Foucault,
in his annual lecture series at the Collège de France in 1978 under
the title Security,
Territory, Population,
elaborated the dispositifs of surveillance and subjectification
familiar to readers of Discipline
and Punish
and The
Will to Know
with a greater emphasis on something that he considered to be
relatively recent: the technologies of security. The disciplinary
regulation of normality and abnormality has, Foucault argued in these
lectures, altered its focus from the production and control of
normalized individuals to the administration of quantifiable
populations in delimited territories based on large-scale analysis
and prediction.
The
title of given to this lecture series is important as it serves to
highlight the thematics of Hope Peterson's installation at RAW
Gallery, The
Night is a Moat.
This installation is the latest articulation of an ongoing series of
investigations into security, territory, population, surveillance and
precarity under the title Threshold
Economics
begun in 2009. (Other findings from this artistic project have been
exhibited as part of the My
Winnipeg
show in Paris, Sète, Ottawa and Winnipeg). All of the work in this
series involves hand-held camera footage of the artist's apartment
and its immediate nocturnal winter environs, accompanied by a mélange
of amplified sounds all-too-well-known to any apartment dweller:
steam-radiators clanging and hissing, cars passing by, muffled voices
and footsteps, a constant mechanical pulse/whine.
In the case of The Night is a Moat, the sense of enclosure (both protective and claustrophobic) that pervades the works comprising the Threshold Economics project is further augmented by the gallery space itself – a basement, with its lights turned particularly low which requires viewers to take a moment to allow their eyes to adjust to the dark. A large video screen is mounted in a curtained-off area, thereby making it not immediately visible from the gallery's entry, as the sound reverberates throughout the bricked room. At first exposure to the environment produced by Peterson's installation, we are posed a question, or, rather, exposed to a mystery. What is happening? This sense of being involved in the investigation of a mystery is underlined by the title of the installation, which evokes noir radio serials of the 1940s – an important source of inspiration to the artist. It is here that the affect of noir mystery combines with the thematics of security, territory and population by means of two main features in this exhibition: the deployment of surveillance and the police.
Peterson's
camera work primarily functions in two imbricated ways: as mimesis of
CCTV and as hand-held personal recordings (as one would record a car
accident or an assault, for example, on one's iPhone). Both of these
modes of surveillance – call them the corporate and the subjective
– are ubiquitous in the contemporary socio-political configuration;
Peterson's usage of both surveillance modes is complex. On the one
hand, we have the personal mode: the “occupant-subject,”
apparently confined to her apartment, peers through security keyholes
to record ominously-lit men standing in corridors or (as we will come
to later) being led away by the Winnipeg police. At other times, the
occupant-subject looks through windows, often with what seems to be
some trepidation; more often than not, the streets are deserted and
we are treated to imagery that are almost sensuous in their treatment
of light, shadow, colour and form. (Trees silhouetted in the night
sky, multi-coloured lights from cars and streetlamps, parking lots
whose cover of snow give them the appearance of planes of pale blue).
I say almost
sensuous; the video image has the graininess that characterizes
footage shot on a cellphone or the like. (This is a deliberate effect
on Peterson's part, as the footage was, in fact, shot in HD). When
the streets are not empty, there are overtones of violence: a woman
walks to her car at speed, as though fleeing someone; a man and woman
have a heated argument that threatens to become physical; policemen
arrest a man, ask questions of a woman, smoke cigarettes as they
wait. Two complementary consequences can be drawn: the
occupant-subject is in a territory that is (or is perceived to be)
threatening to her. However, she is (or perceives herself to be) in a
protective zone; she is not exposed to the violence she records. (It
is in this context that it should be pointed out that the audio
component of the installation is, despite being reminiscent at times
of David Lynch's Eraserhead,
actually becomes soothing and womb-like after sustained listening.)
The night is indeed a moat, that is, a protective apparatus designed
to keep a territory secure.
“...and
always cops.” We have already noted the presence of the police on a
few occasions now: taking a man in the apartment into custody,
standing outside waiting. For Foucault, the development of the idea
that the state should have a police force as distinct from the
diplomatic/military apparatus is essential in securing a territory
internally by constructing a population (a quantifiable entity with
predictable tendencies) out of a group of heterogeneous people. As in
Foucault, the police serve an ambiguous function in The
Night is a Moat.
On the one hand, they are, as one might expect, part of a
disciplinary apparatus; the police lead away a criminal, defined as
“someone who is lead away by police.” They survey the
neighbourhood, standing by their cars with lights flashing. (The
section of the video when the cops are standing in the snow smoking
cigarettes as if waiting for something to happen is one of the more
chilling moments in the work.) On the other hand, the sections when
the police are on screen are actually few and far between, the
majority of the video spent meditating on the landscape. William
Burroughs is reported to have quipped that “a fully functioning
police state needs no police,” and so it is with The
Night is a Moat:
the absence of police is affected by their presence, which is to
say, the disciplinary function of the police is transformed into an
auto-security feature of the landscape itself. The sophistication of
Peterson's analysis of the contemporary structures of surveillance,
security and population-control is all the more remarkable for the
modesty of its means – image, sound, space. Thus we can only hope
to ask her again: Watcher,
what of the night?
Hope
Peterson – The
Night is a Moat
RAW
Gallery of Architecture and Design
290
McDermot Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba
18
October – 10 November 2012
all images stills from Hope Peterson's Threshold Economics (2011), save the second gallery image which is courtesy of Robert Szkolnicki.
