CounterIntelligence A glossary of doubled agency

Charles stankievech

Anthony Blunt, Avant-garde, Conceptualism, Camouflage, Counterculture, Compression, Dialectics, Double Agent, Drone, Encryption, Language Games, Powerpoint, Psychedelics, Readymade, Redaction, Site (Specific, Non + Black), Shadow, Zone

“Guideposts for the dim, replicate half-world from historical military artefacts to contemporary where counterintel­ ligence­ raises deception artwork. At the core of the show lies the concept to the second and third powers.” of the secret double agent, specifically where – “Observations On The Double Agent,” a historical figure or artefact appears to serve CIA Studies in Intelligence Journal, 1962 one community but also functions in the realm of another. Strategically, the exhibition counter­­­ “Do keep in the shadow, and remember the points maneuvers-of-circumvention alongside shadow moves.” artwork-as-ciphers expanding the field of inter­­- – Canadian Army, Training Pamphlet No.1, 1940 pre­tation through poetic connections such as black sites vs. non-sites, interrogation vs. performance, CounterIntelligence contemplates the intersection field manuals vs. bookworks, decoy vs. ready­- of Art and Military Intelligence communities, made. Methodologically, CounterIntelligence ques­ gleaning historic examples ranging from a 1930s tions the contemporary role of the exhibition anarchist double agent who designed Spanish as caught in the no-man’s land between the didactic torture cells based on Surrealist and Bauhaus museum and the conceptual gesture. Much like aesthetics to a civilian bookwork circumventing camouflage, appearances can be deceiving and the NSA’s control of encryption. Instead of focusing surface mean­ings often misleading when tactics on the mechanics of propaganda or questioning such as double agents and “security through the power of the image in today’s media saturated obscurity” are execu­ted with the explicit intention Military Industrial Complex, this exhibition explores not to make the invisible visible, as Paul Klee the hidden gestures and strategic deceptions would say, but rather to use the image to hide what of the shadow world, covering a spectrum of work matters most.

1 A

Anthony Blunt, Sir WWII Germany. Smuggling the purloined letters out of the Zone that was ceding to Soviet jurisdic­ “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish tion, the clandestine recovering and passing A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, of information was not a new practice for Blunt A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock, and, while it might seem odd for an art curator, A forked mountain, or blue promontory it was only illustrative of his double identity. With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world, By the 1970s, cracks started surfacing publically And mock our eyes with air” in the dual identities of Poussin’s painting and – William Shakespeare, Antony & Cleopatra, 1623 Blunt himself. First in 1971, the National Gallery of Canada revoked Blunt’s attribution of the During WWII, Sir Anthony Blunt (1907–1983) painting to Poussin, relegating it to an unknown worked as a spy for the British counterintelligence Italian painter – a decision never conceded Ministry of Security Service popularly known as by Blunt who held firm to his original 1938 diagno­ MI5. After the war he was knighted and held several sis. This crisis of identity, however, paled in prestigious positions including the Surveyor of the comparison to the parlia­mentary pronouncement Kings Pictures, Director of the Courtauld Institute in 1978 by Prime Minis­ter Margaret Thatcher of Art, and consultant for the National Gallery when she revealed to the public that Sir Blunt was of Canada – acquiring for the latter the painting a double agent for the Soviets and had been since Augustus and Cleopatra established, under his the start of his profes­sion as Art Historian at own attribution, to Nicolas Poussin around 1630. Cambridge, thus casting a dual blow to the legi­ Before Blunt, Poussin was a minor artist of no real timacy of both his “intelligences.” The British consequence, but starting with his earliest art intelligence commu­nity already knew for decades historical writings in 1938, Blunt established that Blunt was part of the Cambridge Spy Ring, the narrative of the painter as persona grata within but Blunt had strategically negotiated immunity the pantheon of the canon. Pieced together from and secrecy in exchange for revealing information factual fragments and furtive fictions, not unlike as a gambit that ultimately proved politically Blunt’s own secret personality, the function of useless for the Agency. In the end, Blunt has a “Poussin” was authored during the twentieth remained an enigma and his exposé posed more century in a cloud of attribution controversy. questions than answers: specifically, the question At the nexus of this controversy one could investi­ remains whether he was such an ambitious gate the double of Ant(h)ony: both in and outside curator because of his passion for art, or whether the painting. Foreshadowing the mechanism his superlative professionalism was the perfect of the double agent, it’s important to analyse the cover for his intelligence career; and generally, iconography of the work of art. Two key elements. his narrative questions straightforward notions First, if we believe that this image represents of agency, authorship and attribution that resonate a meeting between the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra beyond his particular circumstances. and Roman Emperor Augustus, then we notice immediately that the third person in the triangle Archive of power is absent: Mark Antony, the doubled lover of both rulers. It is the absence and yet the know­ Flies in the Archive. Brazilian flies that typo Buttles ledge of Antony that complicates love and creates into Tuttles – or was it Tuttles into Buttles that a political body. Perhaps one can draw a parallel Terry Gilliam acutely diagnosed in his film Brazil? to another queer Anthony, that of Sir Anthony Blunt, Flies that turn into Files. Files in the Archive. and his BBC confession where he stated he had If the word “files” comes from the word string, to choose between dogmatic loyalty to the State what red threads simultaneously cut and weave and a political act of Conscience. The second key through the archive? A nuanced reading of an to the painting is again another element in between archive is not only a connecting the dots between Augustus and Cleopatra, this time however it is the files but also understanding what is not included not a lack but rather the present object of exchange. in the archive and why this is the case. It is always What is it that Cleopatra delivers to Augustus, important to remember, the archive is not inherently and thus possibly is the motivation for the event good. Those who hold power have the choice to and also the tableaux? Roman General Cassius, exclude, erase and redact the information they vital to the assassination of Julius Cesar (Augustus’ decide not applicable to the construction of truth. uncle and predecessor), tells us Cleopatra gave In the digital era, the archive approaches a Borgian Augustus a pouch of letters, quite possibly labyrinth nearing infinity, yet one where the banal the contents in the pouch Cleopatra extends to and the bane are closer than a typo. him in our painting. It is important to note that the first joint mission of Sir Anthony Blunt as Avant-Garde Surveyor to the Kings Pictures was undertaken while still an agent of MI5 in 1945, with the primary By the turn of the twentieth century the term purpose of recovering the private letters of the Avant-Garde shifts from a military origin in British Monarch left exposed in a fractured post- the middle ages to an aesthetic badge normally

