Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery & Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.

As I approached the cemetery on foot through the neighborhood of Bay Ridge, I tried to think of a secret meaty enough to divulge. Calle was on site on April 29th and 30th to receive and transcribe secrets in person. Without taking pictures or names, there was a caveat that the artist “might keep a memory of your story, but it will remain anonymous.” Predictably, I came up with nothing—not an unfulfilled desire, taboo belief, or misdeed of any kind, so in lieu of writing something trivial or fabricated, I decided to leave my note card blank. Thus forgoing direct participation, I turned my attention to what appeared to be a number of cathartic confessions imparted to Calle by other Creative Time devotees. Between the two chairs, drama was high; the artist was present. However, for those of us lingering on the margins, the procedure of the piece proved challenging to engage. The marble obelisk is designed with a mail slot to inter secrets into a chamber below the monument for the next twenty-five years. Annually, Calle will return to Green-Wood to oversee the burning of the accumulation. On the heels of Creative Time’s 2016 programs—Duke Riley’s magical Fly By Night and Pedro Reyes’s haunting Doomocracy—Calle’s mediation of public intimacy registered among my fellow observers as a miss.

Calle is not a newcomer to social practice—intimate encounters with others is a hallmark of her oeuvre. In 1979, Calle surveilled a man through the streets of Venice to create her seminal work, Suite Vénitienne. More recently, her project Take Care of Yourself (2007) prompted 107 women to respond to a breakup letter through the media and vocabulary of their choice, resulting in 107 vignettes of dance, music, visual art, and written word. Where Here Lie the Secrets diverges is in the architecture of the open call. Participants were not selected—instead, they showed up. Moreover, only a small selection of secrets will ever be heard or seen by Calle, so by and large, public participation is not fodder for appropriation and fictionalization, as is the case with many of her formative works. With Here Lie the Secrets, Calle shifts the emphasis of the artwork from the story being told (and subsequently hijacked and rewritten into a creative project) to the gesture itself.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

Creative Time Artistic Director Nato Thompson describes the piece as providing a “space for intimate reflection. It is a quiet, personal, and yet also public act.” Calle’s monument is more of a provocation than an object, compelling visitors to meditate on the dual nature of secrecy—intimacies that linger unfulfilled and withheld, or misdeeds with public effect. What is a secret in the digital age, when every movement and click is surveilled, recorded, and sold? Beneath the epitaph, Here Lie the Secrets confronts our contemporary political reality—a reality in which power is strengthened by a strategic balance of secrets and leaks. As Žižek suggests, “The truth liberates us, yes, but not this truth.” There may be secrets, but there is also truth in a cemetery’s stones.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

Moreover, the context of the cemetery provokes a spatio-temporal disruption, which Foucault describes as “absolute break with traditional time.” Leveraging the context of Green-Wood, Calle evokes deeper questions related to time and existence—ideas that were similarly explored in Rachel, Monique (2006), a video work documenting her mother’s death, which made its New York debut at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in 2014. Even so, Here Lie the Secrets is different than previous works, sharing more kinship with Richard McGuire’s time-traveling graphic novel Here, which presents time as an experiential allusion, illustrating scenes, objects, and events from separate centuries within the same frame.  Similarly, Green-Wood’s centuries-old gravestones conjure larger continuities between the evolution of people and culture bound by a specific place.

Sophie Calle. Here Lie the Secrets of Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of Creative Time. Photo: Leandro Justen.

In the artist statement for Here Lie the Secrets, Calle writes of the confession of a secret as the ultimate proof of intimacy. However, it can be argued that cemeteries—though eternally silent—are profoundly intimate sites where all life intersects. Bringing to mind the title of Calle’s 2001 retrospective Double Game, here too there is a conscious redoubling at work. The obelisk is a classic Egyptian motif symbolizing the connection between heaven and earth, and Calle’s monument can be viewed as a conduit, forging connections across time and generations—uniting us through shared human commonalities, including our inescapable universal end.

Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery is on view at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, through April 29, 2042.

Simon Denny. All You Need Is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX Rerun, 2013; installation view, Petzel Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Startup culture is ripe for satire. The tech industry’s social and economic dominance makes it a necessary target, and its penchant for jargon-heavy, wildly inflated rhetoric makes it an easy one. Mike Judge’s HBO sitcom, Silicon Valley, deftly picks the low-hanging fruit, but it hardly needs to. The elevator pitches of most weak-to-average startups on the venture-capital trail, quixotically ascribing revolutionary potential to the most banal of products, all but ridicule themselves (at least to people outside of the industry). This raises the question: Given an industry that already trades in hyperbole, is satire still an effective strategy for cutting through ideology?

