To some people political art means protest art: slogan-slinging,
name-calling, didacticism, an unaesthetic thing. But in the
trauma-riddled early 21st century, after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina,
with a continuing war in Iraq, political art can be something else: a
mirror.
At White Columns in Chelsea, the artist Harrell Fletcher has
photographically reconstituted a museum display he saw on a visit to Ho
Chi Minh City last year. The pictures in the original display
documented the Vietnam War — known in Vietnam as the American War — as
seen from a Vietnamese perspective. Mr. Fletcher presents the images as
he found them. They are beyond horrific.
New paintings by Jenny
Holzer at Cheim & Read in Chelsea are silkscreen reproductions of
recently declassified United States government documents related to Abu
Ghraib prison and to the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and
to interrogation procedures used at both. The words, unaltered except
for magnification, add up to a stupefying archive of official violence.
Interrogation is also the subject of "Operation Atropos," a new
video by Coco Fusco, which makes its East Coast debut tonight at the City University of New York
Graduate Center. (The screening accompanies the center's exhibition
"Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict," organized by the
Whitney Independent Study Program.)
The idea for the video began when Ms. Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist who teaches at Columbia University,
was preparing a performance piece in which she assumed the character of
a female interrogator at Abu Ghraib. She realized that to continue the
work, she needed training in interrogation techniques. Through an
Internet search she found a source of instruction: the Prisoner of War
Interrogation Resistance Program run by a private concern called Team
Delta, based in Philadelphia.
The organizers of the program
are former members of the United States Intelligence Agency and
self-described specialists in the "psychology of capture." In its
original form the course was used to train elite soldiers to resist
interrogation if captured, and to extract information from political
prisoners. Reconceived for the private sector — police officers,
private security personnel and psychological researchers are among the
clientele — the program is a grueling four-day immersion in methods of
physical and mental persuasion, with the participants playing both
captive and captor.
The course is offered only to groups, so Ms.
Fusco solicited volunteers to join her. Six women, three of them former
Columbia students, accepted the invitation. (It cost about $8,000 for
the group; Ms. Fusco picked up the tab.) She also arranged to have the
course videotaped, with the artist Kambui Olujimi as director of
photography.
As the 50-minute video opens, Ms. Fusco is reading
aloud from a briefing that laid out the ground rules for the ordeal
ahead, clearly amused by the portentous language: "You will experience
physical and psychological pain." The women share a piece of secret
information they will do their best not to reveal under duress.
The course begins. The women are riding in a van through the woods in
the Poconos when masked men stop them at gunpoint and direct them to
strip to their underwear for a search. The women's clothes are
exchanged for Day-Glo orange coveralls; their heads and faces are
covered with blackout hoods. They are led, handcuffed, through the
woods.
The make-believe nature of all this is periodically
reinforced as "enemy soldiers" drop out of character to be interviewed
about their work. Even so, a sense of real tension starts to build. Mr.
Olujimi's darting, probing, camera work helps to create it. So does the
sustained image of the women being pushed, prodded, forced to their
knees, yelled at and insulted by the all-male interrogation team.
At one point, an interrogator explains to the camera that a
particularly effective technique for breaking down resistance is to
make a captive think that unless he or she yields information, another
prisoner will be harmed. When this situation is simulated, one of the
women in the group starts to cry. The psychological pressure is
working. Fiction translates into emotional fact.
Another woman
also starts weeping. But it turns out she is doing so deliberately,
using the ploy of feminine vulnerability to avoid divulging her secret.
The ruse works. Later, when the women are relaxing after their stint as
prisoners, Ms. Fusco confesses that she had had to stop herself from
laughing at some of the dialogue her interrogators delivered. As the
film ends, she and her colleagues take turns interrogating their former
captors, learning to do to others what has been done to them.
So what kind of political art is this? It isn't moralizing or
accusatory. It's art for a time when play-acting and politics seem to
be all but indistinguishable. "Operation Atropos" is reality television
with the cracks between reality and artifice showing. It's in the
cracks, Ms. Fusco suggests, that the political truth is revealed.
"Operation
Atropos" will be shown tonight at 7 at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, at 34th Street; (212)
817-7386.
