For an Archeology of THE GAZE le peuple qui manque (Kantuta Quiros & Aliocha Imhoff) ART CRITICS & CURATORS
If seeing is a power, nowadays it certainly manifests itself in its most extended form: we witness the transformation of the contemporary gaze into surveillance. Being at the core of present-day surveillance mechanisms is a phenomenon that can be understood through the increasing use of scanning technologies, as means of production for tracing systems and visual continuity. The network within which everybody is watching and is possibly being watched outdates Michel Foucault’s device of the Panopticon observation. Numerous artists have used critical analysis to dissect this ubiquitous transformation of modern gaze into surveillance: from Michael Klier’s Der Reise (1983) to Harun Farocki’s L’œil-Machine (2003), passing through Renaud AugusteDormeuil’s or Alain Declercq’s videos. These analytical operations belong to a broader history of the gaze and its counter-devices. The film makers and video directors have long taken interest in the deconstruction of the mechanisms connecting the act of watching to the question of power, and leading to a regime of generalized surveillance. Recalling the counter-devices invented by these artists, film makers and video directors (whose most contemporary version would in this case be sousveillance), we aim to see what are the work techniques we could use today for future resistance. In a brief attempt to reiterate these radical gestures, we will see how the invention of counter-watching has developed, confronted with the colonial, patriarchal, mechanical or panoptical watching. This was possible in the first place only due to those inversions in the sequence of watching, that reveal the mechanisms of reification, guardianship, and control. In order to build genuinely democratic information practices, contemporary mediactivism has tried to advance new “polyphonic” networks of images. The rhizomatic strategies involved still had to deal with the hegemonic control of image production and dissemination in the mass and official media. Finally, one will infer from the historical practices of experimental cinema, which even more propose a pure and simple dissolution of seeing into touching and feeling, that the invention of a third eye and of tactile watching is the final effort of abolishing the imprint of power over watching. “Knowing the forces at play” (Alain Declercq) French artist Alain Declercq’s work belongs to a history of techniques used in reversing the emission points of the look. For him, escaping surveillance has developed into surveilling the surveillance, enacted by vigilance produced from its own moving, performing, photographing, and filming body. Declercq has been working for over a decade on control societies, using logic to the extent of unveiling its limits, surveilling the systems of surveillance themselves. One can detect in his obstinate inquiries some fragile game between exposing the technologies of power, truth regimes and fictional evidence, suspicion, paranoia and unexpected reversals of reality. In Hidden (2008) he diverts security regulations by placing a pinhole camera obscura in front of the constructions and buildings protected by the city legislation post Ground Zero, thus constituting an inventory of forbidden places of representation. Using mise en abîme and the demystification of points of view, the scopic lens cut is impressed within the frame, roundly shaped by an absolute eye. Surveillance is therefore replicated in the frame itself, revealing “not the invisible but a visible whose visual character was forbidden”, in Gérard Wajcman’s1 words. In Embedded, which was filmed during the students’ manifestations organized in Paris in 2006, among the forces of order, and mainly among civilian police officers, he infiltrates amongst the infiltrated, only to be exposed later on. For Mike, an undecidable piece of docufiction on the iconography of international plots, Alain Declercq makes up a character, Mike, who is in charge of surveying the actions of international networks. In a troubling ballet of fiction and reality, on June 24th 2005, a criminal brigade and some French anti-terrorists enter his studio in Bordeaux, accusing him of “working with the enemy”. Alain Declerq would be interrogated, his studio searched, and all of his documents and art works carefully analyzed. He would then realize he had been himself observed for the last several months. As Alain Declerq would say later, while reproducing on stage the rooms of this perquisition, “knowing the forces at play” equals terrorism for any forces of order. His work of fictionalized reality allows him to unmask the way security and surveillance dynamics feed themselves from staging reality and the way fictionalizing actually permits them to exist. While Alain Declercq’s work can be seen as typical for the so-called “reversed surveillance” strategies, artists and film makers have invented throughout history different visual devices and perceptive protocols, to free themselves of the neutralization and 1. Gérard Wajcman, Portrait de l’artiste en Persée, in Alain Declercq, éditions Blackjack, Loevenbruck, 2010
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