Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen

摘要

CENTER FOR ART, DESIGN AND VISUAL CULTURE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE OCTOBER 2, 2013-FEBRUARY 22, 2014 At University of Maryland, Baltimore County, three videos by German artist Harun Farocki, and twelve works--mostly color photographs--by American artist Trevor Paglen, were cool, calculated, and highly crafted. The gallery was dark, except for the photographs and videos. Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries looped into the gallery, overheard from Farocki's video Eye/ Machine III(2003). This morbid and, by now, ironically triumphalist refrain underscored the hard-boiled mood of the exhibition as a whole. War, here, is a proving ground, testing morality and experimental technologies. What people are, they become more so in war. What people accept in war (a level of being watched, for instance) remains--people get used to it. In his curatorial wall statement that introduced the exhibition, Niels Van Tomme wrote: Addressing the violence inscribed in military imagery and image-making, Visibility Machines explores how Farocki and Paglen go beyond the production of critical images, activating a systematic appropriation and subversion of the structures supporting the political realities they confront. Neither artist, strictly speaking, invents new content; both plunge into research. Farocki digs in archives to select image sequences, while Paglen tracks and records evidence of the US government's covert operations. If you follow Paglen, it seems as though much of the stratosphere is in danger of becoming a US military DO NOT ENTER zone for tax-funded spying, testing, and interrogation. Paglen's series, The Other Night Sky (2007--ongoing), would be beautiful--saturated color, startling patterns of white light streaking over desolate desert and through black night, color fields, gorgeous abstract photographs about the breakdown of images--if the photographs weren't some of the only popularly accessible clues about classified US spacecraft. Paglen has speculated about the satellite Palladium at Night (PAN) for instance, photographing it as one of a series of blue and white diagonal lines. PAN might communicate with US drones operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Eye/Machine III (2003, 25 min.), Farocki's brief sample of Wagner accompanies images of the heavy aerial bombing of a bridge in Thanh Hoa, Vietnam, in 1972. The Nazis used Ride of the Valkyries in newsreels before Francis Ford Coppola used it in his Vietnam film Apocalypse Now (1979). Farocki holds out a fantasy where war wouldn't have to be a bloody cavalry charge. War would be calculated, dispassionate--not napalm, image-aided surgical strikes, missiles unfailing, flying robots, night drones operated from remote bases and through spacecraft. The developed world can afford to fantasize about sanitized war. Suicide bombings are for poor people. Eye/Machine III describes various forms of industrial and military exactitude. Some is relatively recent, some from longer ago than one might expect. Farocki creates a montage of factories and bases where war technicians and car manufacturers use complex sensors and cameras. Farocki shows robot eyes directing robot arms, and borrows from an archival promotional film for Texas Instruments that celebrates bombs hitting their targets. Bomb payload dumps are as costly and impractical as the sometimes-shaky human hand in the factory. At the same time that manual labor leaves the factory, soldiers leave the trenches. Soldiers train for a computer-assisted war. Factory workers labor alongside robots. Citizens expect to see images of war, video of single bombs hitting their targets. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The way that we are going, we have been going for some time. A voice-over in Farocki's 2003 film, War at a Distance (58 min.), describes the World War II-era Hs293D television bomb, a bomb that can see. The voice is a woman's voice, authoritative over indistinct black-and-white airborne footage taken directly from a camera built into