Art Lecture - Julia Scher

On Wednesday, April 29, I attended an art lecture by artist Julia Scher, who is known for her work focused on surveillance and watchfulness. She gave a lecture about her artwork and the meaning behind it. She makes a lot of public art pieces that are interactive, using cameras, television monitors, microphones, and lights. She also does a lot of performance art, in which people, including Scher herself, play with and interact with her artwork. According to Scher, surveillance is the act of watching and being watched, and watchfulness is the raw material for storytelling. The cameras and monitors within her pieces represent surveillance. Cameras are freeze-grabbing machines that can capture a moment in time, and therefore they are machines of control. In Scher’s opinion, surveillance systems and interrogation systems are designed to take things away, but they also end up leaving traces. Her work captures these traces that are left behind. For example, in one of her pieces, Scher set up several cameras and monitors outside of a movie theatre and created a small security tower viewing window. The monitors faced the street, while the cameras recorded what was going on inside the theatre. Scher inlaid the live footage from inside the movie theatre with previously shot footage of people being chased, so it appeared like a lot more was going on inside the theatre.

Another one of her pieces, entitled Wonderland, focused on the themes of fear, security, and children. She took photographs of young children dressed in pink security outfits to put control in the hands of children. She then created a child-size security control center where the children had access to computers and the Internet. She gave them access to websites to show them what bad people were like, while also letting them discover their own bodies. The exhibit looked very interesting and was very well thought out. Scher’s work seems to have meaning on many different levels, and she pays a lot of attention to the details while still maintaining the big picture.

One of the things that was particularly interesting about the lecture was the way Scher’s ideas and questions seemed to flow out of her mouth. She talked fairly quickly, asking several very thought-provoking questions at once without waiting for an answer. It was almost like she was interrogating her audience, and her lecture was a performance piece in itself.