Open Secret Pamela M
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MAY 2011 INTERNATIONAL SUMMER PREVIEW 50 SHOWS WORLDWIDE $10.00 Open Secret PAMELA M. LEE ON THE WORK OF ART BETWEEN DISCLOSURE AND REDACTION Jill Magid, My Sensitivity, 2007, four-color silk-screen Below: Dutch intelligence personnel removing Jill Magid’s Becoming 1 print, 27 ⁄4 x 44". From the series “The Kosinski Tarden, 2009, the day after the closing of Magid’s exhibition “Authority Quotes,” 2007. to Remove,” Tate Modern, London, January 4, 2010. Photo: Amy Dickson. With its blurry photocopied type, its rubber-stamped admonitions— CLASSIFIED, it may say, or SUPPRESSED—and its thick lines of black marker obliterating everything we really want to know, the redacted document is a paradox, an iconic representation of that which is withheld from view. As such, it embodies what Pamela M. Lee terms the open secret: a visible invisibility, an essentially aesthetic phenomenon that functions less to reveal than to declare the prerogatives of those who conceal. Suggesting that the trans- parency of the WikiLeaks era is illusory, Lee proposes that it is the open secret that actually governs the politics of information today. Here, she looks at the practices of two artists, Jill Magid and Trevor Paglen, who, in very different ways, explore the work- ings of the open secret, and locates the roots of their strategies well beyond the pale of art. It is in the cold-war think tank, secrecy’s ostensibly impregnable redoubt, Lee argues, that we find the template for Magid’s andP aglen’s subtlety and stealth, their oscillations between the seen and the unseen, and their Trevor Paglen, Reaper Drone (Indian Springs, NV Distance ~ 2 miles), 2010, color photograph, 30 x 36". tactical elisions of fiction and fact. 220 ARTFORUM MAY 2011 221 A BRIEF HISTORY of treason and terrorism and explicitly compared The secret paradoxically possesses techniques, and the alternations between the open OF THE CONTEMPORARY SECRET himself to the WikiLeaks impresario. As the catalyst and the hidden that sponsor its occasional emergence behind the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, something like an appearance— into public view. But perhaps what Magid and Paglen Daniel Ellsberg may be forgiven for anointing Julian the Defense Department’s highly classified “secret an aesthetics, if you like. The past ultimately disclose, if in very different ways, is that Assange his heir apparent—as he did in December history” of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg is renowned as several years have seen the lies and truth claims occupy surprisingly proximate 2010, when he defended Assange against accusations a staunch crusader for the freedom of information, development of a certain kind of territory on the spectrum of redaction and disclosure; and that the very notion of evidence as fact undergoes practice that visualizes covert a radical mutation where the blurred interests of trans- relationships of power. parency and secrecy are concerned—now more than ever, given that the politics of information has taken on a startling urgency. and redaction is not simply a matter of spilling secrets, of uncloaking those conspiratorial cover-ups that THINK-TANK AESTHETICS Left: Leonard C. Lewin’s Report Above: Mark Lombardi, from Iron Mountain: On the BCCI–ICIC–FAB, 1972–91 (Fourth obscure the innumerable smoking guns of the world. Possibility and Desirability of Version) (detail), 1996–2000, Nor can the contemporary secret be understood Past is prologue. A prehistory of the open secret in Peace (Dial Press, 1967). Photo: graphite on paper, 4' 4" x 11' 6". Matthew Budman/Main Line to statically inhabit one of two registers: known or contemporary art must include a consideration of Autographed Books. unknown, illuminated or obscure. The secret is itself earlier work dealing with the related topic of surveil- an ideological contrivance; its withholding—its visible lance and with those forms of domestic “espionage” so it stands to reason that he would view Assange withholding—is as critical to its power as whatever that have perpetually monitored the quotidian com- as a kindred spirit, the standard-bearer for a new content we might imagine it conceals. ings and goings of ordinary people. Some twenty generation of antisecrecy advocates. That four Thus the secret paradoxically possesses something years ago, the exploding landscape of CCTVs and decades separate the publication of the Pentagon like an appearance—an aesthetics, if you like. The the emergence of a new digital tool called spyware Papers from Assange’s campaign, however, is a fact past several years have seen the development of a seemed to confirm the dark predictions of the disci- that bears repeating. certain kind of practice, represented by artists such plinary society put forward by Foucault, on the one Above: Air force officer at the Below: Briefing at the If Ellsberg’s gesture reflected a long tradition of as the late Mark Lombardi (with his diagrams of the hand, and a recently birthed generation of cyberpunk RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, journalistic