Among their other abilities, artists can see things coming.
Reflect upon how much the onset of World War I, its accompanying horrors and the depravity and economic chaos that followed were presaged in the prewar works of the German Expressionists. Now, nearly a century later, our own nation is in the grip of an unsettling enterprise we euphemistically describe as “homeland security.”
In the name of this elusive but omnipresent “security,” in the hope of easing the lingering dread that still haunts us from the terrorist acts of 16 months ago, we are imposing serious constraints upon our daily lives, sacrificing longstanding rights and values and succumbing to a general militancy.
And, like it or not, we are placing ourselves under surveillance. Artists saw this coming — uncannily, even before 9/11. And they saw it in American suburbs.
Disturbing display
A just-opened exhibition at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery — appropriately, across the street from the heavily fortified White House complex — contains ample and disturbing testimony to this phenomenon in the form of a computer-graphics display, a video installation and four photographic series, all by five U.S. artists and another from Norway.
The exhibition is called “Homeland,” and the works on view provide us with a look at how we have chosen to see ourselves. And watch ourselves.
“The `Homeland’ artists function as provocateurs,” said Corcoran curator Paul Brewer, “making us aware of the delicate balance we maintain between being secure and being surveilled.”
Norway’s Sven Pahlsson has the most telling contribution of the five to this endeavor. His “Sprawlville or Life at the End of the Highway Ramp” is a continuously played video employing digital animation and 3-D modeling software.
It begins with what looks like the burning of Troy, a walled city with an orange glow at the center, glimpsed from afar. As the viewpoint moves closer, we see that the fortresslike structure actually is an enclosed shopping mall, surrounded by an empty but brightly lit and vast expanse of parking lot. In the manner of a police helicopter or a constantly revolving surveillance camera, the viewpoint goes ’round and ’round this cold, forbidding complex as the morning light increases and the orange glow at the center, presumably from a sodium vapor light, recedes.
Then the digital video display segues to something as dreary and forbidding: an endless drive down a suburban street. Some of the stark, nearly featureless houses have cars in the driveways, but most do not. Everything and everyone is behind closed doors. A few windows shine with light, indicating a human presence. But no one is seen. This is true of all the works in the exhibition.
“Though void of human figures, the images constantly reaffirm their existence,” observed Brewer.
“When looking at living and social spaces without a physical presence to read in terms of expression, gesture or fashion, viewers are left to populate the images themselves by assigning values, lifestyles or even personalities to absent strangers, using only banal backdrops, props and details.
“In attempting to construct such vague identities, one is forced to consider the implications of one’s own opinions and judgments as an outsider. Within the current social atmosphere of exaggerated paranoia now validated by new mandates associated with security and pre-emptive action, the outsider is an increasingly theatrical suspect.”
Todd Hido’s still camera prowls a neighborhood of desolate, rundown lower-middle class housing, each dwelling place its own little fort. With different building materials, it could be 15th Century Scandinavia.
Jason Falchook chooses more upscale houses and yards, and stares at them, as if from surveillance cameras set on the grass of lawns or in shrubbery.
Dear to their hearts
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Michael Fisher and Kate MacDonnell boldly intrude upon their subjects, getting inside the houses and photographing their contents as clues to the identities of the inhabitants and what it is they hold dear — what it is they so desperately want to protect.
In his darkly satirical 1997 film “The End of Violence,” starring Bill Pullman and Andie MacDowell, German director Wim Wenders pursued a plot line involving a top-secret government scheme to install surveillance cameras throughout a city and so keep watch over all its inhabitants. When a government agent played by Gabriel Byrne threatened to reveal the project, he was killed.
With cameras like these now in place in cities throughout America, there’s no need for such secrecy now.