Here and There and Nowhere

by Simon Gennard

The Specious Present, Adam Art Gallery

11 July - 20 September 2015

Surveillance Awareness Bureau, 1 Grey Street

27 May - 13 June 2015

Before Anderson Cooper came out, before he confirmed what everyone already knew about him, a photo of the journalist carrying a Haitian child to safety during looting following the 2010 earthquake made the rounds on Tumblr. The photo was accompanied by a long, impassioned comment. I can’t remember it verbatim, and I can’t find this particular post, but I do remember the image being used as evidence for the sturdy and compassionate moral fibre of homosexuals everywhere.

It’s kind of inane, as arguments go, but I’ve been thinking about it recently (as if Anderson Cooper were not eternally in our hearts and dreams) after reading Nicholas de Villiers’ ’Afterthoughts on Queer Opacity’. In the essay, de Villiers muses on what queer visibility means now. It can be read as a kind of addendum to his book Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol. De Villiers is interested in the kind of mechanisms developed by these figures to evade demands to ‘come out,’ to attach themselves to a politics of queer representation and exceptionalism that now seems inescapable. He writes:

Rather than seeing Foucault, Barthes, or Warhol’s 'opacity’ as symptomatic of 'the closet’ and internalized homophobia—where opacity would be merely a reactive desire for 'privacy’ that is ultimately complicit with homophobia and repressive silence—I was interested in their tactical negotiation of their public personas in interviews and published texts where they are visible, but opaque (not 'see-through’ or easily deciphered).

De Villiers’ essay is an attempt to discuss this evasion outside of the queer canon. He applies his arguments to Cooper, Jodie Foster, Queen Latifah, Ellen Page, and Lana Wachowski. Escaping the canon, I guess, takes baby steps. De Villiers’ draws a direct route between the necessity for queer public figures to come out, to be visible and transparent, to perform as brave and worthy examples for queer youth to follow, a la Cooper’s act of heroism, and the project of legal recognition that governs the discourse of mainstream queer rights - marriage equality, equal access to serving in the military. The same state towards whom these demands are made relies on visibility, on recognition, in another, fundamentally more sinister, way. The state relies on surveillance technologies - on its subjects being seen and known - to police movement, to combat displays of collective resistance, to criminalise individuals who belong to certain racial, cultural, class groups.

I suppose I am thinking about Anderson Cooper saving that Haitian child because the argument that accompanied the image posited, implicitly, queerness as a moral deficit, and public, documented acts of compassion such as this one as a necessary reparation to be made before the state is able to recognise queer subjectivities. It implies, further, that the aspirational good life for queer subjects is one necessarily comprised of these reparative acts; that to be a good queer citizen is to embody this kind of decentness, to be married, to be loyal to the point of being willing to go to war. This discourse obfuscates that these reparative acts seem to be so easily ascribed to the bodies which are pale, ruggedly handsome, beefy-forearmed, unquestionably and quite comfortably masculine. As for bodies which refuse to comply with this model?They might be lucky to appear as a footnote.

De Villiers ends his essay by discussing Zach Blas’ ongoing project, Facial Weaponization Suite, a video from which was included in the Surveillance Awareness Bureau exhibition held on Grey St last month (the video is also available on his website). Blas’ video takes as its point of departure the rapid embrace of facial recognition and biometric technologies by state security operations, as well as advertisers hoping to cater content according to normative categories of gender, race, and class. The video then turns its attention to a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology which suggested people are able to distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual men based on photos of their faces, even when exposed to the photos for only half a second. The video’s call to arms is somewhat facetious, and incredibly important. The question at the heart of the video, 'How do we flee this visibility into the fog of a queerness that refuses to be recognised?,’ takes its cue, maybe somewhat ironically, from the Guy Fawkes mask adopted by Anonymous. The video calls on queer citizens to don a 'fag face’ - a pink mask, said to be a distorted amalgamation of faces that 'cannot be read or parsed’ - as a means of binding citizens into a shared project of resistance. It treats invisibility not as suppression - in the way that a closet might - but as a weapon.

I want to think about what images surface as a result of this widespread embrace of surveillance technologies. I want to think about these images as the result of an ongoing attempt to see and be seen from all angles. I want to think about how we learn to read these images, and in particular what omnipotent vision does to a sense of time. How it can protract a single moment. How it can efface everything before and after and call itself whole. I like to think of the work of David Claerbout, whose presentation The Quiet Shore is currently on display at Adam Art Gallery as part of their exhibition The Specious Present, as the manipulated detritus left over from seeing too much of a scene. Writing on The Algiers’ Section of a Happy Moment, a 32 minute slide presentation detailing the instant a football game is interrupted by a flock of seagulls from every angle imaginable, Claerbout places this work within a project of examining the 'suspicious gaze.’ In some ways, Claerbout’s work avoids an association with what we might think of as surveillance imagery, through the deployment of crisp, heavy contrasts, a welcome rhythm between the close-up and the distant. These poetic elements only serve to make the work more hypnotising.

There’s an odd kinship between Claerbout’s and Blas’ work. It might not seem immediately obvious; Blas’ intervention is directed towards a particular public whose historical relationship with seeing and being seen is being renegotiated in a very particular way. Both artists redeploy the mechanisms of surveillance, but where Blas relies on irony and recruitment, Claerbout opts for the kind of dullness granted by holding one’s gaze for too long, and in doing so illuminates the inadequacy of dense masses on images in revealing nuance. It’s not an intimacy, so much, because intimacy might require a narrative, some kind of investment, a beginning and an end. Instead, it hovers in a kind of threshold, somewhere between seeing and knowing.