muckraking, Assange’s is continuous systemic and insidious connections that link the pro- theorists, on the other. Art followed suit, as Lynn CA, 1958. Photo: Leonard CA, 1958. Photo: Leonard McCombe/Time & Life Pictures/ McCombe/Time & Life Pictures/ with the digital protocols of contemporary media. tagonists of global power networks) and the Web- Hershman Leeson, Sophie Calle, and Julia Scher, Getty Images. Getty Images. Indeed, whatever Assange’s bona fides, and in spite based initiative They Rule (with its own cladistic among others, took up their own investigations. or because of the sensitivity of his revelations, his representations of American elites), that visualizes Scher’s work, in particular, is emblematic of such release of some 251,000 American diplomatic cables those covert relationships of power that obtain among is actually in keeping with the modus operandi of corporations, government agencies, and private a media long habituated to the routines of hyper- citizens. But the focus of this essay is the work of Jill exposure. Whether the relentless bleating of the Magid and Trevor Paglen, whose distinct practices twenty-four-hour news cycle, the nonstop Twitter converge around the logic of the open secret. Both dispatch, or the blow-by-blow reportage of the artists interrogate and dramatize what could be Facebook insurrectionist, the mass disclosure of called the mechanisms of contemporary secrecy. For information is the rule, not the exception, within the her part, Magid’s practice literally performs the universe of digital communications. What constitutes rituals of concealment and exposure. In “Authority a genuine notion of secrecy these days must be mea- to Remove,” her 2009–10 exhibition at Tate Modern sured against a world hallucinating a dream of trans- in London, Magid charted her long involvement parency: an illusion of unencumbered access to with the Dutch secret service, or AIVD (Algemene meaningful data that stands out against the noise and Inlichtingen—en Veiligheidsdienst), which culmi- miscellany of the digital semiosphere. Ironically, it is nated in a novel based on years of interviews with the existence of the open secret—one that paradoxi- intelligence agents. Large portions of the novel were cally announces its clandestine quality by virtue of then redacted. Paglen’s work in experimental geog- its public appearance—along with the endless search raphy has produced powerful insights into the pho- for, and generation of, new content to expose, that tographic calibrations between the visible and the propels the fantasy of the free exchange of informa- invisible, homing in on the sub rosa installations of tion. In fact, this communicative dynamic is funda- the American military both on the ground and in the mentally troubled by a public sphere compromised air. His latest show, at San Francisco’s Altman Siegel by both the quantity and the quality of its revelations, gallery earlier this year, continued in the vein of what no less than by the systems of control that govern Rebecca Solnit aptly calls “visibility wars” while their exposure. mining new territory in the history of photography. None of this is to dismiss WikiLeaks so much as Both artists assiduously unpack the secret’s organi- it is to stress that the relationship between disclosure zational and performative logic, its murky procedural 222 ARTFORUM MAY 2011 223 game theorists, behavioral scientists, and anthro- and suggested that perhaps someone in the CIA had SECRET AGENCY when the institution under scrutiny is an intelli- Jill Magid, sculptures from the In contemporary aesthetic series “I Can Burn Your Face,” pologists, whose combined authority was meant to had a role in the leak. Kahn repeatedly denied that gence agency, the very notion of this openness is 2008, neon, transformers, practice, there lies a confusion address the most pressing questions of national secu- he was involved, calling the whole affair “sinister.” Report from Iron Mountain prefigures many of fundamentally tested, if not flagrantly compro- wires. Installation view, Stroom between the terms of reality and Den Haag, The Hague. Photo: rity from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Although Perhaps the bluntest appraisal of them all was Magid’s and Paglen’s concerns; it is a parable of a mised—especially for an organization devoted to Rob Kollaard. fiction that corresponds to the the collective ambition behind think tanks was issued by an individual whose stock-in-trade was culture increasingly devoted to the production, man- protecting “democratic order.” Magid’s project is cold-war think tank. ostensibly to serve the greater good, their shadowy state secrets. “Whoever wrote it is an idiot,” Henry agement, and organization of secrets. Effectively implicated in this dynamic. To be sure, the details of constitutions and top secret research initiatives com- Kissinger reportedly said. Though the statement straining the limits of the imagination, of what can its unfolding inadvertently ironize the agency’s municated something far more sinister to the public.