Leeron Tur-Kaspa: Art at the Airport: Towards an Aesthetic of Looking
20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.
After 9/11, the United States TSA (Transportation Security Administration) solicited the help of two individuals to help fashion the new regime of airport security measurements: Ron Rafi, former security director at Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv, and Paul Ekman, American psychologist known for his work on lie detection through facial cues. Ekman’s work, and by extension the entire apparatus of 21st Century airport securitization, is founded in a universalizing psychology that posits the body as a leaky container, ready to divulge its authentic interiority to the trained detective. How does this surveillant gaze targeted towards future interiority shape the contemporary subject in transit, and how does this methodology of looking intersect with practices of art and cultural activities at the airport?
Antonia Majaca, Ghalya Saadawi, Laura Harris and Rachel O’Reilly responded to the question:
What is the purpose of your visit?
Report by Ayesha Hameed:
After 9/11, the United States TSA (Transportation Security Administration) solicited the help of two individuals to help fashion the new regime of airport security measurements: Ron Rafi, former security director at Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv and Paul Ekman, an American psychologist known for his work on lie detection through facial cues. Ekman’s work, and by extension the entire apparatus of twenty-first-century airport securitization, is founded in a universalizing psychology that posits the body as a leaky container, ready to divulge its authentic interiority to the trained detective. How does this surveillant gaze targeted towards future interiority shape the contemporary subject in transit, and how does this methodology of looking intersect with practices of art and cultural activities at the airport? In the presentation seats are set up like those in an airport lounge with airport sounds played overhead. Leeron walks from one side of the room to another. Movement here is a form of ideology as we look at art in the airport. She speaks from one corner on a history of biometric controls at the airport, linking, among others, behaviour-detection training to visual training in showing paintings from the Van Gogh Museum. From another corner she shows images including a clock and a mural with a Zionist slogan from Ben Gurion airport, and work by Brett Nielson and Sandro Mezzadra, Wendy Brown, Marc Auge and Rachel Hall among others.
Antonia Majaca thought the familiar experience of borders brought up by the presentation could be considered in light of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s suggestion of a global idea of race: a universal transparent ‘I’ that codifies and classifies. She also commended the evocation of boarding lounge affect: comfort and irritation.
Laura Harris wondered where the artist wanted to take the work, suggesting she connect it to nineteenth-century photographic history dealing with identification and eugenics and the long history of visual surveillance technologies, such as that done by Cesare Lombroso and Simone Brown. She asked: ‘How can the deviances from white normative faces be mapped? How do airports differ in this capacity?’ Harris also thought it would be interesting to consider the contemporary move to reassign surveillance to others in airports so the gaze is dispersed.
Rachel O’Reilly didn’t get the containment aspect. ‘There is a difference between the performance of transparency as opposed to its operation,’ she noted. She said the questions raised by the Dutch museum are interesting, as they connect settler colonialism and surveillance to Dutch modernism. Following Harris, she said predictive policing didn’t need advanced technology – as it is inherently an organization of white supremacy. The border has evolved to both eliminate the native and to keep the Muslim at bay. O’Reilly advised the artist explore the idea of the future interior more, observing the question is always: ‘Who crosses and who doesn’t?’
Ghalya Saadawi appreciated the artist’s efforts to look at art in airports, and advised highlighting this even more: that is, art as a new technology that maintains the illusion that the airport is a place of enjoyment and fluidity, and cosmopolitan performance. The contradictions in this study, she suggested, could be explored through the idea of ‘future interior’: ‘Why is it that art can be instrumentalized in this way? And which art? Who is lending it?’