California’s Wende Museum Makes High Art Out of Surveillance

A character in the masterful 2006 German film, The Lives of Others, follows the impact of the East German Stasi’s secret surveillance of a playwright and his actress girlfriend.
 
At one point, the playwright declares: “The state office for statistics on Hans-Beimler street counts everything; knows everything: how many pairs of shoes I buy a year: 2.3, how many books I read a year: 3.2 and how many students graduate with perfect marks: 6,347. But there's one statistic that isn't collected there, perhaps because such numbers cause even paper-pushers pain: and that is the suicide rate.”
 
From Fyodor Dostoevsky to George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and The Lives of Others director and screenwriter Florian Henckel, great writers have portrayed the heroic (and sometimes not) struggles of ordinary people against total surveillance. Now the dehumanizing impact of surveillance is on display in the visual arts in a year-long new exhibition at the Wende Museum in Culver City.
 
One piece is from German artist Verena Kyselka’s 2007 “Pigs Like Pigments,” which incorporates printouts of Stasi files overlaid in red with personal details about the artist’s uneventful daily life under the regime. Mixed-media prints by Sadie Barnette adds floral decorations to the 500-page file the FBI kept on her father in a work entitled “Mug Shot.” Another display is of “smelling jars” in which the Stasi, after breaking into homes and stealing small items of clothing, kept the scents of their surveillance victims in case the state needed to pursue them with dogs.
 
A Wende Museum blog says:
 
“The exhibition feels particularly important today, in a time of hyper-surveillance, from programmatic digital ads that follow our every move online, to voice detection in our phones that feed us more ads, to geo-location devices in our cars, to CCTV cameras on our sidewalks, to dark web sites that sell our personal information, to hackers breaching another database compromising our passwords and leading to possible identity theft, to Artificial Intelligence technology that can mimic our voices and plant our faces on someone else’s body.”
 
This exhibition, which mixes archival artifacts and surveillance devices with contemporary artworks, will be at the Wende Museum for one year. The Wende Museum also offers online a digital book on the Counter/Surveillance exhibit, the artists, and the human costs of a surveillance state.

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