Catalogue Police the police
Catalogue Police the police
Catalogue Police the police
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FOR AN ARCHEOLOGY<br />
OF THE GAzE<br />
LE pEUpLE QUI MANQUE (KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff)<br />
ART CRITICS & CURATORS<br />
If seeing is a power, nowadays it certainly manifests itself in its most extended form: we witness <strong>the</strong> transformation of <strong>the</strong> contemporary<br />
gaze into surveillance. Being at <strong>the</strong> core of present-day surveillance mechanisms is a phenomenon that can be understood<br />
through <strong>the</strong> increasing use of scanning technologies, as means of production for tracing systems and visual continuity.<br />
The network within which everybody is watching and is possibly being watched outdates Michel Foucault’s device of <strong>the</strong> Panopticon<br />
observation. Numerous artists have used critical analysis to dissect this ubiquitous transformation of modern gaze into<br />
surveillance: from Michael Klier’s Der Reise (1983) to Harun Farocki’s L’œil-Machine (2003), passing through Renaud Auguste-<br />
Dormeuil’s or Alain Declercq’s videos.<br />
These analytical operations belong to a broader history of <strong>the</strong> gaze and its counter-devices. The film makers and video directors<br />
have long taken interest in <strong>the</strong> deconstruction of <strong>the</strong> mechanisms connecting <strong>the</strong> act of watching to <strong>the</strong> question of power, and<br />
leading to a regime of generalized surveillance.<br />
Recalling <strong>the</strong> counter-devices invented by <strong>the</strong>se artists, film makers and video directors (whose most contemporary version would<br />
in this case be sousveillance), we aim to see what are <strong>the</strong> work techniques we could use today for future resistance. In a brief<br />
attempt to reiterate <strong>the</strong>se radical gestures, we will see how <strong>the</strong> invention of counter-watching has developed, confronted with <strong>the</strong><br />
colonial, patriarchal, mechanical or panoptical watching. This was possible in <strong>the</strong> first place only due to those inversions in <strong>the</strong><br />
sequence of watching, that reveal <strong>the</strong> mechanisms of reification, guardianship, and control. In order to build genuinely democratic<br />
information practices, contemporary mediactivism has tried to advance new “polyphonic” networks of images. The rhizomatic<br />
strategies involved still had to deal with <strong>the</strong> hegemonic control of image production and dissemination in <strong>the</strong> mass and official<br />
media. Finally, one will infer from <strong>the</strong> historical practices of experimental cinema, which even more propose a pure and simple<br />
dissolution of seeing into touching and feeling, that <strong>the</strong> invention of a third eye and of tactile watching is <strong>the</strong> final effort of abolishing<br />
<strong>the</strong> imprint of power over watching.<br />
“Knowing <strong>the</strong> Forces at pLay” (aLain decLercq)<br />
French artist Alain Declercq’s work belongs to a history of techniques used in reversing <strong>the</strong> emission points of <strong>the</strong> look. For him,<br />
escaping surveillance has developed into surveilling <strong>the</strong> surveillance, enacted by vigilance produced from its own moving, performing,<br />
photographing, and filming body. Declercq has been working for over a decade on control societies, using logic to <strong>the</strong><br />
extent of unveiling its limits, surveilling <strong>the</strong> systems of surveillance <strong>the</strong>mselves. One can detect in his obstinate inquiries some<br />
fragile game between exposing <strong>the</strong> technologies of power, truth regimes and fictional evidence, suspicion, paranoia and unexpected<br />
reversals of reality.<br />
In Hidden (2008) he diverts security regulations by placing a pinhole camera obscura in front of <strong>the</strong> constructions and buildings<br />
protected by <strong>the</strong> city legislation post Ground Zero, thus constituting an inventory of forbidden places of representation. Using mise<br />
en abîme and <strong>the</strong> demystification of points of view, <strong>the</strong> scopic lens cut is impressed within <strong>the</strong> frame, roundly shaped by an absolute<br />
eye. Surveillance is <strong>the</strong>refore replicated in <strong>the</strong> frame itself, revealing “not <strong>the</strong> invisible but a visible whose visual character was<br />
forbidden”, in Gérard Wajcman’s 1 words.<br />
In Embedded, which was filmed during <strong>the</strong> students’ manifestations organized in Paris in 2006, among <strong>the</strong> forces of order, and<br />
mainly among civilian <strong>police</strong> officers, he infiltrates amongst <strong>the</strong> infiltrated, only to be exposed later on. For Mike, an undecidable<br />
piece of docufiction on <strong>the</strong> iconography of international plots, Alain Declercq makes up a character, Mike, who is in charge of surveying<br />
<strong>the</strong> actions of international networks. In a troubling ballet of fiction and reality, on June 24th 2005, a criminal brigade and<br />
some French anti-terrorists enter his studio in Bordeaux, accusing him of “working with <strong>the</strong> enemy”. Alain Declerq would be interrogated,<br />
his studio searched, and all of his documents and art works carefully analyzed. He would <strong>the</strong>n realize he had been himself<br />
observed for <strong>the</strong> last several months. As Alain Declerq would say later, while reproducing on stage <strong>the</strong> rooms of this perquisition,<br />
“knowing <strong>the</strong> forces at play” equals terrorism for any forces of order. His work of fictionalized reality allows him to unmask <strong>the</strong> way<br />
security and surveillance dynamics feed <strong>the</strong>mselves from staging reality and <strong>the</strong> way fictionalizing actually permits <strong>the</strong>m to exist.<br />
While Alain Declercq’s work can be seen as typical for <strong>the</strong> so-called “reversed surveillance” strategies, artists and film makers<br />
have invented throughout history different visual devices and perceptive protocols, to free <strong>the</strong>mselves of <strong>the</strong> neutralization and<br />
1. Gérard Wajcman, Portrait de l’artiste en Persée, in Alain Declercq, éditions Blackjack, Loevenbruck, 2010<br />
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