Sunday, July 31, 2016

When artists write novels: some thoughts on Jill Magid


“Players only love you when they’re playing.” Stevie Nicks

"Time is all that anyone is ever left with. There's nothing "pretty" about the diaries Theck was writing. Reading them that friday evening in Berlin made me understand that writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That "art" is really "artifact," exhibit A, exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there is the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out." Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

The artist Jill Magid’s project, Finding Tarden, was an attempt to “show the face” of the Dutch Secret Service, by writing a novel. Magid’s end result was proposed as aesthetic: she’d have an art show, where she’d exhibit the novel, in book form, inside a plexiglass vitrine. Or at least that’s the way Magid sold herself to a militarized, government agency. It worked. Magid was granted access to agency employees. She interviewed employees in a pseudo-HR role.  The interviews occurred in filmic locations redolent of noir cinema: smoke filled hotel bars and Amsterdam cafes, sparse living rooms in the off-hours. To gain intimacy with workers, to explain her project and their necessary participation, Magid created a pitch video: she re-staged a scene from a Godard movie, where the heroine coquettishly seduces the viewer. Godard once stated all you need for a movie is “a gun and a girl.” Ironic considering Magid’s ultimate aesthetic statement was the creation of a novel, not a film; and doubly ironic considering what is absent from this project is any articulation of the violence this agency thwarts or, perhaps, actualizes and amplifies. 

Magid opens her novel by describing scenes that involve her standing at her apartment window. She’s unable to sleep and she watches the flickering booths of the prostitutes below. Men stop and enter. When the men finish, the sex worker’s little screen goes up, and the men appear in the doorways. Their heads lean toward the woman, while their bodies are halfway onto the street. Takeaway: experiences happen behind closed doors and certain things are unknowable to a voyeur. The project resulted in a highly controlled online document. I was unable to download it but I pulled out several quotes on second reading: “I had no intention of importing something I’d made in the studio. I wanted to be intimately involved with the organization. I wanted to penetrate it” (My emphasis). Magid’s interest in an erotics of the unfolding of information parallels her method of penetration into this power system. Normal language often breaks down. She switches between journalistic prose and metaphysical poetry. She ends the novel stating she wants the system of power to enter her.

Magid attempts to make an invisible, highly dangerous organization visible, by investing that organization with attributes it doesn’t possess. Her mode of seeing the system in all its nakedness, is the language of contemporary culture: seduction. She seduces employees. Her interviews feel like dates. With men she is coy, supple, ready to be shaped, but still shrewd and worthy of respect. With women she is a confidant, a fellow player in the game of hard power. But hard power is the world of one-way diplomacy and militarized action, ie, the world of the Dutch Secret Service. Soft power is about reconciliation, brokering deals based on agreement and future possibilities. Magid’s method of interaction with the organization is all soft power, an interpersonal adventure.  

Magid at once succeeded and failed to show how the Dutch CIA worked. The body of the novel was redacted. Crucial information necessary for the reader’s understanding of the Dutch CIA, was erased. Yet on a more conceptual level, Magid posed the problem of the work, at the site of the work; the Dutch Secret Service redacted her novel: they control the flow of information— that’s how the Dutch CIA works. Magid’s redacted novel highlights how information is highly scripted and controlled by systems of governmental hard power that exist beyond a world of aesthetics.  Moreover, an aesthetic gesture that makes these systems ambiguously beautiful and us, the reader, complicit in their nebulous beauty, is noteworthy. 



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