Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris, is a tremendously productive interviewer: thousands of hours of conversations with artists, videotaped in their studios, at cafes, in taxis and on planes, have yielded magazines, bricklike volumes, even exhibitions. Yet one of Mr. Obrist's favorite interview topics is what doesn't get made - an artist's dearest unexecuted projects. "Unrealized projects by even the most well-known artists are often unknown, unpublished or forgotten," he said. On June 23, Mr. Obrist will conduct a 24-hour "Interview Marathon," which will be simultaneously transcribed and designed into a book, at the Theater of the World Festival in Stuttgart, Germany. In the meantime, here are a few of the unrealized works he has helped to reveal in past interviews.
For Rent: Large Theaters, Month-to-Month O.K. (May 22, 2005)
Directions: Sorry, the Jedi Won't Return (May 22, 2005)
Directions: Kelly Clarkson and the Kidz (May 22, 2005)
Directions: A Love Bug and His Lovers (May 22, 2005)
The Playwright as Pen Pal (May 22, 2005)
GERHARD RICHTER In a gesture to Duchamp, Mr. Richter wanted to exhibit a ready-made object: "A motor-driven clown doll, about 1.5 meters tall, which stood up and then collapsed into itself. It cost over 600 Deutsche marks at that time, and I couldn't afford it. Sometimes I regret not having bought that clown."
MICHAEL ELMGREEN AND INGAR DRAGSET This Scandinavian duo, whose subway-station installation is currently on view at the Bohen Foundation in the meatpacking district, was drawn to the Grace Building on West 42nd Street: "We'd love to do a huge white-paint pour down the facade," Mr. Dragset said. "I don't think it'll ever happen."
MAURIZIO CATTELAN This prank-loving Conceptual artist, whose early projects regularly involved subjecting his dealers to various forms of humiliation, wanted to dress Stefano Basilico, then a new gallery owner, in an elaborate costume for an entire month. Before breaking out on his own, Mr. Basilico had worked for the dealer Ileana Sonnabend. Mr. Cattelan wanted him to wear "a very complicated dress, a sort of carnival costume: it would have seemed as if Ileana Sonnabend was carrying a little Stefano on her shoulders." (See above.) Mr. Basilico refused the piece.
PIERRE HUYGHE In a project to be called "The Family Film Series," Mr. Huyghe, the French video and installation artist, planned to reprogram an abandoned small-town cinema to show the residents' home movies continuously. As he explained it, "Doing that in a small city, so that everybody would show up in each other's films, the neighbor in the background, a co-presence and a collective auto-portrait of a town."
Art of the Undone
Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris, is a tremendously productive interviewer: thousands of hours of conversations with artists, videotaped in their studios, at cafes, in taxis and on planes, have yielded magazines, bricklike volumes, even exhibitions. Yet one of Mr. Obrist's favorite interview topics is what doesn't get made - an artist's dearest unexecuted projects. "Unrealized projects by even the most well-known artists are often unknown, unpublished or forgotten," he said. On June 23, Mr. Obrist will conduct a 24-hour "Interview Marathon," which will be simultaneously transcribed and designed into a book, at the Theater of the World Festival in Stuttgart, Germany. In the meantime, here are a few of the unrealized works he has helped to reveal in past interviews.
For Rent: Large Theaters, Month-to-Month O.K. (May 22, 2005)
Directions: Sorry, the Jedi Won't Return (May 22, 2005)
Directions: Kelly Clarkson and the Kidz (May 22, 2005)
Directions: A Love Bug and His Lovers (May 22, 2005)
The Playwright as Pen Pal (May 22, 2005)
GERHARD RICHTER In a gesture to Duchamp, Mr. Richter wanted to exhibit a ready-made object: "A motor-driven clown doll, about 1.5 meters tall, which stood up and then collapsed into itself. It cost over 600 Deutsche marks at that time, and I couldn't afford it. Sometimes I regret not having bought that clown."
MICHAEL ELMGREEN AND INGAR DRAGSET This Scandinavian duo, whose subway-station installation is currently on view at the Bohen Foundation in the meatpacking district, was drawn to the Grace Building on West 42nd Street: "We'd love to do a huge white-paint pour down the facade," Mr. Dragset said. "I don't think it'll ever happen."
MAURIZIO CATTELAN This prank-loving Conceptual artist, whose early projects regularly involved subjecting his dealers to various forms of humiliation, wanted to dress Stefano Basilico, then a new gallery owner, in an elaborate costume for an entire month. Before breaking out on his own, Mr. Basilico had worked for the dealer Ileana Sonnabend. Mr. Cattelan wanted him to wear "a very complicated dress, a sort of carnival costume: it would have seemed as if Ileana Sonnabend was carrying a little Stefano on her shoulders." (See above.) Mr. Basilico refused the piece.
PIERRE HUYGHE In a project to be called "The
Family Film Series," Mr. Huyghe, the French video and installation
artist, planned to reprogram an abandoned small-town cinema to show the
residents' home movies continuously. As he explained it, "Doing that in
a small city, so that everybody would show up in each other's films,
the neighbor in the background, a co-presence and a collective
auto-portrait of a town."
| Dance | Music | Television | Columns |
Normalizing Torture, One Rollicking Hour At a Time
THE acclaimed Fox series "24" has received a lot of attention over its four successful seasons: for its innovative real-time format, its braided storylines, its heady brew of national security and sentimentality, and its uncanny topicality. From Balkan nationalist revenge to rogue agents with biological weapons, wars on and of terror have been portrayed in exacting detail, shaping entertainment out of headlines that often stretch the imagination.
Kiefer Sutherland, as Jack Bauer. Here he is a tortured captive, but he gives as good as he gets (and more often).
