“The New Normal” is a descriptive paradigm given to us by Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, and refers to our post-9/11 culture in which privacy has become a quaint fantasy. The phrase has been appropriated for this tech-savvy 13-piece traveling exhibition, which finds its inspiration in the wire-tapping, luggage-searching, internet-monitoring frenzy.
The exhibit – clever, bold and engaging – features Dick Cheney himself as a sort of ironic centerpiece. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy re-stage the list of requirements that the Vice-President mandates of all hotels he visits, resulting in a deadpan installation made of a king-size bed, Fox News on TV, today’s New York Post, etc. Other works also deal with a Patriot-Act-inspired sense of disseminated information: Six CIA Officers Wanted in Connection with the Abduction of Abu Omar pictures photocopied passport IDs of these six men, which were obtained from hotels in which they stayed. Artist Trevor Paglen seems to echo the idea that publicizing private information cuts both ways.
Kota Ezawa has fun with his source material in a more jestful manner. He has digitally animated the infamously available home-video footage of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, resulting in a playful cartoon that remains incisive due to its subtext: why do we partake in such juvenile consumption? Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher, also bringing an air of joy to the foreboding issue of ubiquitous surveillance, address privacy through the personal by asking online communities to send in unaltered images of the space underneath their beds.
The New Normal ranges from the overtly political (Eyebeam R&D lets you track your neighbor’s campaign contributions) to the resolutely poetic (Mohamed Camera’s video of breezy curtains that demarcate public from private). At its most simple, the show may be its most effective: Thomson & Craighead’s Beacon rhythmically displays real-time anonymous web searches:
“numb toes”
“self identity advertising”
“teen movies”
“why dogs dig”
A poignant idea, artfully made: the private is public, for better or worse.
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