https://socialistaction.org/2016/05/27/laura-poitras-astro-noise/
Laura Poitras: Astro Noise
/ 10 hours ago
May 2016 Poitras Damon WInter NYT
By CHRISTINE MARIE
“Astro Noise,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Feb. 5 – May 2, 2016.
In the “Seeds of Time,” Frederic Jameson famously wrote of our cultural
moment, “It seems to be easier to imagine the thorough-going
deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late
capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness of our imaginations.”
In response, many artists have taken it upon themselves to try to find
ways to communicate the reality of the increasingly obscure mechanisms
of the contemporary global capitalist system, giving some sort of
materiality to its circuits of finance, its systems of transportation
and communication, its maps of surveillance infrastructure, and the
interrelationships among sites of extreme exploitation, in the hope that
artistic practice can once again be deeply intertwined with some kind of
revolutionary practice.
Allan Sekula made films and photographs of global maritime trade that
tried to make palpable the system of commodity production and its basis
in the exploitation of low-wage workers. Trevor Paglan has tracked
surveillance satellites and photographed “choke points,” the clusters of
fiber optic cable offshore of the U.S. and Europe where the NSA tries to
intercept information traveling over the internet.
In “Astro Noise,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras builds on this impulse with an
immersive installation designed to force museum goers to move from a
simple intellectual awareness of the extent of the new surveillance
state to the kind of knowledge enriched by experience and emotion.
“Astro Noise” was first conceived by Poitras in 2012-2013 while exiled
in Berlin to avoid U.S. government confiscation of film footage she was
editing, and at the same time, receiving the first e-mails from Edward
Snowden, a disembodied voice she knew only as Citizen Four. The context
of her creative work, as noted in her “Berlin Journal”—excerpts of which
are included a companion volume to the show—was the impending
imprisonment of John Kiriakou, an ex-CIA agent put away for telling a
reporter about the torture going on at black sites, the suicide of Aaron
Schwartz who was facing imprisonment for trying to “free” academic
journals from commercial pay walls, and her own secret meetings with
Julian Assange.
C4, as she calls Snowden, could be the agent of entrapment, for her, or
for Assange, or even other collaborators, she worries. She wants to
publish audio of Chelsea Manning before being shut down. She records her
expectations that proceeding to engage with Snowden would likely land
them both in jail or exiled. These musings are interspersed with her
thoughts upon re-reading “1984” and Cory Doctorow’s “Homeland,” as well
as accounts of her nightmares and extreme physical reactions to anxiety.
In the midst of all this, she critiques the naïveté of her first film
about Iraq, “My Country My Country”: “As if appealing to people’s
consciences could change anything. Ten years into this war it is obvious
that other forces are at work.” As the engagement with Snowden proceeds,
she realizes that a film may not be best way to empower viewers. She
imagines an art exhibition that could create an aesthetic experience and
reveal information in a way that more directly engages.
She turned to Whitney performance curator Jay Sanders to execute that
idea. Installation, she and her collaborators hoped, might be able to do
what highly layered, complex, and non-didactic documentary films, such
as Poitras’ “The Oath,” seemingly could not—position the viewer in a
less passive relationship to the outrages of state spying and torture.
“Astro Noise,” then, represents a most serious effort by an artist given
unparalleled trust by some of the most important whistleblowers of our
time—and radicalizing under the pressure of events—to bring capitalist
reality home in an important venue for mass culture. While the reality
of the increasingly rapacious art market and liberal character of public
art institutions like the Whitney make one initially suspicious of her
choice of venue, there is no doubt that the thousands of New Yorkers and
tourists who found their way to her show are more politically
sophisticated and thoughtful about how to act than before they went in.
In addition, Poitras and her collaborators on the accompanying text,
Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, have
taken every advantage of the privileged space still accorded art to try
to break through the normalization of 24-7 spying that is the goal of
much popular culture dealing with the so-called War on Terror, streaming
panels and creating a book that stands alone and offers theory as well
as fiction.
One ponders entering the spaces of the installation while gazing at
giant vibrantly colored images that lightly reference the giant color
field paintings hanging in other parts of the museum. The images are in
fact the output of a British spy program named ANARCHIST and were
created from the intercepted feed of Israeli drones. I was immediately
reminded of standing in a house in Ramallah with a fellow activist who
explained that the sound I heard was the noise of drones that flew 24-7
in a grid pattern over the entire West Bank, allowing the Israeli
government to track each individual at any point in time, day in and day
out.
Once inside the first darkened space, the viewer confronts a room-size
dual-channel video screen. On one side is slow-motion film of New
Yorkers in a stadium reacting to the sight of the Twin Towers falling.
As one walks around the divider, and looks at another giant screen, one
finds oneself thrust into a mud-floored room where several prisoners,
including Salim Hamdan (Hamdan v. United States), are hooded and
interrogated by masked U.S. soldiers. The footage was declassified some
time ago, at the time of the Hamdan trial; it is not its newness but its
projection, which puts one in the room, which makes the experience so
shocking.
The viewer next enters the “Disposition Matrix,” a long narrow series of
halls punctuated by narrow slits that remind one of the eyeholes in a
prison cell door. Through the slits one can view part of the Snowden
“archive” of leaked documents, including the graphics and world maps
that various spy agencies used to promote their tradecraft at
conferences, as well as the cartoonish sketches used inside the agencies
to boast of their omnipotence. The position of the slits forces the
viewers to share a narrow space and spurs strangers to interact while
trying to decipher just what they are seeing.
One of the most moving elements of Disposition Matrix is a video
interview with Murat Kurnaz, an innocent sold to the U.S. for bounty and
then secretly rendered. Kurnaz describes how he was tortured by being
hung by his wrists from the ceiling and how he felt after the man
hanging in front of him was left in place long after his death.
“Disposition Matrix” feeds into the space called “Bed Down Location.”
The space is named with the phrase that U.S. troops use to designate a
site where a target sleeps in preparation for the assault. Museum-goers
enter the darkened room and lie down facing up at the projection of
night skies over Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, watching the stars and
the glints of drones constantly in motion above them. A faint sound of
drones and intermittent transmissions from drone pilots completes the
experience of being a target night after night and for years on end.
Poitras’ own experience of surveillance is the theme of another space.
Viewers watch the eight-minute clip of video she took from the roof of
the home of an Iraqi family who lived in the Green Zone, a clip that
intelligence service documents on the adjacent wall explain led to
Poitras’ becoming a person of interest, stopped 40 times at airports
with her working materials confiscated, before she fled to Berlin.
Despite this harassment and a reasonable fear of imprisonment for
dealing with classified materials that shame the U.S. government,
Poitras has made a show that is not about the inescapable totality of
the police state but about resistance, the resistance of Murat Kurnaz,
Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, herself, and countless numbers of
Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis. She clearly hopes that we, too, will
resist, in solidarity with all of the victims who have allowed her to
turn her camera upon them.
The socialist movement that we need in these dire times is a movement
like those of the past, in which the heroism of the world’s working
people in their battles for freedom, dignity, and justice nourished
artists and an intelligentsia, who in turn created new ways to
comprehend our situation and empower our action. Laura Poitras and her
collaborators on “Astro Noise,” the exhibition and the book, should be
thanked for making this vision a little less remote.
Photo: Laura Poitras in her studio with objects exhibited at the Whitney
Museum of Art. Damon Winter / New York Times
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May 27, 2016 in Anti-War, Arts & Culture, New York, Uncategorized. Tags:
Laura Poitras, Snowden, Whitney
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