Peep Art
"Peep Art" by Hal Niedzviecki, Spring 2009 pp. 46-50
Before Facebook, reality TV and closed-circuit television cameras feeding YouTube an endless array of “gotcha” moments, there were the artists. Decades before surveillance and self-surveillance became the new pop culture, artists were using emerging technologies, from the video camera to the hidden microphone, to explore and critique. Since the 1960s, a wide array of diverse works have been created under the umbrella of what we might loosely dub “surveillance art.” The majority of these works have sought to elicit a relatively predictable reaction: viewers were meant to walk away uneasy at the possible predominance of new surveillance technologies; trepidation regarding the merging of everyday life with tracking technology was the name of the game.
In 1974, the pioneering video artist Willoughby Sharp enclosed himself in a four-by-eight-foot box furnished with a foam mattress. He stayed in the box for 300 hours, and made live video of his “performance” available to gallery visitors. In the 1980s, the French artist Sophie Calle made a name for herself with projects like Address Book, in which she used an address book found on the street to explore the life of a random stranger. Before returning the book to its owner, Calle photocopied its contents. She then systematically called his friends and published the transcripts of her conversations with them in a daily newspaper. In the 1990s, Steve Mann presented himself as an employee in stores where surveillance was active. The “employee” had a camera embedded in his shirt. When the “employee” was inevitably told that he could not film in the store, he responded that, like the store itself, he was subject to instructions from a manager, whose orders dictated that the camera always remained on.
All these projects ask us to question whether we really want to live fully mediated, perpetually observed lives. For the past couple of years I’ve been working on a book called The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. In it I argue that we are more accepting of surveillance, more willing to subject our private lives to public scrutiny and less concerned about privacy than ever before. Peep has become the new pop culture, and millions of us are lining up to spill our guts on blogs, social-networking sites, reality TV and anywhere else we can think of. We want the cameras trained on us 24/7 and we’re happy to delve into the private lives of strangers for our own and the general public’s amusement. All this makes me wonder: what if the surveillance art of the last three decades has had the opposite effect from what was intended? What if artists seeking to sow anxiety and have us consider the alarming possible consequences of surveillance have instead sown the seeds for today’s obsession with all things candid camera? Instead of encouraging us to jettison surveillance, our art pioneers have led the way, shown us just how entertaining the real lives of real-life random strangers can be. Instead of apprehension and unease, they’ve left us wanting more.
So where does that leave the new generation of artists who want to grapple with the predominance of surveillance (self and otherwise) in our society? To explore the future and present of surveillance art, I decided to check in with two up-and-coming Canadian artists who deal directly with surveillance in their work. Michelle Teran is an Alberta-born video artist currently living in Berlin. Her recent projects have centred on capturing and displaying random CCTV camera feeds. Dean Baldwin is a Toronto-based artist whose best-known works have been related to methodically photographing the quotidian details of his own life.
Since the early 2000s, Michelle Teran has been experimenting with capturing CCTV security-camera feeds and displaying them to audiences. The idea came to her while she was working in Amsterdam. A wireless camera rig she was experimenting with accidentally picked up a video feed from a restaurant two fl oors below her studio. “I turned off my camera and I discovered that this other image appeared, this strange black-and-white ghostlike image. And I was trying to figure out what it was and I realized it was the camera in the restaurant kitchen two fl oors down. So I started to walk through Amsterdam to see what types of transmissions I could find.”
Teran found so many transmissions she began making videos featuring a split screen contrasting footage of seemingly innocent strolls through the city with the grainy video images she was tapping into as she walked happily by. In 2003, this was crystallized in a performance work she called Life: A User’s Manual. In this piece, Teran took people on a walking tour of camera feeds. Adopting various personas depending on the theme of the performance, Teran pushed a shopping cart outfitted with a makeshift broadcasting centre. As a drifter, a private eye or an urban derelict, she guided her small audiences from gleaming store aisles to seedy back alleys. “One performance went from the inside of a tavern to a redlight- district rest spot for prostitutes. Two prostitutes were arguing inside, a transvestite and a woman. Then we saw the entrance of an apartment building, the inside of a restaurant and the inside of a perfume store. You would walk around and then intercept these feeds and have these different live video transmissions that could go anywhere from very public to highly intimate.” After User’s Manual, Teran began offering up outdoor screenings of static CCTV camera feeds, complete with popcorn and Hollywood titles like The Cradle Will Fall and Baghdad Café. She called the project Friluftskino: Experiments in Open Air Surveillance Cinema. One of these movie nights, entitled Carwash, saw Teran exhibiting footage of the interior of a car wash on an exterior wall of the building that housed it. Another night, Teran projected the ghostly, barely visible outline of a baby’s crib, an eerie ambiguous image that left it up to the viewer to decide if there was or ever had been an infant cozily asleep behind the slatted wood bars.
Audiences follow Teran, a Pied Piper of extraneous video, through Europe’s capitals in search of accidental moments of catharsis, insight and weirdness. When I ask her what reaction she hopes to get from this work, she talks about deliberately confronting people with their own lurid curiosity. “When people are part of this they are complicit, they are no longer innocent. If they go along with this journey, they are not innocent bystanders. There’s the sense of being a voyeur, fl uctuations from giddiness to boredom to fear, and this is also related to what you’re looking at on the screen. Am I allowed to look at this?”