This is even more true of the current season. with its potent mix of diverse elements - including a two-stage nuclear conspiracy plot; the formation of an unsympathetic confederation of sleeper cells, defense contractors and rogue scientists; and even a subplot about Sino-American conflict - all poised for unpredictable resolution Monday evening. Yet it's possible that this year's "24" will be most remembered not for its experiments with television formulas, but for its portrayal of torture in prime time.
This is not the first time torture has been featured on the show. In Season 2, a national security adviser was interrogated with a defibrillator, while the president watched on a monitor. The Counter Terrorism Unit (C.T.U.) agent Jack Bauer extracted information from a detainee by forcing him to watch streaming video of the execution - staged, it turned out - of his child. Later Jack himself was captured by enemy operatives and cut, burned and shocked to the point of heart failure. Interrogation in the first three seasons involved various forms of threat and violence, meant to produce information vital to the defeat of an unending number of emergencies.
But on the present season of "24" torture has gone from being an infrequent shock bid to being a main thread of the plot. At least a half-dozen characters have undergone interrogation under conditions that meet conventional definitions of torture. The methods portrayed have varied, and include chemical injection, electric shock and old-fashioned bone-breaking. Those subjected to these treatments have constituted a broad range, too, from an uncooperative associate of the plotters to a Middle Eastern wife and son linked to an operative to the teenaged son of the current season's secretary of defense, James Heller (William Devane).
In the sort of marriage of political crisis and melodrama that marks "24" as a leader in television's post-9/11 genre of national security thriller, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), now romantically involved with Heller's daughter, Audrey (Kim Raver), interrogated her estranged husband, Paul, using the electrical cords of a hotel lamp, only to discover that the allegations linking Paul to the unfolding nuclear-threat plot were false. The prospects for Jack and Audrey's relationship took several turns for the worse from that point, reaching a low with Paul's death after Jack withheld urgently needed medical care in order to save another patient, a Chinese scientist being prepared, fittingly, for interrogation.
All of which brings to mind the debate over torture that erupted - and just as strikingly receded - after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and news of the administration's efforts to redefine military interrogation standards. Engaged as "24" is with the fine points of actual counterterrorism policy, its current interest in torture could be seen as a way of questioning the limits of just war. The show's producers, for their part, don't see it that way.
"I hate to disappoint you," said Joel Surnow, an executive producer, "but we don't work that way. We construct our stories based on what's happening to the characters in a particular episode, and how they respond to the demands of their own personal challenges."
Still, recent plot developments suggest a
rightward tilt. A striking episode this season involving torture
concerned Joe Prado, a suspected terrorist accomplice freed just before
being interrogated, thanks to a lawyer working for Amnesty Global, a
(barely) fictionalized Amnesty International. The ever-resourceful
Jack, knowing what had to be done, resigned from C.T.U. to disassociate
colleagues from his actions and then, in a parked car outside the
C.T.U. building, expertly broke Prado's handcuffed hands to procure
vital and, in this case, accurate leads. An earlier revelation - that
the anonymous call prompting the lawyer's action had come from a
terrorist mastermind - underscored the apparent moral of the episode:
regardless of good intentions, those seeking to protect suspects'
rights risk abetting terrorist activities, to catastrophic ends.
Yet in the end, the question of torture's role on "24" seems more complex than whether the show presents it as deplorable or justified. To be sure, very little public scrutiny - much less protest - of violent interrogation is depicted. In fiction, as in real life, human rights violations take longer than 24 hours to come to light, when they do at all. But if the good guys on "24" go about their work largely unaccountable to law or to public opinion, they remain obligated, within the show's moral order, to one another.
What is most striking about torture on "24" is how it affects not only politics but also emotional and professional relationships. The C.T.U. data technician Sarah Gavin, interrogated with tasers to discover if she were a terrorist mole, subsequently returns to work showing no signs of trauma. Indeed, she marshals the clarity of mind to renegotiate her terms of employment with her superior, who approved her interrogation just hours earlier. The war-protester son of Secretary of Defense Heller, more alienated than ever after a session of sensory deprivation in a C.T.U. holding room, receives a strikingly paternal lecture from his father about why that treatment was appropriate. Even Audrey's husband, Paul, somehow rises above his grievance to view his erstwhile tormentor as a buddy, helping Jack extract documents from a defense contractor and fend off attack - and even loyally taking a bullet for him. In all of these interactions, torture doesn't deaden the feelings between people, rather it deepens them.
It is often noted that torture goes against the tenets of human community in two fundamental ways. Because torturers deny the basic humanity of their victims, it's a violation of the norms governing everyday society. At the same time, torture constitutes society's ultimate perversion, shaking or breaking its victims' faith in humanity by turning their bodies and their deepest commitments - political or spiritual belief, love of family - against them to produce pain and fear. In the counterterrorist world of "24," though, torture represents not the breakdown of a just society, but the turning point - at times even the starting point - for social relations. Through this artistic sleight of hand, the show makes torture appear normal.
That twist raises questions about whether the devastation of war can be contained by the rules of proper conduct. What "24" illustrates, more effectively even than the headlines from which its draws inspiration, is that such boundaries are unsustainable, in fiction as in real life. This is a problem that transcends easy political distinctions between liberal and conservative, as the capacity to abuse is just as universal, it seems, as the desire to be free.
Has "24" descended down a slippery slope in portraying acts of torture as normal and therefore justifiable? Is its audience, and the public more generally, also reworking the rules of war to the point where the most expedient response to terrorism is to resort to terror? In the world beyond the show, that debate remains heated. How it plays out on "24" may say a great deal about what sort of society we are in the process of becoming.