2 C worn by a man no less macho. Originally signalling devastated world market post-WWII. There are a company of soldiers on the outer fringe and thus however moments of direct crossover such as the first to scout and encounter the enemy, it was Thomas W. Braden’s famous 1967 confession “I’m metaphorically applied to artists venturing into glad the CIA is ‘immoral’,” which confirmed the new aesthetic territory. While connections between CIA’s funding of the arts and intellectual journal the terms could find its paragon in the Italian Encounter as well as the funding of touring exhi­ Futurists who celebrated the aesthetics of war bitions and concerts as ideological warfare against in the trenches of noise and the radiating machines, Communism. Key personnel with ties to the there is a more complicated crossover between intelligence community also managed cultural the roles of artist and spy in pastoral landscapes, institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art tranquil seascapes and sunset city skylines. Military in New York, both intelligence agencies and scouts and spies since the first records of conflict art institutions sharing roots in the close-knit Ivy have travelled the landscape and made sketches League community. A few years after the CIA of enemy positions and architectural renderings is founded, the Americans also start the secret of fortresses. We know from at least a 1702 report, National Security Agency (NSA), an agency that before the en plein air fashion of painting, devoted to the future of warfare – that is to say, spies undertook their gaze not only from under the immaterial age of information. Interestingly, the cover of a tree’s shadow but further­more under parallel to the intelligence community’s evolution, the cover of the personality of landscape artists. American Art underwent its own “demateriali­ It is no surprise then that artists were often accused zation” (to cite a term first used by Oscar Masotta of espionage during times of conflict, from Renoir and hijacked by Lucy Lippard). Circumventing the during the Siege of Paris in 1871 to the rejection by gallery market strategy (at the time at least), officers on the border between Italy and Switzerland Conceptual Art dealt with ideas and information of Picasso’s Cubist portrait of Igor Stravinsky as the primary means of production and reception, because it looked like a military map. Popular spy foreshadowing the future where the exchange fiction had created a hysteric paranoia during of information defines everyday life, economics WWI, and since photography had not yet compre­ and geopolitics. Joseph Kosuth attempted hensively supplanted drawing as the means for rapid to define “Art as Idea as Idea” (1965 – ) through docu­mentation, the artist as observer and image the use of reproductions, language and objects, maker was a prime suspect for surveying and but more radically yet Robert Barry believed disseminating sensitive informa­tion. This military “A SECRET DESIRE TRANSMITTED TELEPA­ understanding was compounded by a greater THICALLY” (1969) was possible as the end cultural misunderstanding of modern art. Artists game of art – a dream not only bypassing the pushing the boundaries of representation following fetish of the artworld object, but even traditional such strategies as visual perception in Impressio­ surveillance wiretapping. nism or the fracturing of the space-time continuum in Cubism, moved further and further away from Camouflage modes of realism, thus widening the trench between a popular understanding of what an artist should “The nature of things is in the habit of conceal- create and the suspicious artefacts on canvas. ing itself.” Frances Stonor Saunders has pointed out by the – Heraclitus, Fragment 5:4, 5th Century BC mid-century and particularly during the witch hunts under Senator McCarthy, not only the “The Desert does not camouflage warmachines; artist but the genre itself was under trial with it camouflages war itself.” proclamations such as: “Modern art is actually – Reza Negarestani Cyclonopedia, 2007 a means of espionage.” Disguising one’s identity while hunting has always Conceptualism been practised, but the modernisation of hiding or visually fooling the enemy as a Western military Art historians such as Max Kozloff and Eva Cockroft science started in the nineteenth century. Uniforms along later with Serge Guilbaut mark the shift transitioned from pageantry to utility when British of power in the artworld from Paris to New York troops implemented “skirmishing” warfare and with the birth of Abstract Expressionism – what copied Afghans by dying their white uniforms with some see as the first uniquely American Art. But tea thus territorializing the colour khaki, a tone such a shift in power across the Atlantic occurred in that blended with earthy surroundings (“khaki” all areas from the economic to the intelligence field. having Hindi and Persian etymological roots The birth of the contemporary American Intelli­ meaning “dirt”). gence Agencies (CIA, NSA, NRO, etc) coincided A brief list of artistic investment in the field with the birth of American Art, while one field was of camouflage: not dependent on the other in any significantly - 1898: Abbott Thayer, painter of angels, intro­ casual manner both rather developed within a larger duces animal mimicry and countershading situation of the rise of American power in the into military design.