The art world allows for more nuanced and challenging modalities of representation than mainstream media outlets like HBO do. The artist Li Liao, for example, took a job at the notoriously exploitative Foxconn factory in China, which produces parts for Apple products, and then exhibited his uniform, ID card, labor contract, and an iPad—the object of his labor—as a work titled Consumption (2012). While not offering much to look at, Li’s work succeeds in concretizing an experience on the production side of the technology industry, images of which can be hard to believe. Taking another perspective, Simon Denny’s exhibition The Innovator’s Dilemma, now at MoMA PS1, trains its gaze on the rhetoric of startup culture, which the artist shows to be itself one of the industry’s most important products, albeit an ethereal one. Denny’s work could easily register as satire, but it is not. It holds up a mirror, the effect and purpose of which are not easy to ascertain.

Simon Denny. Berlin Startup Case Mod: Rocket Internet, 2014; custom computer case, packaging, heavy-duty computer hardware, digital prints on Plexiglas, custom Plexiglas components, metal fittings, Samsung UE40F6500 SS, video on USB stick, and custom spider computer case; 42 1/8 by 36 5/8 by 21 5/8 in., 30 11/16 by 31 1/2 by 12-3/16 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Innovator’s Dilemma includes four installations, each made to look like a trade-show platform—an appropriate type for representing the international echo chamber of startup discourse. All You Need Is Data (2013) arrays several dozen canvas posters representing events from the 2012 Digital Life Design (DLD) conference, an event held annually in Munich. Capturing the skeuomorphic aesthetic of Apple’s then-current operating system, iOS 5 (since replaced by the iconographically flatter iOS 7 and iOS 8), the posters pair photographs of leading industry personalities with associated pull quotes (“We are hard-wired to share,” says Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb). In Disruptive Berlin (2014), Denny creates modest monuments to that city’s top ten startups (as named by Wired UK in 2013). His sculptures consist of tricked-out desktop computers placed atop horizontal flat-screen monitors looping promotional videos from the associated companies, accompanied in some cases by spastic dubstep music. The Personal Effects of Kimdotcom (2013), meanwhile, re-creates a number of the assets seized by the U.S. government after its arrest of Kim Schmitz, the founder of the streaming sites Megavideo and Megaupload, including a server stack, a life-size model of the creature from the Predator films, and an artistic monument to Schmitz’s skills in the Call of Duty video game.

Simon Denny. New Management, 2014; installation view, Portikus, Frankfurt. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Helena Schlichting.

These works leave the viewer at something of a loss regarding Denny’s stance, aesthetic or political, regarding the material he displays. The quotations in All You Need Is Data may register below the hagiographic pitch typically adopted toward industry gurus at conferences like DLD, but not so much that they read as snide or ridiculing. Rather, they seem a more or less accurate distillation of what the actual events entailed; they could even pass for DLD promotional stock. Likewise, while the “monuments” in Disruptive Berlin have a touch of silliness, they could conceivably function as the trophies they purport to be, thus calling into question what would appear to be their irony. The Kimdotcom platform, for its part, strictly avoids passing judgment on its figure. What, then, are we to make of this rather noisy, banal trade-show environment, transferred to the context of an art museum? What is its raison d’être?

A potential answer comes in the form of Denny’s fourth platform, New Management (2014), which selectively re-creates the Frankfurt hotel room where, in 1993, the former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee famously declared a set of new management principles intended to make his company a more internationally competitive player. The enactment of these principles proved an enormous success, but the hyperbolic, revolutionary cadence of Lee’s speech—often recalling the platitudes of a self-help guru (“Change everything but your wife and kids” is the most famous maxim to come out of it)—is what most anticipated startup culture, which was then still several years away. Denny’s installation highlights the discrepancy between the grandiosity of Lee’s rhetoric and the cheap accoutrements of the room in which he presented it, gesturing to the fact that the speech rings hollow only to outsiders. For the audience to whom it was directed, it was and indeed remains gospel.

New Management suggests that Denny intends to work in a historical mode. Indeed, while the other three installations concern subjects nearer to the present time, they all present artworks as though they were artifacts or archival material, with what I read as a kind of devious quasi-objectivity. They reveal that, just as the tech industry must constantly renew its product lines, so it must renew its discourse and image, with the result that these ethereal attributes often escalate to ever loftier, often laughable heights. Indeed, if there is one thing that The Innovator’s Dilemma makes apparent, it is how much the look of tech has changed even since 2013. Just two years later, the skeuomorphic graphics, the dubstep, and the unimpeachable popularity of Call of Duty all read as distinctly, terminally passé. Evidently for Denny, to present these phenomena in all their brash irrationality is itself a worthwhile artistic gesture, and to take an explicitly defined stance, whether critical or satirizing, would be superfluous.

