This is really fascinating. I'm so grateful to read a description of the art
installation although I can imagine how distressing it would be if I could
experience it first hand. Also, the article describes the new art which I
usually can't relate to, not even when it's explained. But I suppose that
because I'm so attuned to the subject matter, I can understand this art
experience.
Miriam
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Subject: [blind-democracy] Laura Poitras: Astro Noise
https://socialistaction.org/2016/05/27/laura-poitras-astro-noise/
Laura Poitras: Astro Noise
/ 10 hours ago
May 2016 Poitras Damon WInter NYT
By CHRISTINE MARIE
“Astro Noise,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Feb. 5 – May 2, 2016.
In the “Seeds of Time,” Frederic Jameson famously wrote of our cultural moment,
“It seems to be easier to imagine the thorough-going deterioration of the earth
and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to
some weakness of our imaginations.”
In response, many artists have taken it upon themselves to try to find ways to
communicate the reality of the increasingly obscure mechanisms of the
contemporary global capitalist system, giving some sort of materiality to its
circuits of finance, its systems of transportation and communication, its maps
of surveillance infrastructure, and the interrelationships among sites of
extreme exploitation, in the hope that artistic practice can once again be
deeply intertwined with some kind of revolutionary practice.
Allan Sekula made films and photographs of global maritime trade that tried to
make palpable the system of commodity production and its basis in the
exploitation of low-wage workers. Trevor Paglan has tracked surveillance
satellites and photographed “choke points,” the clusters of fiber optic cable
offshore of the U.S. and Europe where the NSA tries to intercept information
traveling over the internet.
In “Astro Noise,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras builds on this impulse with an immersive
installation designed to force museum goers to move from a simple intellectual
awareness of the extent of the new surveillance state to the kind of knowledge
enriched by experience and emotion.
“Astro Noise” was first conceived by Poitras in 2012-2013 while exiled in
Berlin to avoid U.S. government confiscation of film footage she was editing,
and at the same time, receiving the first e-mails from Edward Snowden, a
disembodied voice she knew only as Citizen Four. The context of her creative
work, as noted in her “Berlin Journal”—excerpts of which are included a
companion volume to the show—was the impending imprisonment of John Kiriakou,
an ex-CIA agent put away for telling a reporter about the torture going on at
black sites, the suicide of Aaron Schwartz who was facing imprisonment for
trying to “free” academic journals from commercial pay walls, and her own
secret meetings with Julian Assange.
C4, as she calls Snowden, could be the agent of entrapment, for her, or for
Assange, or even other collaborators, she worries. She wants to publish audio
of Chelsea Manning before being shut down. She records her expectations that
proceeding to engage with Snowden would likely land them both in jail or
exiled. These musings are interspersed with her thoughts upon re-reading “1984”
and Cory Doctorow’s “Homeland,” as well as accounts of her nightmares and
extreme physical reactions to anxiety.
In the midst of all this, she critiques the naïveté of her first film about
Iraq, “My Country My Country”: “As if appealing to people’s consciences could
change anything. Ten years into this war it is obvious that other forces are at
work.” As the engagement with Snowden proceeds, she realizes that a film may
not be best way to empower viewers. She imagines an art exhibition that could
create an aesthetic experience and reveal information in a way that more
directly engages.
She turned to Whitney performance curator Jay Sanders to execute that idea.
Installation, she and her collaborators hoped, might be able to do what highly
layered, complex, and non-didactic documentary films, such as Poitras’ “The
Oath,” seemingly could not—position the viewer in a less passive relationship
to the outrages of state spying and torture.
“Astro Noise,” then, represents a most serious effort by an artist given
unparalleled trust by some of the most important whistleblowers of our time—and
radicalizing under the pressure of events—to bring capitalist reality home in
an important venue for mass culture. While the reality of the increasingly
rapacious art market and liberal character of public art institutions like the
Whitney make one initially suspicious of her choice of venue, there is no doubt
that the thousands of New Yorkers and tourists who found their way to her show
are more politically sophisticated and thoughtful about how to act than before
they went in.