3 C

- 1914c.: Pablo Picasso claims to invent modern Sixties protesting the military industrial complex, camouflage according to biographies by Gertrude the geodesic dome – along with Fuller’s World Game Stein and Roland Penrose. – became the blueprint for the Drop City commune - 1917: Norman Wilkinson and Vorticist Edward and Whole Earth subscribers. Wadsworth invent Razzle Dazzle designs for WWI ships in the basement of the Royal College of Art. Compression - 1942: Lazlo Moholy-Nagy works with the Pratt Institute on camouflage development for the Paul Virilio is correct in noting that the most impres­ US military. sive force as it shifted gears from the nine­teenth - 1942: Surrealist Roland Penrose uses nude into the twentieth century was speed. The fact that photos of Lee Miller in green body paint there is an exponential increase in information is not to instruct the British Home Guard on how nearly as significant as the speed of access to this to use camouflage. information; already thousands of years earlier a - 1942: MoMA presents the exhibition “Camou­ library like Alexandria possessed more information flage for Civilian Defense” in New York. than any single subject could ever access. Moreover, - 1942: Salvador Dali proposes for United Nations every industry from transport to telecommunication, a theory of “Total Camouflage” based on his from medicine to media, wrestles with the accelera­ paranoid, Surrealist aesthetic. tion of product to public; art is no exception. But - 1966: Alighiero Boetti first appropriates camou­ the twentieth century witnessed the crash into a flage as a readymade by simply stretching speed limit: the “event horizon” of the speed of light. camouflage textile over painting stretchers Time has become “real-time” and we live in an and hung on a wall. epoch defined by feedback. And yet, in reaching the From inflatable tanks in the WWII Ghost Battalion limits of speed, the energy of the twenty-first cen­ to the application of Gestalt Theory from an tury still cannot be contained. Instead of exploding aerial perspective, artists played a key role in the out into the cosmos following the failed utopia of appli­cation of visual theories into military use. space travel in the 1960s, we have imploded into As the discourse of “truth” exited the arena the fragments of compressed media (mp3, DVD, of Art in the twentieth century, a Heideggerian mpeg, jpeg, tif, RAW, gif, pdf, DV, etc). As an inhe­ concept of “unveiling/veiling” (a-letheia) surfaced rent outcome of speed, the twenty-first century in the artist-cum-camoufleur. will witness the density of compression as its fundamental materiality. Already we witnessed Counterculture the Renaissance engineer Brunelleschi compressing architectural space into optical perspective and Buckminster Fuller defected from the counter-attack cinema compressing time into montage and time- of Game Theory into the counterculture of the World lapse sequences. Today’s audio-visual art depends Game. At the birth of the Cold War, Fuller was hired on the continually mor­phing codices of compression to collaborate with the Department of Defense to store its memory, to script its actions, and struc­ and MIT’s Lincoln Labs to build the architecture ture its display. The greatest effect of compression for the future networked continent of North America. on subjectivity might be the ubiquity of digital Estimating Soviet bombers flying over the Arctic ice media, but the most dangerous element of compres­ cap and bombing major urban centres as the great­ sion is the ability to store infinite amounts of infor­ est danger facing America, in 1951 a think tank mation. The modern invasion of privacy by the devised an electromagnetic curtain across the Cana­ State goes at least back to the Mazzini Affair of 1844 dian Arctic, which turned an indige­nous nomad’s with the Secret Department of the Post Office landscape into a no-man’s territory and a military opening letters (and of course fictional examples theatre into game theory. To shelter the radio such as Hamlet’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). equipment of this Distant Early Warning (DEW) Wiretap­ping in any case has always been controver­ Line, Buckminster Fuller designed the rigid geodesic sial ever since the Prohibition Era. But the now radome, still used today in the Arctic and around the outmoded electronic techniques of wiretapping world primarily to cover radar anten­nas at military were at least limited to real-time listening as well as bases, and Intelligence Stations like RAF Menwith material limits such as tape length and cost; or in Hill in the UK and various NSA sites around the other words, someone had to eavesdrop in real-time globe. By 1967, the geodesic dome had acquired to reel-recordings. With the construction of server enough cultural status that it started to shift from a farms, search algorithms and compression codes, synecdoche of military and industrial invention into we have reached a new era of surveillance where an ideological icon. Built for the watershed Expo 67 corres­pondence is archived as fast as real-time in Montreal, Canada as a showcase of Americana transmis­sion and moreover eternally stored. A single (including a large Dymaxion Map painting by high quality video can now be “larger” than a Jasper Johns alongside Apollo space artefacts and person’s lifetime email correspondence. “Angels” photographs), Fuller’s epic geodesic dome for the today, whether of the John le Carré or the Michel US pavilion became the symbol of a shifting era. Serres variety, carry guilty consciences along with As counter­culture developed in America in the their coded messages.