The Innovator’s Dilemma was on view at MoMA PS1 through September 7, 2015.

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Aleksandra Domanović. Turbo Sculpture, 2010-2013 (video still); HD video, color, sound; 20:00; edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Leighten, Berlin.

Domanović’s current installation, Turbo Sculpture (2010–2013) at Atlanta Contemporary, is a twenty-minute crashing of high-definition images and sounds. It examines the recent commission of monumental public sculpture that appears in major public crossways and tourist locales across the former Yugoslavia: Hollywood stars and popular musicians such as Johnny Depp and Bob Marley, fictional film characters such as Rocky Balboa and Donald Duck, and even former President George W. Bush. Garish, expensive, and extremely popular among citizens and tourists alike, these new shrines to popular commodities in American culture refuse the traditional subjects and themes of public monuments (such as national heroes, political leaders, or representations connected to the collective history of a nation) and instead grotesquely literalize the country’s swift embrace and belief in the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”[1] At once extremely jarring, ridiculous, tasteless, and thoughtful in its carefully constructed collusions of site-specific imagery and digital detritus of internet-age image culture, Turbo Sculpture is more than a subversive engagement with the implications of aesthetic failure or neoliberal kitsch. Similar to the dark humor of political philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, Domanović brushes against these tasteless sites by forcing the viewer to linger at the fault line between the ridiculous and the serious within the political landscape of former Yugoslavia.

Aleksandra Domanović. Turbo Sculpture, 2010-2013 (video still); HD video, color, sound; 20:00; edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Leighten, Berlin.

In the aftermath of Slobodan Milošević’s soft dictatorship of the region—its bloody civil wars, horrifying military interventions, and unresolved ethnic and racial tensions—Domanović’s work points to the broader tensions underpinning Serbian national identity through the current reign of the ersatz. Unable to reconcile history through visual representation, these public monuments to popular culture stand as insistent disavowals on behalf of the state to redirect the iconographic traditions of a nation that cannot own up to its violent, terrorizing past.

Titled in relation to “turbo-folk”—an admixture of traditional Serbian folk music, Western forms of commercial pop, Middle Eastern forms of dance music, and the rave culture that spread across the Balkans during the 1990s—Domanović appropriates the genre’s catchy, commercial lingo of deep rhythms, youthful rebellion, and grotesque scale in order to underscore the funneling of Serbian cultural life into mainstream markets. However, turbo-folk has long been regarded by left- and right-wing groups as the “soundtrack to Serbia’s wars,” both for its blatant, vulgar commerciality in Miloševic’s climate of war profiteering, as well as its distinctly un-European musical origins—a cultural symbol of the dark nationalist tensions and anxieties that circulated between Croats and Serbians during Milošević’s militant nationalist regime.[2] Drawing attention to the challenges at work in separating Serbian “turbo” culture from extreme political ideologies, Domanović places tension on the shallow gap between joyful subversion and reactionary forms of celebration.

Aleksandra Domanović. Turbo Sculpture, 2010-2013; HD video, color, sound; 20:00; edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Leighten (Berlin, Germany).

More importantly, Domanović’s concern with the historical legacy of national signs and symbols sheds light on an important national conversation in the United States regarding the use and abuse of icons of national “heritage” and “legacy.” As Domanović identifies, it is the elastic nature of cultural symbols that allows them to both collapse and thrive under opposing interpretations and conflicting contexts—a testament to the hopeful progressions and regressive compromises surrounding the politics of commemoration.

Aleksandra Domanović: Turbo Sculpture is on view at Atlanta Contemporary through November 7, 2015.

[1] See Frederic Jameson’s iconic text, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 1991).

[2] See Gordana Andrić’s article “Turbo-Folk Keeps Pace With New Rivals,” in the Culture section of English-language news outlet the Balkan Insight. Retrieved on the Balkan Insight webpage on October 1, 2015, at http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/turbo-folk-keeps-pace-with-new-rivals.

