by Robert Sloon

It is indubitable that we live in a world where the flow of information is a prevailing current, in terms of business, in terms of politics and in terms of culture. It is also indubitable that this has made the world a far more paranoid place. The more information we have access to, the more the information we are lacking shows up. Information can be a veiled threat. It has been said that we live in an age of conspiracy, in which we try desperately to make links between multitudes of data that don’ t always make logical sense.
Art, like many things, can be seen as a microcosm of this. It is a flow of visual information that is both global and local. For those who try and understand, or at least follow it, it can be a desperate scrabble to make sense of it all.
Lately, I have taken to reading spy novels. I love the intrigue, the plot, the research and the characters. But I have found too that they have provided me with a metaphor, or a model if you will, to understanding contemporary art production in a paranoid age.
My theory, perhaps espionage aesthetics, where aesthetics denotes a philosophy to understand art, borrows quite heavily from American curator Ralph Rugoff. In a famous exhibition in 1997, called Scene of the Crime, he used the theme of a detective to help understand postwar art, when art (and similar trends govern today’s production) was largely a recording of actions .Significantly, he cast the viewer as a detective, possessing “a scanning gaze able to sift through the details of a scene, to shuffle fragments of information that seem only haphazardly related”. The viewer was then responsible to solve it, not like a sum, but like a detective pulling together an interpretation from the clues.
I really liked this, and have found it useful to my understanding of how art works. However, in trying to understand contemporary art two vital points seemed missing. Firstly, artists, unlike criminals, are active collaborators in the leaving of clues. The passive, but violent, body of art didn’t quite fit. Secondly, the act of exchange, which is a major part of art was wholly absent. A more active, and perhaps more morally grey crime seemed to work better, that of espionage.
If we twist Ralph Rugoff’s metaphor slightly, we can imagine the spy master as the detective. The receiver of the micro-dot, of the purloined letter and the one who has a “scanning gaze” invterpreting the mounds of data. Here I imagine, if you have read any Le Carre, George Smiley sifting through the papers and his memory, in a desperate search for the elusive prize Karla. He turns the drudgery of beauracracy into an intellectual puzzle, one whose solutions are often inconclusive, but produce for him an intellectual pleasure. If we, the viewers, are George Smileys, the interpreters of disparate information, the artists are the secret agents.
The way agents communicate, out in the field, is through various methods: the dead drop, the hidden transmitter, the diplomatic bag, the secret compartment. What is significant is the agent actively obscures and encodes the information. The artist, similarly, is an active collaborater in the encoding of meaning.
Another important aspect is to look at the secret agents motive. The flow of information isn’t a one way, but a transaction. Some act out of idealism, a belief in an abstract, country, motherland, ideology, patriotism, or shall we say art. Others act for financial gain. And most for a bit of both. There is an committed and willing exchange.
Art operates as a Cold War. The question you need to ask yourself is where do you stand, and what are you fighting for.

Labels: espionage aesthetics, Joburg art fair