4 D

Dialectics Drone

Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Controller The birth of polyphony was in the reverb of and Agent, Master and Slave. The most important the drone. The earliest Western technique thinker of Dialectics in the twentieth century was to move toward polyphony consisted of a counter­ philosophy professor, French statesman and Soviet melody improvisation sung over a plainchant. spy Alexander Kojève. Born in Russia, Kojève was Due to the large, vaulted space of Gothic Wassily Kandinsky’s nephew and immigrated to cathedrals, reverb and resonant tones echoed Paris in 1933 after studying in Berlin and Heidelberg. as drones, thus creating the foundation for music. One of the major forces behind the form­ing of the By the thirteenth century, a particular drone European Economic Community (now the European technique called “basilica” was used to describe Union), Kojève’s lasting intel­lectual influence was when one singer held a continuous note while also his lectures on Hegel from 1933–1939, attended another sang over top. As the dominant form by the elite of French intellec­tual life, including of power of the period, the Church was responsible Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, Maurice for the most advanced technologies. In the Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, and Jacques Lacan. musical case, the Church developed the prototype Later acknowledgements of Kojève’s influence of the multimedia spectacle and an architectural came from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. amplification of the war cry of bagpipes: the As the original theorist of the “End of History,” organ. It is hard today to under­stand the power Kojève’s desire extended beyond the theory and affect of the organ in a Gothic space since of philo­sophy directly into the political post-WWII. we are conti­nual­ly assaulted with industrial noise On the surface he func­tioned as a states­man for and headphones that directly implant sound the French government on issues of economics, into our heads. By contrast, in a time before but in 1999 the paper Le Monde published an article maps were common and boundaries not divided that claims he had been a Soviet spy for thirty years. by lines, a territory was defined rather on the The evidence has never been released. acoustic reach of the Church’s bell implanting the first artificial rhythm and space of a peasant’s Double Agent life as they labou­red under the compression of sound waves. In an era before steam power “Who’s on first? What’s on second?” and combustion, the over­power­ing spectacle – Abbott + Costello, 1936 of an organ Mass would have been unlike any­thing else a citizen would have experienced – the lower A Double Agent, or an intelligence officer who works drones of the pneu­matic machine rumbling the for two opposing agencies, is a tricky and often basilica sustained by the power of the Pope. But impossible to control personality. Since their very not all drones were purposeful. A continuous premise is to play the ambiguity of who controls sounding of a pipe organ caused by mechanical him or her, the reality of who is working for who defect was called a “cipher” – a word we normally is often never clear, and merely a game set against asso­ciate with secret writing. A third meaning of the clock destined to expire. A rare species, such the word defines an entity without will and which agents have existed since the earliest records of does the bidding of others. Today, the most military strategy; even Sun Tzu’s Art of War includes technologically advanced extension of power across the Double Agent as one of his five classifications the pastoral territory is again a drone; but this time of spies. Based on the schism of identity (and often it is not the cipher of an organ, but rather the drone more than just in half), the paranoia of an embedded cipher under the remote control of a videogame Double Agent within an agency also causes the player who in turn is under the direct bidding – snake to swallow its own tail, as the power of sur­ “without due legal process” – of the Executive veil­lance normally directed towards the enemy Power of the State. turns inward and starts to cannibalise its own body in search for the mole hiding in a mise-en-abyme. Encryption While famous spies took on the role of artists like KGB Rudolph Abel in NYC in the 1950s, the art was In the early 1990s, encryption technology was not always a façade. French double agent Alfonso the exclusive domain of military intelligence Laurencic not only played both sides of the Franco- organisations like the National Security Agency Anarchist struggle in 1930s Spain, he extracted (NSA). However, with the birth of digital com­ the paranoia out of Surrealism for real psychological munication and e-commerce on the internet, warfare. It came to light in a 1936 court document academics and entrepreneurs realised encryption that he used Bauhaus and Surrealist aesthetic needed to go mainstream. The American Admi­ theories to design torture chambers and prison nistration alongside the NSA battled to limit cells. This included optical illusions, clocks civilian and corporate encryption, crying that that “melted” by constantly changing time, shift effective encryption would make snooping more in lighting conditions, and architecture devoid difficult. Plans to provide backdoor access to of expected and functional angles. commercial encryption was supposedly thwarted

5 L through the argument of free competition in an his sister’s house in Vienna from 1924 – 26. increasing international market. The logic being A Gesamt­kunst­werk, he designed everything from if the govern­ment limits the encryption strength the masterplan down to the locks and door handles. of consumer products, they will undercut the Metaphorically, the key to the transition from value of the pro­ducts and American citizens will a logical ordering and picture of the world as seen simply buy foreign products and foreigners would in a blueprint/Tractatus and the pragmatic naviga­ not buy American products. Still functioning tion of language games is literally the key to the under Cold War menta­lity, one strategy of control Wittgenstein Haus – that small object whose pur­ was to make the export of strong encryption illegal, pose is to open and close spaces, lock and unlock hopefully minimising the enemy’s access, yet social engagements. Arthur Danto in 1964 embraced allowing US citizens to defend their consti­tutional Wittgenstein’s theory of language games in his rights to privacy. Technically, digital encryption was seminal essay “The Artworld.” Arguing for an inter­ classified under export laws as a munition; just as pretive model of aesthetics, a transcen­dent concept Lockhead Martin would need permission to sell of art is pulled out of the museum and back into fighter jets, so would Lotus123 accounting software the world of the artefact, or inversely, as Alfred Gell need approval under the same legal code. Within asked in his anthropological essay “Vogel’s Net,” this so-called first “crypto war” rose an unlike why not consider hunting traps as art? Danto ends player: Philip Zimmermann. Not a top scientist his classic essay defining the value of this new partici­pating in the peer-review world of Stanford, useful art and in doing so he returns to the classic nor an NSA mathematician secretly working in the tale of Hamlet and parti­cularly the role of the famous black epistemological hall of mirrors at Fort Meade, Mousetrap scene. Here Art is a play, a dangerous Zimmermann was an anti-nuclear activist and game, where “as a mirror held up to nature, [it] amateur coder. His role was not so much in might serve to catch the conscience of our kings.” deve­loping the theory of Public Key encryption Today the most important keys are not to our (the standard for most online exchanges of houses, but the one’s that lock and unlock our vir­ encrypted information), but in making it available tual lives: bank accounts, email, computers, social to the masses. By uploading his sourcecode to the networks. Such keys reduce our language games internet, Zimmerman alle­gedly violated out­dated down to single civilian passwords that define export laws and lawsuits followed. In a second our subjectivity in direct contrast to the single key round of anti-government protest res­­pon­­ding to search terms typed by NSA officers. The social the ludicrous and over­zealous censorship of what network exhibi­tionist versus the dragnet of an Zimmermann thought was a basic right – the same overzealous intelligence machine. privacy of corres­pondence attributed to snail mail letters should be attributed to e-mail letters – PowerPoint he published a book. But his book was not a manu­ script arguing for his side of the story, instead it was Soldiers walk through walls, commanders commu­ a strategic gesture: PGP: Sourcecode and Externals, nicate through PowerPoint. Gordon Matta-Clark published by MIT Press in 1995. The book’s 933 splits space and the PowerPoint presentation pages are exclusively composed of the computer gene­rates a smooth space of networked points. code printed in Optical Character Recognition type In the twentieth century, military communication (OCR). Henceforth, all one needed to do was rip was pri­­ma­rily composed of typewritten documents; out and scan the pages and one had the computer the shift from cultural to a visual primacy in the program – circum­navi­gating the encryption export twenty-first century is manifested in one way law because, techni­cally, the book was just a book by the sheer number of PowerPoint presentations and could be seen as a piece of writing under the leaked as primary documents dictating policy expression of free speech. Zimmermann, essentially and explaining programmes. Smart bombs backed as a political gesture more than a practi­cal plan, up on hard ­drives, structured as schematics and bypassed an archaic law that was being used leaked on a Lady Gaga CD. to restrict new technology by success­fully using an even more archaic technology: the book based Psychedelics on moveable type, circa 1455, becomes the book of moveable export, circa 1995. “Just say know.” A mantra of the countercultural movement as articulated by Timothy Leary, Language Games drug evangelist and far out prophet of rebelling against the Man, Uncle Sam. Leary ended up “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in prison but didn’t let the walls of Folsom keep in silence” wrote Wittgenstein at the end of his his mind from expanding. In 1970 he wrote a rare major treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus self-published book, titled Terra II: A Way Out, of 1921. He later went on to develop his theory The Starseed Transmission, that included a binary of language games in Philosophical Investigations. coded message to communicate with Aliens. But But between writing these two major and philo­ not all psychedelics were taken by choice in order sophically distant treatises, Wittgenstein built to increase one’s knowledge, even if many drugs