Simon Denny. All You Need is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX Rerun, 2013; installation view, Petzel Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

The art world allows for more nuanced and challenging modalities of representation than mainstream media outlets like HBO do. The artist Li Liao, for example, took a job at the notoriously exploitative Foxconn factory in China, which produces parts for Apple products, and then exhibited his uniform, ID card, labor contract, and an iPad—the object of his labor—as a work titled Consumption (2012). While not offering much to look at, Li’s work succeeds in concretizing an experience on the production side of the technology industry, images of which can be hard to believe. Taking another perspective, Simon Denny’s exhibition The Innovator’s Dilemma, now at MoMA PS1, trains its gaze on the rhetoric of startup culture, which the artist shows to be itself one of the industry’s most important products, albeit an ethereal one. Denny’s work could easily register as satire, but it is not. It holds up a mirror, the effect and purpose of which are not easy to ascertain.

Simon Denny. Berlin Startup Case Mod: Rocket Internet, 2014; custom computer case, packaging, heavy-duty computer hardware, digital prints on Plexiglas, custom Plexiglas components, metal fittings, Samsung UE40F6500 SS, video on USB stick, and custom spider computer case; 42 1/8 by 36 5/8 by 21 5/8 in., 30 11/16 by 31 1/2 by 12-3/16 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Innovator’s Dilemma includes four installations, each made to look like a trade-show platform—an appropriate type for representing the international echo chamber of startup discourse. All You Need Is Data (2013) arrays several dozen canvas posters representing events from the 2012 Digital Life Design (DLD) conference, an event held annually in Munich. Capturing the skeuomorphic aesthetic of Apple’s then-current operating system, iOS 5 (since replaced by the iconographically flatter iOS 7 and iOS 8), the posters pair photographs of leading industry personalities with associated pull quotes (“We are hard-wired to share,” says Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb). In Disruptive Berlin (2014), Denny creates modest monuments to that city’s top ten startups (as named by Wired UK in 2013). His sculptures consist of tricked-out desktop computers placed atop horizontal flat-screen monitors looping promotional videos from the associated companies, accompanied in some cases by spastic dubstep music. The Personal Effects of Kimdotcom (2013), meanwhile, re-creates a number of the assets seized by the U.S. government after its arrest of Kim Schmitz, the founder of the streaming sites Megavideo and Megaupload, including a server stack, a life-size model of the creature from the Predator films, and an artistic monument to Schmitz’s skills in the Call of Duty video game.

Simon Denny. New Management, 2014; installation view, Portikus, Frankfurt. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Helena Schlichting.

These works leave the viewer at something of a loss regarding Denny’s stance, aesthetic or political, regarding the material he displays. The quotations in All You Need Is Data may register below the hagiographic pitch typically adopted toward industry gurus at conferences like DLD, but not so much that they read as snide or ridiculing. Rather, they seem a more or less accurate distillation of what the actual events entailed; they could even pass for DLD promotional stock. Likewise, while the “monuments” in Disruptive Berlin have a touch of silliness, they could conceivably function as the trophies they purport to be, thus calling into question what would appear to be their irony. The Kimdotcom platform, for its part, strictly avoids passing judgment on its figure. What, then, are we to make of this rather noisy, banal trade-show environment, transferred to the context of an art museum? What is its raison d’être?

A potential answer comes in the form of Denny’s fourth platform, New Management (2014), which selectively re-creates the Frankfurt hotel room where, in 1993, the former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee famously declared a set of new management principles intended to make his company a more internationally competitive player. The enactment of these principles proved an enormous success, but the hyperbolic, revolutionary cadence of Lee’s speech—often recalling the platitudes of a self-help guru (“Change everything but your wife and kids” is the most famous maxim to come out of it)—is what most anticipated startup culture, which was then still several years away. Denny’s installation highlights the discrepancy between the grandiosity of Lee’s rhetoric and the cheap accoutrements of the room in which he presented it, gesturing to the fact that the speech rings hollow only to outsiders. For the audience to whom it was directed, it was and indeed remains gospel.

New Management suggests that Denny intends to work in a historical mode. Indeed, while the other three installations concern subjects nearer to the present time, they all present artworks as though they were artifacts or archival material, with what I read as a kind of devious quasi-objectivity. They reveal that, just as the tech industry must constantly renew its product lines, so it must renew its discourse and image, with the result that these ethereal attributes often escalate to ever loftier, often laughable heights. Indeed, if there is one thing that The Innovator’s Dilemma makes apparent, it is how much the look of tech has changed even since 2013. Just two years later, the skeuomorphic graphics, the dubstep, and the unimpeachable popularity of Call of Duty all read as distinctly, terminally passé. Evidently for Denny, to present these phenomena in all their brash irrationality is itself a worthwhile artistic gesture, and to take an explicitly defined stance, whether critical or satirizing, would be superfluous.

The Innovator’s Dilemma is on view at MoMA PS1 through September 7, 2015.

Like what you’ve read? Let’s keep it going: Donate to our Writers Fund.