John Knight’s current show at Greene Naftali is mostly strong, with some minor exceptions. The video and projection works on view are presented as one unnamed curation. One new piece, described by the press release as indicative of his interest in “Disclosure,” is a series of slides. Each is a dated diary entry in white on a black ground. They recount the artist working on a new lithograph project, but the narrative is told with suggestions of mystery, intrigue, and furtiveness. He suspects the people around him of plotting a large event (the production of a print) as if they were underground rebels or terrorists. He is ambivalent about his own commitment to their cause, and his samizdat notes indicate a desire to inform on them, or to escape. The portrayal may be especially well timed, following on the heels of Trevor Paglen’s documentation of the NSA, which closed in October at nearby Metro Pictures, and with increasingly loud demands from a vocal minority in the US and Europe, demanding more surveillance of neighbors suspected of jihadist sympathies. Knight points to the blind spot nature of paranoia and the heightened anxiety it produces about even mundane interactions.  NOAH DILLON

November 11, 2015 to January 8, 2016 at Greene Naftali Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues.

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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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October 20, 2010 – January 23, 2010
235 Bowery, between Rivington and Stanton streets
New York City, (212) 219-1222

Surfing through Free is analogous to spending hours at the computer, reviewing this bit and that byte until cross-eyed and overloaded. Interesting ideas fight to remain present in the midst of all the other flotsam accumulated along the way.

First and foremost, Free explores the following aspects of the internet: how artists engage with the public space it provides; how artists negotiate the pros and cons of the immediate availability and broad circulation it allows; and how it serves as a contentious territory that individuals, governments, corporations, etc. use as a tool to both control and elicit change.

But wait, there’s more: The essay “Dispersion” by Seth Price serves as a touchstone for the exhibition. Price’s thesis meanders around several topics: First he explains how Conceptualism managed to sabotage itself by being too esoteric instead of emphasizing its accessibility.  From there, Price explores the disparity between the archive of high culture (museum, galleries, art historical texts, etc.) and the archive of popular culture (in this case, the internet).  His view is that to be a part of the former, art must still be discussed and contextualized before it is archived, while at the same time, it must evolve and exist via modern media to have a foothold in the latter.  Dispersion (2008) is presented in the exhibition as a printed document, reproduced in large format with ropes tied in knots embedded in each page. The knots seem arbitrarily thrown at the page, but upon closer inspection it’s obvious that they are placed near or on top of key points made in the text.

Curator Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome (an online art forum dedicated to artistic practices that engage technology) and Adjunct Curator of the New Museum, in her essay “Walking Free,” looks at three themes that bind the works on display. The first is how identifying where your ideas end and another’s begin is infinitely harder in a space where everything is shared and reproduced ad nauseam—remarking also that this open-source medium calls into question what one can justifiably appropriate. The second theme is exploring—and here Cornell uses the rambling phraseology of Donald Rumsfeld—“unknown unknowns.” What is hidden, what is repressed, what are people more likely to say or admit under the cloak of anonymity the internet provides? The third theme, in the vein of other works that acknowledge the expansion of public space provided by the internet, is Free’s recognition of the “free culture” movement, which argues that the access to information made possible by the internet—through its commitment to openness—should be embraced as an opportunity for greater sharing rather than as a threat to our privacy or way of thinking.

The ideas behind Free are captivating, but with 22 artists attempting to illustrate them, the exhibition is exhausting. In some cases the art objects themselves do very little to engage. Amanda Ross-Ho’s You and Me Findings (Rotated 90° CW) (2009), is comprised of earrings found on eBay through searches for “earrings.” Interspersed across a black canvas, they take on a constellation effect through which they are supposed to lose their function as jewelry and instead become abstractions.  For The Skies The Limit (Leave Me Alone) (1998–2009) she uses a previous work (in this case an enormous t-shirt with the words “Leave Me Alone” in large type) to be a symbol of a lengthy process of metamorphosis and reuse. The t-shirt was used in an exhibition in 1998, and a photograph of it was later merged via Photoshop with an image of a tie-dyed T-shirt. For Free, she tie-dyed the original shirt and mounted it on a canvas, as a way of printing or making tactile her experiments in Photoshop, therefore making prominent the potentially endless process of versioning and redefinition allowed by technological means. All well and good, but as objects these are not very interesting to look at.

Other works included in this category are Pangea (2010), a boudoir installation piece by Lizzie Fitch that intends to blur the line between public and private spaces, and riverthe.net (2010), a video projection of the website of the same name by Ryan Trecartin and David Karp that comes off as a kind of chat roulette in a museum setting.

In contrast Kristin Lucas’s Refresh (2006-7) documents her petition to legally change her name; the catch is that the name she wants is the same name she already has. The intent, she tells the judge, is to refresh herself as if she were a web page. The idea that the intangible soul can be versioned is absurd for sure, but Lucas pleads her case politely and concisely to the point where it’s a convincing argument. The transcript includes the judge’s patient but perplexed agreement to grant the name change (“The court is not in the business of humor”), along with the signed approval form and crudely-rendered drawings of the court proceedings by Joel McKay. In a play on the “publicness” of technology, Lucas provides the court transcript as a public document, free to be inspected by anyone who cares, while the drawings emulate the colored pencil and wash depictions of high-profile courtroom cases where photography is not allowed. As documentation, these vestiges prove the event occurred, but did anything really happen? It is a question echoed every time a page is refreshed with no visible changes.

In Legendary Account (2006-7), Joel Holmberg turns Yahoo! Answers on its head. Holmberg used the online forum, typically visited for such arcane questions as, “How do I remove a splinter?” to instead ask existential questions such as, “How does it feel to be in love?” and “How do I best convince someone I am an artist?” and “How do I occupy space? The funny part is that people actually answer. The work exists both online, in a series of answers on Holmberg’s Yahoo! Answers account, and in the museum space where printouts of the questions are installed as scrolls against a background that matches the background of the Yahoo! Answers site. The piece aptly questions our sources in the search for answers these days—is it enough to “Google” something to find a suitable answer?

Other works that function well here are C-print photographs by Trevor Paglen that illuminate the locations, sources, and characters that inhabit and study the “black world” of secret military operations; Alexandre Singh’s multimedia installation The School for Objects Criticized (2010), which imbues personality into objects, gives them voices (literally, voice recordings are played as if the objects were actors in a play), and allows them to analyze the strange criteria humans use to criticize art;  and Martijn Hendrik’s Untitled Black Video (2008), which recreates the leaked cell phone video of the execution of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In his video, the screen is black, and the typed comments of various chat forum participants who watched the video online are shown in white text, their subtitles providing anonymous commentary and an alternative documentation of a historical event.

There is more to say, certainly, with at least ten other artists included. To that end several visits are required (taking the time to hear the entire dialogue of The School for Objects Criticized is highly recommended).  One last boon: the benefit of this exhibition’s connection to Rhizome is the free online catalogue.  You may find that the essays outshine the art, but at least you can surf the show from anywhere and avoid the flotsam with just a click.

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