6 R were used in prisons of various sorts. In the arena a child’s writing game that allowed surface erasing of the Cold War, the earth had been completely of a message, but permanently recorded all marks colonised, and the only dark places left were outer on a soft pad underneath the writing surface. and inner space. It is well known that at McGill The old espionage trick: revealing a message whose University in Montreal from 1957-1964 Donald traces were left on a previous top sheet of paper Cameron experimented with LSD to reprogramme by lightly shading the debossed page below. people’s minds under the infamous CIA’s Project The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1967: MKULTRA. Patients going into the Allan Memorial intended to lift the veil of secrecy and reveal the Institute were often diagnosed with minor issues inscriptions in the permanent record while keeping such as anxiety or postpartum depression, but the US government accountable for its actions, both after three months of LSD-induced coma and as a historical record of past events and promises other techniques that the CIA aggressively called of future exposés. Redaction strategically thwarts “coercive” strategies, it was found “patients” the accountability of the record. The back holes (read prisoners) entered states of psychological where marks cut through the text prohibiting the “regression” – in other words, returned to a child- Trauma from surfacing. Whole documents, released like state, even confusing their interrogators but fully redacted, leaving only the header “Secret,” as their parents. Cameron’s experiments might bury evidence in an empty gesture of transparency. have ceased in 1964, but by that time, the theory of coercion had been established and codified Site (Specific, Non + Black) in CIA documents, such as the KUBARK Counter­ Intelligence Manual of Interrogation from 1963, In the 1960s, American Art retraced its colonial which defined “[t]he principal coercive techniques past by “going West.” A new breed of artists, ambi­ are arrest, detention, the deprivation of sensory tious and yet to be in the centre of the power play stimulus, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened in the NYC gallery scene, explored the landscape suggestibility and hypnosis, and drugs.” The titles as the new space of production, not as en plein air of other CIA coercive strategies included: The All- painters creating visions of the landscape but Seeing Eye, Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd, The Wolf through engagement with the dirt itself: Lawrence in Sheep’s Clothing, and most tellingly, Alice in Weiner set off explosives to blow pits in the ground Wonderland. Lamentably, the CIA Director Richard of California, Michael Heizer dug zigzagging ditches Helms ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA in the Nevada flats reminiscent of WWI trenches, files to wipe out the existence of the unethical Donald Judd renovated a WWII German Prisoner experiments. Fortunately however some documents of War camp into a personal museum, and ex-CIA were filed in the wrong place in the archive and pilot James Turrell flew over most of America discovered a few years later with the help of the until he found Roden Crater in Arizona to construct Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). a starlight observatory. Supposedly exiting the White Cube ideology as critically voiced by Brian Readymade O’Doherty, site-specific art rebelled against the artificially neutral white washed walls of the gallery The Readymade was always a Trojan Horse under to engage a history of place or geography of locus. the direction of a double agent. Duchamp’s radical The question is how much of these gestures were gesture of submitting the found object of the urinal ideological and how much were opportunistic. in 1917 was made under the pseudonym of one Were these artists trying to escape the institutio­ R. Mutt. The artworld was never the same since nalized art market of New York and the power the “Fountain” fractured an ideology and provided controlled by galleries, or were their macho moves one of the most revolutionary “leaks” in the simply requiring a larger canvas? Today Donald twentieth century. Judd’s Marfa attracts hip hop stars and playboys; Lucy Lippard, once an important voice in defining Redaction site-specific work, has since said “Land Art is for city people.” Robert Smithson, and his understudy Trauma, the radical cut in reality that is beyond Gordon Matta-Clark, possessed a keen sense anti­cipation, is defined as trauma because it does of the paradox of site-specific earthworks and the not fit within the structure of one’s world. Trauma headquarters of the artworld. Partially Buried Wood is always doubled. Trauma as black hole compresses Shed and Splitting (respectively), articulated a sense the subject against the event horizon. Never able of the problematic aspects concerning the power to reach the hidden core or escape to warn another, gestures of work on such a grand scale. Smithson it is this Event as the source of trauma that the in particular developed the language to articulate subject revolves around and around, repeating parallel to Conceptualism the idea of the Non- a fragmented narrative in limbo. Subject. Thrown Site. Here the link between the remote locations under: sub-ject. Trauma is doubled not as Event away from the gaze of the spectator is articulated, but rather reproduced in the failure to communicate connec­ting the site-specific of the earthwork the original traumatic Event. A 1925 notion of the and the non-site sculpture in the gallery. What does unconscious in Freud’s “The Mystic Writing Pad”: it mean to offshore the production of art yet cash

7 S in the value, when few see the Jetty spiraling beyond reach? Today artists like Trevor Paglen travel to another continent to take a photo of a secret military prison and return with the document to dis­play in the gallery, creating a trinity of Site- Specific, Non-Site, Black Site.