In Teran’s work, then, we see a shift: she questions not so much the ubiquitous presence of surveillance, but rather our preference to pretend that it’s not a potential source of entertainment. She shows increasingly familiar types of images to people and demands that we account for our inevitable fascination with a possibly empty crib, the waiting room of a bawdy house, the back alley behind a restaurant.
I meet Dean Baldwin in a restaurant and one of the first things we talk about is, again, the question of tacit approval through participation. He tells me that today, with the explosion of shrinking capture-and-display technologies, most particularly the camera phone, “Everyone is a photographer.” Baldwin notes that his work is inspired by, or perhaps even usurped by, the endless photographing and online publishing of the mundane that characterizes our increasingly wired society.
In 2006, Baldwin obsessively chronicled everything he ate and drank, producing thousands of “still life” images that, when exhibited together, became a pyramid-like monument to the unthinking process of food consumption. This remarkable act of systematic self-surveillance was preceded and followed by other, similar explorations of the intersection of the random and the domestic. One project was Alarm Clock Self-Portraits (Snoozebutton) (2001–), which involved Baldwin taking a picture of himself every morning as soon as possible after waking up. Then there was Kitchen Sink Arrangements, a series of snapshots taken each time Baldwin worked up the will to strap on the rubber gloves and plunge his hands into the murky depths of weeks’ or even months’ worth of crusted crockery. There was also Food I’ve Left in the Fridge Too Long, consisting of photos of the various rotten, mouldy, decomposing items that perpetually lurked at the back of Baldwin’s bachelor-pad refrigerator. Of this work, which represented a shift from his previous habit of obsessively chronicling found objects (including a stint documenting an array of discarded mattresses), Baldwin says, “It wasn’t until I started bringing the camera into the domestic that it became interesting. Then it spoke about personal habits, it became less about collecting images and more about the habits that were revealed by taking those moments out of a personal realm.”
In other words, as Michelle Teran makes amply clear in her surveillance-feed interventions, what’s always inherently interesting is the personal made public. The potential for revelation that emerges when space is invaded (deliberately or otherwise) creates instant, undeniable drama. In tapping into this, Baldwin seems to be right in tune with the public appetite for more details about the private lives of celebrities, politicians and, well, just about anybody. I put this to Baldwin: what if he’s not so much a commentator as an enthusiast? Are surveillance artists merely cheerleaders for a new era of ubiquitous digitalized narcissism?
“There’s a strange sort of desire,” admits Baldwin. “Photography doesn’t really belong to photographers any more; everybody has a camera and there’s a cultural obsession with daily reporting on our lives. In the case of Facebook, we publish our own lives so that we can read them; it’s really perverse. I finally did stop doing these projects—I turned away from this obsessive behaviour, started to get into other types of works, more social pieces, relational stuff.”
So in 2008 Baldwin turned the camera outward. Asked to create a show for the Art Gallery of Mississauga, he wandered through the Mississauga Civic Centre (of which the gallery is a wing), asking office workers if they’d be willing to produce an object from their cubicles for him to photograph. The result was an array of images of thousands of objects, grouped by category: staplers with hole punchers, stuffed animals with snow globes, cacti with ferns, dirty dishes with half-eaten PowerBars.
Michelle Teran drifts through the Western world discovering and repurposing CCTV feeds. Dean Baldwin grows bored of his own life and decides to turn the camera on the mundane continuities of other people’s daily doings. In a way, it seems too easy—all those willing voyeurs and eager viewers. What’s at stake for anyone any more? Sophie Calle was threatened with a lawsuit by the hapless owner of the address book she relentlessly discussed over the course of more than 20 published articles. Steve Mann’s “sousveillance” surveillance performances earned him punches and abuse. But so far nobody’s been bothered by Teran’s possibly illegal borrowing of random transmissions. Baldwin asked permission to enter office cubicles and take photos and was rarely rebuffed. Once inside a worker’s cube, he didn’t have to do much prodding to get people to show him what they were hiding in their bottom drawer as opposed to what was permitted to sit on their desks in plain view.
But the relative ease of access these artists experience while going about their business presents its own set of difficulties. Present-day creators exploring surveillance themes must resist the temptation to turn their art into entertainment, even as they run the risk of inadvertently entertaining us. No wonder Baldwin and Teran are, ultimately, ambivalent about our newly emerging culture of perpetual observation. They refuse to either embrace or condemn, and, in fact, their subtle, fiercely amoral works end up doing both. Baldwin and Teran are the pioneers and early adopters. They are among the first to explore the implications of new technologies on the social and the individual. But, as with their historical peers, their experiments come with the side effect of normalization. For better or worse, they’re helping us get used to this interconnected miasma of surveillance feeds, webcams, uploads, downloads, status updates and tagged pictures. As our comfort level increases, this new environment of perpetual peep-pop becomes as difficult to critique as it is to avoid. The technologies keep shrinking, the possibilities keep expanding and Peep art, like Peep culture, is here to stay.
Hal Niedzviecki is a Toronto writer. His new book The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors is published by City Lights.
This series of essays on emerging Canadian artists is sponsored by the Fraser Elliott Foundation in memory of Betty Ann Elliott.
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