In addition, Poitras and her collaborators on the accompanying text, Astro
Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, have taken every
advantage of the privileged space still accorded art to try to break through
the normalization of 24-7 spying that is the goal of much popular culture
dealing with the so-called War on Terror, streaming panels and creating a book
that stands alone and offers theory as well as fiction.
One ponders entering the spaces of the installation while gazing at giant
vibrantly colored images that lightly reference the giant color field paintings
hanging in other parts of the museum. The images are in fact the output of a
British spy program named ANARCHIST and were created from the intercepted feed
of Israeli drones. I was immediately reminded of standing in a house in
Ramallah with a fellow activist who explained that the sound I heard was the
noise of drones that flew 24-7 in a grid pattern over the entire West Bank,
allowing the Israeli government to track each individual at any point in time,
day in and day out.
Once inside the first darkened space, the viewer confronts a room-size
dual-channel video screen. On one side is slow-motion film of New Yorkers in a
stadium reacting to the sight of the Twin Towers falling.
As one walks around the divider, and looks at another giant screen, one finds
oneself thrust into a mud-floored room where several prisoners, including Salim
Hamdan (Hamdan v. United States), are hooded and interrogated by masked U.S.
soldiers. The footage was declassified some time ago, at the time of the Hamdan
trial; it is not its newness but its projection, which puts one in the room,
which makes the experience so shocking.
The viewer next enters the “Disposition Matrix,” a long narrow series of halls
punctuated by narrow slits that remind one of the eyeholes in a prison cell
door. Through the slits one can view part of the Snowden “archive” of leaked
documents, including the graphics and world maps that various spy agencies used
to promote their tradecraft at conferences, as well as the cartoonish sketches
used inside the agencies to boast of their omnipotence. The position of the
slits forces the viewers to share a narrow space and spurs strangers to
interact while trying to decipher just what they are seeing.
One of the most moving elements of Disposition Matrix is a video interview with
Murat Kurnaz, an innocent sold to the U.S. for bounty and then secretly
rendered. Kurnaz describes how he was tortured by being hung by his wrists from
the ceiling and how he felt after the man hanging in front of him was left in
place long after his death.
“Disposition Matrix” feeds into the space called “Bed Down Location.”
The space is named with the phrase that U.S. troops use to designate a site
where a target sleeps in preparation for the assault. Museum-goers enter the
darkened room and lie down facing up at the projection of night skies over
Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, watching the stars and the glints of drones
constantly in motion above them. A faint sound of drones and intermittent
transmissions from drone pilots completes the experience of being a target
night after night and for years on end.
Poitras’ own experience of surveillance is the theme of another space.
Viewers watch the eight-minute clip of video she took from the roof of the home
of an Iraqi family who lived in the Green Zone, a clip that intelligence
service documents on the adjacent wall explain led to Poitras’ becoming a
person of interest, stopped 40 times at airports with her working materials
confiscated, before she fled to Berlin.
Despite this harassment and a reasonable fear of imprisonment for dealing with
classified materials that shame the U.S. government, Poitras has made a show
that is not about the inescapable totality of the police state but about
resistance, the resistance of Murat Kurnaz, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning,
herself, and countless numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis. She
clearly hopes that we, too, will resist, in solidarity with all of the victims
who have allowed her to turn her camera upon them.
The socialist movement that we need in these dire times is a movement like
those of the past, in which the heroism of the world’s working people in their
battles for freedom, dignity, and justice nourished artists and an
intelligentsia, who in turn created new ways to comprehend our situation and
empower our action. Laura Poitras and her collaborators on “Astro Noise,” the
exhibition and the book, should be thanked for making this vision a little less
remote.
Photo: Laura Poitras in her studio with objects exhibited at the Whitney Museum
of Art. Damon Winter / New York Times
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May 27, 2016 in Anti-War, Arts & Culture, New York, Uncategorized. Tags:
Laura Poitras, Snowden, Whitney
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