The New Museum - Jan. 2010

Over winter break, my boyfriend and I visited The New Museum. It was my second time there, and unfortunately half of the gallery space was closed but what we were able to see was delightful! The museum itself is a great space for contemporary and modern art, each floor is covered with white walls and no floor has the same layout. Some of them have incredibly tall ceilings while the room is shaped like a corridor, while others have low ceilings with several walls to make alleyways of modern art. The top floor of this peculiarly shaped building is called the "Sky Box" and it has a fabulous view of the cityscape through panoramic windows, or for the more adventurous there is also a terrace with thick glass walls.

Social scientist, artist, writer and provocateur, Paglen has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies--the "black world"--for the last eight years. Paglen is interested in the idea of photography as truth-telling, but his pictures often stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. In the series Limit Telephotography, for example, he employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky, he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph classified spacecraft in Earth's orbit.

The stuff we saw displayed immediately put us on edge. One of his huge photographs displayed a long exposure of the night sky, which are usually used to display the path of stars and things orbiting the earth. Paglen's photograph actually showed evidence of an undeclared satellite in orbit directly above Afghanistan! Though there are no records of this satellite, there is no way to deny what he has captured. As the museum guard explained to us, what he does is not illegal - the people have a right to question and investigate the government, but he is definitely toeing the line.

There is less information available on the next artist, but Jon Rafman is taking something so familiar to us and exposing the strange nature of it. Google's Street View drives by just updating the physical environment indiscriminately, passing by fires, nude beaches, teens flipping off the camera, and puts the images on the internet to be seen by anyone, with the faces of individuals blurred out of course. Rafman scoured the street views around the world and made large prints of the more peculiar sights.

Alexandre Singh's piece was a very interesting use of objects, lighting, and audio-recordings. Each object had a personality that correlated with a distinct accent as they discussed the intricacies of the display of the objects characterized. The tape-recorders were stuffy snobs, the bottle of bleach took the role of neo-fascist, the whole piece was delightful to experience. I love the use of new media to break up the monotony of seeing a 2D representation of someone's point of view. "It was pleasingly elaborate."

When I was actually watching this film, I was incredibly tired. So, let me be real here and say that I didn't catch a lot of what it had to say, but the title alone was neat. It was most likely about freedom though because the exhibition was titled, "Free." The piece itself was a film that had new subtitles added over the real ones, spliced with other footage made specifically for the new work. Pretty neat idea, though I think the artist had some issues releasing it due to copyright infringement.