Shadow

“the theater…not only destroys false shadows but prepares the way for a new generation of shadows, around which assembles the true spectacle of life…. And for the lovers of realism at all costs, who might find exhausting these perpetual allusions to secret attitudes inacces­ sible to thought, there remains the eminently realistic play of the double who is terrified by the apparitions from beyond.” – Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double, 1938

The Witch of Endor’s summoning of Samuel’s shade for King Saul in the Old Testament is the first exam­ple in the Western canon of the shadow under­ world. From the beginning, the shadow played the role of secret intelligence predicting the fall of Kings as Samuel prophesied Saul’s demise in battle the following day with the Philistines.

Zone

The Soviet Occupied Zone of the DDR. The Green Zone in Baghdad. The Demilitarized Zone between the Koreas. William Bourough’s and David Cronenberg’s Interzone. The Zone is the liminal territory, the space between borders, the region between reason and unreason, the buffer between fact and fiction, the transition between Fall and Rise, constantly undergoing deterritorialization. The Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic science fiction film Stalker (1979) is a particular type of Site: a nebulous location demarcated by high security military patrols and yet abandoned on the inside. Here the industrial is left to decay and the natural exudes a mystical presence that overcomes the traces of the human. Why is the Zone, the Zone? Alien encounters (both extraterrestrial and politi­ cal), military experiments gone awry, or the secret place beyond comprehension? How does one know about the secret, that which as Wittgenstein said, we cannot speak about? How do those inside the secret understand their own epistemology? Traditionally, knowledge was produced in the order of secret religions and guilds, but today the myth of democracy tells us information must be open source and knowledge verified under peer- review. And yet, a whole shadow world shifts in the Zone visible at times only through the ancient art of heral­dry or the fortune of leaks. Sometimes we can only circle around the shadow and thus attempt to define the trauma in our subjectivity by delimiting its perimeter like the event horizon of a black hole.

