if not for a fragment of a sign, reading “HOME GYM,” a prize that gives the bright colors and curves their meaning as game show stage elements. Despite the dated references to The Price is Right and obsolete televisions, these pieces have aged surprisingly well: they may have greater resonance today thanks to Miller’s apparent prognostication of the explosion of streaming Internet video services that chop up, compress, and reconstitute images without requiring human intervention.

While the technique behind the game show paintings is mysterious, a more recent series of paintings, split between both galleries, offers a more transparent view of the artist’s process with depictions of reality show contestants in moments of apparent emotional collapse. Like the aforementioned cliché regarding today’s saturation of images, denigration of reality TV has become a trope among those who feel their own cultural consumption is above such base programming. A number of artists have engaged this medium without being so patronizing: performance artist and writer Kate Durbin’s book E! Entertainment (Wonder, 2014) consists of scripts, screenplays, and retellings of reality show scenarios written in the deadpan style of a stenographer. Miller’s reality-show paintings deal with their emotionally charged content with a similar detachment. Close-up shots of heads dominate the canvases, looking more like preliminary underpaintings in umber and white than like finished works. Much thinner than the similarly toned pedestrian series, each painting’s grid and pencil marks are visible even at a distance. While many painters strive to cover up their sketches, Miller seems to embrace the honesty of this technique, stripping away figure painting’s veil of naturalism and presenting these paintings as records of his manual labor.

The games Miller plays with manual, mechanical, and digital reproduction disorient the viewer, calling into question assumptions about the ways in which our sense of reality is mediated through the images and programming to which we are “constantly exposed” (to use another cliché). While the grisaille paintings of pedestrians and reality TV stars emphasizes the hand of the artist and his process, the murals and game show paintings disrupt such fetishization of manual labor by making us agnostic to the actual nature of their production. The pieces on view in both galleries bask in the paradoxical history of their materiality and production: some are naked paintings that plainly exhibit the marks of their creation while other paintings may or may not be “paintings” at all. Miller’s games may be rewarding to some and frustrating to others, but the disorientation he channels is the essence of our age: the loss of distinction between fact and fiction, original and copy, humanity and digitality.

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