Surveillance State of Mind
What Remains and the Question of Scrutiny
By Adrienne Matei
Technocratic powers seem to be watching us wherever we go, virtually and in real life. Performing artists — those who invite strangers to look at them — seem especially well-placed to address the difference between scrutiny that is welcome and monitoring that is objectionable, even threatening. A number of recent works have engaged questions about the dangers of being constantly watched. In What Remains, the New York choreographer Will Rawls, in collaboration with the poet Claudia Rankine and the filmmaker John Lucas, explored, through the medium of dance, the extent to which people, particularly African Americans, can connect meaningfully when their freedom is curtailed by surveillance.
What Remains, originally commissioned for We’re Watching, a 2017 New York art festival conceived around the theme of surveillance and recently restaged for FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival, pointedly hides more than it reveals. The dance addresses the self-protective hyper-vigilance of Black Americans living with the knowledge that in a racist system, every one of their gestures may be interpreted as suspect, whether by human beings or by machines. What Remains grapples with being Black in an increasingly technological world, one in which facial recognition software has inherited racial bias, misidentifying those with dark skin and implicating innocent people in crimes they did not commit, even as the racial disparities of how police use force has been well documented. The festival program quotes Rankine speaking to the potentially fatal consequences of surveillance as it intersects with race in America: “Can I have my phone out? If it glitters, will someone think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”
Clad in figure-obscuring black cloaks, the dancers in What Remains — Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis — are present as audience members enter the performance venue, Danspace. They make direct eye contact with each arriving person, whispering, “you… you… you.” Straightaway, the convention of who is watching whom during this performance is subverted — the audience is seen and unexpectedly addressed.
“Being on stage and being watched and being looked at is of course related to being surveilled,” Rawls said in an interview, commenting on the crowd’s role as an acknowledged presence in the performance. “It was important for me to offer the opportunity to the audience to know that they, too, are part of this room, and that the show looks back at them.” Rawls intends his work to focus on “questions about how racism and white supremacy operate as a controlling mechanism for black bodies in culture, and historically,” drawing upon the legacy of entertainment as one of the few venues for African Americans to garner power and success. By upending the crowd’s conventional assumption of invisibility and dismantling the hierarchy of entertainer and audience, What Remains critiques the notion that anyone is entitled to more anonymity than others.
Rawl’s choreography is intentionally light-handed: The performers improvise during large sections of What Remains. “I think that dance is this incredible medium where we can experience a person in real time figuring out internally how to move their body through space,” said Rawls. Yet their expression is far from joyful. Throughout the first half of the performance, dancers seem to spasm into glitch-like convulsions and freeze, just when I anticipated they would progress. “I think one of the best things dance does is create ambiguity,” said Rawls, and indeed What Remains manifests a world of well-honed elusive tactics in which modes of communication between dancers become a kind of secret code. When the performers move and call out distorted syllabic sounds, they construct a language indecipherable to the uninitiated, be they humans or machines trained to identify conventional vocabulary and form, but that is legible to those who share their emotional experience. Throughout the piece, identifiable words and gestures are pared back until they become faint references to their former meaning. Lines and words from Rankine’s poems are recited without context, allowing for various interpretations. That initial greeting of “you,” for instance, can be traced back to a line from Rankine’s Citizen: “Who shouted, you? You /shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes/sounding like you, you sometimes saying you…” The connection between this line and the disembodied “you” is purposefully vague.
By virtue of its theme, Rawls’s piece enters a wider, cross-genre artistic conversation about surveillance culture wherein artwork in various mediums frequently intensifies paranoia. The hyper-vigilant surveillance state has begat a new, deeply dread-soaked artistic movement, one that seeks to demonstrate the inescapable power of surveillance, confirming all nightmares and offering little recourse. For instance, American artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, collects discarded genetic material — chewing gum, say, or hairs left in a Penn Station bathroom — and enters its extracted DNA into a computer program that can recreate the face of the person it came from. She then prints it as a 3D model for her series, “Stranger Visions.” Trevor Paglen’s “Orbital Reflector” satellite ominously reminds viewers that the night sky is thick with surveillance machines. These and similar works tackling the terror of mass surveillance and data collection could well represent the current circumstances that the New York Times’s Holland Cotter referred to in his review of Laura Poitras’ 2016 Whitney exhibit “Astro Noise.” There, he writes, “In the political thinking of an earlier time, you were either part of the problem or part of the solution, the inference being that there was a solution. The art of the present is not so sure.”
What Remains does participate in this chorus of dread. Much of the piece is uncomfortable to watch, as it seems uncomfortable to perform, with dancers wailing, trapped in paroxysms of movement, their heavy cloaks glowing Gilead-red under cold searchlights. Yet in addition to conveying hardship, it offers something few artistic confrontations of life under surveillance do — an alternative mode of living within a hostile environment. The world it creates is not hopeless. By allowing dancers privacy and autonomy despite the presence of a gathered crowd, it demonstrates that obscurity can be wielded in defiance of the oppressor. Its logic centers on knowing the system — or in this case, the audience — and exploiting its blind spots. Perhaps the beauty of What Remains lies in its suggestion that privacy can exist despite scrutiny; there are ways to temper the bleakness of a life surveilled.