8 list of works: With No Shadow, 2010 48 Museum of Modern Art, NY 72 Edward Wadsworth Two-channel video MOMA Exhibition #190: A Ship Being Painted with 1 Abbas Akhavan 8:00 min Camouflage for Civilian Dazzle Camouflage, 1918 Study for Blue Shield, 2011 Courtesy of Harun Farocki Defense (Press Release), 1942 Woodcut (framed) Site-specific installation Filmproduktion Courtesy of MoMA, NY 25.4 × 19.7 cm 2 × 2.5 m * Private collection 24 Coco Fusco 49 National Security Agency 2 Anonymous A Field Guide for Female (NSA) Cipher Disk and Four 73 Eyal Weizman QUAKE 3 Artificial Intelli­ Interrogators, 2008 Booklets, no date Forensic Architecture, 2014 gence / Game Theory Book various dimensions † Powerpoint Discus­sion Thread on 13.1 × 19.5 cm † Courtesy of Eyal Weizman 4Chan, 2011 50 Trevor Paglen Digital File 25 Gaddafi Administration NOYFB, 2006 74 Eyal Weizman Letter to New York Times Fabric patch; edition 18/50 Hollow Land: Israel’s Archi­ 3 Gregory Bateson Fashion from President 10 × 7.5 cm tecture of Occupation, 2007 “Restructuring the Ecology Col. Gaddafi’s Minister for Courtesy of the artist Book of a Great City,” 1971 Culture and Ethnic Affairs, and Altman Siegel Gallery, 16.6 × 24 cm † Article by Gregory Bateson 15 April 2011 San Francisco in Radical Software, no. 3 PDF 75 WikiLeaks 57.15 × 73.66 cm (open) Courtesy of the New York 51 Palestine Arab Delegation Collateral Murder, 2010 The Daniel Langlois Times The Statement of The Single-channel video Foundation­ Collection of the Palestine Arab Delegation 17:47 min Cinéma­thèque québécoise 26 Dan Graham Before the Special Political Public license Side Effects / Common Drugs, Committee (United Nations 4 Sir Anthony Blunt 1966 General Assembly, Seven­ 76 ludwig Wittgenstein Dossier (FBI Documents, In Mel Bochner, teenth Session), 1962 Key to The Wittgenstein Correspondence, and WDAOVTOPNNMTBVAA Book House, Vienna, 1926 – 28 Statements), 1950 – 79 21.59 × 27.94 cm † 17 × 24 cm † Metal key + two books 21.59 × 27.94 cm (Tracta­tus Logico-Philo­ 27 Hizbollah 52 Queen’s Press sophicus + Philosophische 5 Mel Bochner Special Force, 2003 Camouflage of Large Untersuchungen) Working Drawings CD-ROM Videogame with Installations, 1939 7.5 × 3.0 × 0.5 cm And Other Visible Things Jihad videos † Book Private Collection On Paper Not Necessarily 25.4 × 15.25 cm † Meant To Be Viewed As Art 28 Albert Hofmann 77 Amir Yatziv [WDAO­V­TO­NNMTBVAA], Lysergic Acid Diethylamide 53 Walid Raad The Inflatables #1, 2009 1966 (LSD-25), 1938 † “OH GOD,” HE SAID, C-print Four Binders TALKING TO A TREE, 2010 75 × 60 cm * 45 × 27.94 cm † 29 Douglas Huebler Artist’s book by Edition 591, Duration Piece #15: hand-numbered 78 Philip R. Zimmermann 6 Marcel Broodthaers Global, 1969 27.9 × 40.9 cm † PGP: Source Code Un Coup de Dés Jamais Index card and Internals, 1995 n’abolira Le Hasard, 1969 13 × 18 cm † 54 Fabian Reimann Book Book One Second Distance, 21 × 23.5 cm † 25 × 33 cm 30 Israeli Defense Force 2008 – 2010 Collection of National OTRI Urban Warfare Black and white photograph 79 Casio F-91W Gallery of Canada, Presentation, 2004 30 × 30 cm * 4 × 23 cm Library and Archives Powerpoint with images Digital Watch † Art Metropole Collection, and video 55 Steve Rowell Gift of Jay A. Smith, Courtesy of Eyal Weizman Menwith Hill After the Rain, 80 Icelandic Spar Toronto, 1999 2007 6.5 × 6.5 × 7 cm 31 Donald Judd Archival inkjet print; Crystal with passage from 7 Adam Broomberg Receipt from Bernstein Bros., 2013 edition, 1/3 Thomas Pynchon’s Against + Oliver Chanarin Sep 1 – 1966, 1966 61 × 89 cm * the Day, 2006 † Chicago #5, Tze’elim Military In Mel Bochner, Base, Negev Desert, 2005 WDAOVTOPNNMTBVAA 56 Peter Paul Rubens 81 Site (Non), Six Satellite Photo wall mural 21.59 × 27.94 cm Letter to Nicolas-Claude Images of Intelligence 300 × 353 cm * Fabri de Peiresc, Antwerp, HQs: CSIS-CSEC, CIA, NSA, 32 yves Klein 1630 Facsimile of a hand­ NRO, MI5, GCHQ, 2014 8 Bill Burns Peintures: 10 Planches written letter; two pages Digital Archive Prints Guard Tower Plans, Prison en Colours, 1954 31.8 × 20.5 cm each Cell Plans and the Songs Forty-page book, unbound; Collection of the Morgan 82 Site (Black), Six Satellite of Guatanamo Bay, 2010 authorized 2006-edition Library & Museum, New York Images of Black Sites (Abu Multiple (three vinyl records of 400 by Editions Dilecta, Ghraib, Bright Light, GITMO, + three offset prints) Paris 57 Ed Ruscha Salt Pit, Temara, Udon Thani), 61 × 61 cm 19 × 24.5 cm Various Small Fires and Milk, 2014 Courtesy of Art Metropole, Collection of the Department 1964 Digital Archive Prints Toronto and the artist of Art Library, University Book of Toronto 14 × 17.8 cm 83 Site (Specific): Six Satellite 9 Canadian Army Private Collection Images of Earthworks A General Instructional 33 Joseph Kosuth (Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, Back­­­­ground for the Young Art as Idea as Idea: 58 Paul Ryan Chinati, Double Negative, Soldier, 1940 4th Edition, 1969 “Cybernetic Guerrilla Lightning Field, Roden Book Index card Warfare,” 1971 Crater), 2014 13.5 × 19.5 cm 10.6 × 15.24 cm † Article and images by Paul Digital Archive Prints Collection of Leo Stankievech Ryan in Radical Software, 34 hedy Lamarr no. 3 84 TOR Project relay node 10 Canadian Forces + George Antheil 57.15 × 73.66 cm (open) Computer, software and CADPAT Digital Camouflage Patent #2,292,387 for Secret The Daniel Langlois internet Raw Fabric, 1995 Communication System, Foundation Collection of the 91.5 × 91.5 cm † 1941 – 42 Cinémathèque québécoise radio Broadcasts: PDF 11 Center for Land Use Public Domain 59 Scientific American 85 BBC / SOE / Georges Bégué, Interpretation Vigenère Cipher Les messages personnels: Yakima Research Station, 35 Alfonso Laurencic + (Polyalphebetic Systems), WWII Radio Londres Coded NSA satellite communication Ministerio de la Gober­nación 1966 Phrases, 1944 facility, Yakima, Washington, Al Dictamen de la Comisión In Mel Bochner, 1:00 min no date Sobre Ilegitimidad WDAOVTOPNNMTBVAA Inkjet Print de Poderes Actuantes 86 Bertolt Brecht 27.94 × 43.18 cm en 18 de Julio de 1936: 60 David E. Sherman Bertolt Brecht before the CLUI Photo Apéndice I, 1936 (for Roland Penrose) Committee on Un-American Book Lee Miller in Camouflage, Activities: An Historical 12 Center for Land Use 18.5 × 25.5 cm † 1942 Colour photograph Encounter, Presented by Interpretation 25.4 × 38.1 cm Eric Bentley, 1947 Robert Smithson’s Partially 36 An-My Lê © Lee Miller Archives, 40:00 min Buried Woodshed, no date Small Wars (Ambush), England All rights reserved Smithsonian Folkways, Inkjet Print 1999 – 2002 FW05531, © 1947 27.94 × 43.18 cm Silver gelatin print 61 Joshua Simon CLUI Photo 67 × 97 cm + Charles Stankievech 87 Black Cat Systems Collection of Richard Mosse Tahrir Square Lasers, 2013 Number Station Recording: 13 Central Intelligence Agency Single-channel video played The Russian Man, 1997 (CIA) 37 An-My Lê on iPhone 6:46 min KUBARK Counterintelligence Small Wars (Explosion), 3:00 min loop * Courtesy of Black Cat Interrogation [Manual], 1963 1999 – 2002 Systems Xerox Silver gelatin print 62 robert Smithson 21.59 × 27.94 cm 67 × 97 cm Gypsum Nonsite Benton 88 Black Cat Systems Released by FOIA, 1996 Collection of Richard Mosse California, 1969 Number Station Recording: Photostat, black and white CIA’s The Counting Station, 14 Central Intelligence Agency 38 lucy R. Lippard photograph, painted metal 1998 (CIA) 955,000 (exhibition construction, gypsum 9:45 min Human Resource cata­logue), 1970 66 × 69.2 cm (overall) Courtesy of Black Cat Exploitation Training Manual, Index cards Collection of the Art Gallery Systems 1983 10.6 × 15.24 cm of Ontario, Toronto Xerox Self-published † Purchase, 1979 89 raymond Cass 21.59 × 27.94 cm E.V.P. Ghost Orchid: There Released by FOIA, 1996 39 El Lissitzky 63 Edward Snowden are probably millions now, Proun Room Writings Snowden’s Public Encryption c.1970 15 lt. Col. Jim Channon, and Images, 1923 Key, 2013 0:28 min US Army Binder Digital File Courtesy of PAARC First Earth Battalion 21.59 × 27.94 cm Operations Manual, 1978 64 Anna-Sophie Springer 90 raymond Cass Xerox 40 Mark Lombardi Cleve Backster Interrogates Archives, Tape 1, c.1970 21.59 × 27.94 cm George W. Bush, Harken Janet Craig, 2014 6:46 min Courtesy of arcturus.org Energy, and Jackson Plant of the Dracaena genus Courtesy of PAARC Stephens, ca. 1979 –90 Variable Dimensions 16 Dana Claxton (5th Version), 1999 91 Jean Cocteau AIM #3, 2010 The Drawing Center edition 65 Charles Stankievech Orpheus (radio extract), 1950 Gelatin silver print 28 × 42 cm † 82°29’58” N 62°20’5” W, 2:02 min 152.4 × 106.5 × 7.62 cm 2011 (framed) 41 Mark Lombardi Two redacted postcards 92 Joe Raposo Collection of John Cook Bush-Walker Family, sent from CFS Alert Signals Sesame Street Theme, 1969 no date Intelligence Station, Nunavut 1:00 min 17 George Conklin Index card 12.5 × 17.5 cm Professor Conklin’s Vest 12.7 × 7.6 cm Collection of Anna-Sophie 93 hedy Lamarr / Warner Bros. Pocket Argument Settler, Card Archive, I.1 Springer The Conspirators (soundtrack 1898 The Museum of Modern Art to theatrical trailer), 1942 Book Archives, New York, 66 Abbott Handerson Thayer 2:42 min 6.35 × 13.97 cm † MA 1413-1428 Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom; Film Screenings: 18 Salvador Dalí 42 Gordon Matta-Clark an Exposition of the Laws Total Camouflage for Total Splitting, 1974 of Disguise Through Color Program 1: Objet petit a War, 1942 Black and white photograph; and Pattern, 1909 Essay and images by printed 2001 Book 94 Walter Benjamin Salvador Dalí in Esquire 40.6 × 50.5 cm Collection of Anna-Sophie Mondrian 63 – 96, 1986 Magazine, vol. 18, no. 2 Collection of the Canadian Springer Video 25.4 × 35.56 cm † Centre for Architecture, 23:00 min * Montreal 67 Tamas St.Turba 19 DBI Architects Gift of the Estate of Gordon Czechoslovakian Radio 1968, 95 raúl Ruiz Information Dominance Matta-Clark 1968 – 2014 L’Hypothèse du tableau volé Center, Fort Belvoir, VA Sculpture (The Hypothesis of the Stolen (Architectural Brief 43 Simon Menner 10.16 × 25.4 × 15.24 cm Painting), 1979 for Star Trek Design Spies take Pictures of Spies, Produced by C. Stankievech Film transferred to DVD of Military Command 2013 under instructions from 63:00 min Center), 1999 Black and white photograph the artist Courtesy of INA PDF 61 × 45.75 cm * 21.59 × 27.94 cm 68 unknown (formerly attributed Program 2: Fantasy is the Courtesy of DBI Architects 44 Major Vera Michael, US Army to Nicolas Poussin) Screen that Separates Desire “Subject: Hi” (email to Augustus and Cleopatra, from Drive 20 Jan Dibbets C. Stankievech), 2012 c.1630 Radiographic Shadows in Konrad Fischer Email † fascimiles with projection 96 Walid Raad Gallery, 1969 145 × 195.2 cm The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Index card 45 lee Miller National Gallery of Canada Hangs, 1999 10.6 × 15.24 cm † Man in Camouflage, Accession No. 6092 Video Vogue Studios, London, UK, 18:00 min 21 Encounter Magazine, 1940 69 uS Army Courtesy of V Tape, Toronto Vols. 1-7, 1953 – 54 Black and white photograph Boobytrap, 1954 – 65 Magazines 38.1 × 25.4 cm Book 97 lene Berg 18.5 × 25.5 cm † © Lee Miller Archives, 11.43 × 18.4 cm Man in the Background, 2006 England All rights reserved Collection of Simon Menner Single-channel video 22 Arthur Erickson 20:00 min Preliminary Study Models, 46 richard Mosse 70 uS Army with Ubisoft Courtesy of Film Form, Canadian Chancery, Colonel Soleil’s Boys, 2010 + Secret Level Sweden Washington, DC, 1982 Digital c-print; America’s Army: Rise Architectural models edition AP/2 with 1 of a Soldier, 2002 98 Deborah Stratman 8.8 × 76.4 × 46.2 cm artist proof videogame for Xbox and Hacked Circuit, 2014 Collection of the Canadian 182.88 × 228.6 cm Play­Station2 (video projection hD video file, single-channel, Centre for Architecture, Courtesy of Jack Shainman and gamecase) † 5.1 soundtrack Montreal Gallery, New York 15:00 min * Arthur Erickson Fonds 71 Paul Virilio 47 Sang Mun Bunker archéologie, 1975 * Courtesy of the artist(s) 23 harun Farocki ZXX, 2012 Book † Collection of Charles Serious Games IV: A Sun Typeface (various matter)* 15 × 24 cm † Stankievech 68

CounterIntelligence is a project by Charles Stankievech presented­ at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery from January 24 to March 16, 2014