Trevor Paglen. Circles, 2015 (video still); video; 12:00. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

Trevor Paglen’s career has taken off like a spy satellite. He has become a key political artist of our time, despite the fact that his larger project is to represent something quite difficult to depict visually—namely, government secrecy. His work draws our attention to (if it does not always actually reveal) the network of sites, operations, and practices on which our government spends our tax dollars in the name of protecting us. The arrival of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in the popular consciousness, and all of the related revelations that subsequently emerged, have only made Paglen’s work seem more prescient and relevant. His fascinations are now our fascinations. And so Paglen, whose contributions to the 2014 Snowden documentary Citizenfour recently won him the right to share an Oscar, finds himself a standard-bearer for committed political art.

Paglen is interested in the landscape and the things our government likes to hide there. As artworks, his photographs and videos are usually without incident and gesture toward conceptual aesthetics—aren’t we all Duchampians now? In his latest show at Altman Siegel Gallery, Autonomy Cube (2014), a computer server encased in a Plexiglas cube, is poised on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery. The piece toys formally with Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain (1917) and the minimalist cubes of Robert Morris and so many others. Like many previous works by Paglen, for instance his pictures of secret government sites that can barely be perceived because they are so incredibly distant, or of satellites so tiny and far away that all we apprehend is the beautiful night sky, Autonomy Cube manifests the gap between the desire to expose something sinister and the desire to produce something visually cool and oblique. The distance between the work and its meaning is odd, even uncomfortable. That is the point.

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Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying

In the yellow haze of the sun

Recent contemporary photography, particularly examples frequenting the walls of major museums, often seems drained of political poignancy, given over instead to aesthetic and commercial concerns: epic scale, vivid color, and the elastic potential of digital manipulations. But if the traditional—and vital—imperatives of documentary photography have been superseded by the tropes of high art, a compelling show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art rethinks the terms of this transformation.

Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949) Walking Gun, 1991 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998 (1998.440) © Laurie Simmons

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection is on view in the Met’s dedicated space for modern photography, a short walk from the snaking lines of viewers patiently waiting for a turn in the dramatically presented Alexander McQueen exhibition. As Associate Curator Douglas Eklund writes in the introductory text, the 25 pictures gathered together represent the first time this space has engaged directly with the state of the world, our ‘culture at large’. But this is a show as much about the state of the medium, and about the commitment of the museum to represent the diversity of photographic practices. All of the pictures here have been made in the last three decades, and many of them are recent acquisitions.

Hans Haacke (German, born 1936) Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979 Gelatin silver print and chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 (2010.416a, b) © Hans Haacke

The show juxtaposes more obviously politically potent work from the era of the culture wars with more recent conceptual work. The appropriated and re-configured text and images from a corporate annual report in Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979, points to the absurdly feeble attempts of corporate America to sooth its collective conscience, and the constructed, surreal violence of Laurie Simmon’s Walking Gun, 1991, calls up an active resistance to gender inequality that is strikingly powerful if somehow also nostalgic for a time when such imagery felt more like a loaded gun.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moyra Davey’s Copperhead Grid, 1990, anchors the room, ten neat rows showing the decaying surfaces of American pennies, an elegy for the economy.

Adjacent to it, an early Jeff Wall, The Storyteller, 1986, sits casting its signature glow in the corner. Despite its contextual relevance here—it shows a group of Vancouver’s down and out gathered by a looming overpass—it is still a kind of elephant in the room, edging out some of the work around it by sheer girth, and foretelling the waning of the artist’s own political interest and the general shift in tone his brand of ‘museum’ photography has led.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But the show also offers the possibility of a sea change, or at least a subtly altered, more socially engaged institutional perspective on recent work.

The state of war and US military strategy is the subject of two very different pieces. Trevor Paglen’s work uses sophisticated technology to track covert American military activity, often resulting in abstractions of captured light—in this case, KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186), 2008, shows a streaking satellite purportedly on a reconnaissance mission somewhere above Yosemite. A recent work by An My Lê, in contrast, shows detailed images of its titled subject, Suez Canal Transit, U.S.S. Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt, 2009, that invite close examination. Sequence and perspective, however, are intentionally confused, destabilizing any feeling of a fixed point of view.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the wall opposite, one of James Casebere’s meticulously photographed cardboard constructions has never seemed so fragile or so perfectly chosen a subject. In this model, Landscape with Houses (Duchess County, NY) #1, 2009, shows a complex of suburban dream-houses, the likes of which we have seen vanished in the recent housing market collapse.

James Casebere (American, born 1953) Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, 2009 Chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011 © James Casebere

Like the repetition of Davey’s pennies and these rows and rows of houses, and despite the inevitable encroaching visual power of each piece on one another, the pictures in this room undeniably gather force together. The gallery space is occupied by their collective energy: violence, decay, suspicion, and the slow-burning failure of late capitalism.

A constellation of images by Wolfgang Tillmans (who was involved in their arrangement), including a sleeping baby and Shanghai’s TV tower, ends the show in a glittering attempt at restoring some meaningful connection to the alienated world pictured in the surrounding room.

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968) Oriental Pearl, 2009 Inkjet print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 Image courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York © Wolfgang Tillmans

As in the three-verse Neil Young song it invokes, the idyllic past and dystopian present conjures an irrevocable passage that leaves space only for a dream of a possible future.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection also includes work by Gretchen Bender, Philip-Lorca diCorica, Robert Gober, Katy Grannan, Curtis Mann, Adrian Piper, and Christopher Williams. It is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 2, 2012.

Trevor Paglen They Watch the Moon, 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

Seth Curcio: Trevor, your practice is centered in both experimental geography and art-making. Often the two collapse into one. Did your interest in geography develop concurrent with your interest in art-making? Or, did one come before the other?

Trevor Paglen: I’ve been an artist my whole life – much longer than I’ve been a geographer. In the mid 1990s, I started doing projects that had a strong relationship to landscape and the politics of visibility. While earning a MFA in Chicago, I became frustrated by the limits of traditional art theory, which mostly comes out of literary criticism, and wanted to find a more expansive theoretical language that could account for things like economics, politics, materiality, and so forth, in addition to questions of representation. Geography theory, I found, was incredibly powerful and flexible: it provided me with a way to think about cultural production in a much more powerful way than what I’d found in art and representational theory. So, I ended up moving to Berkeley and doing a PhD in geography.

Trevor Paglen: Unhuman Installation View/ Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: It’s interesting to know that you began making art long before your interest in science. In much of your work, there are strong references to art history as well as the history of photography. Those histories are intermingled with political and scientific concerns, allowing much of the work to function on multiple levels simultaneously. There are obvious references to Abstract Expressionism in works such as The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) and Untitled (Reaper Drone), as well as specific references to the history of photography in the works Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV) and Artifacts (Anasazi Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly). How do you feel these art historical references operate in the work, and what insight do they provide the viewer?

TP: Absolutely. There are all sorts of reference and nods to various art-historical moments and works, and references to specific historical photographs and gestures. I constantly use those references in a number of ways. With those references I want to ask “150 years ago, for example, a photographer looked at a particular place and that act of looking and photographing, at that particular historical moment, said a number of things about that historical moment. What happens when we try to see the same place now, and what might that act of seeing or photographing tell us about our particular historical moment?” The same is true for the references to various representational modes: “What,” for example, “does abstraction mean now? What, if anything, from that particular way of representing a historical and cultural moment, is relevant to our own contemporary moment? Why? And how?” For me, these sorts of historical references act as guide-points that we can use to understand how to see the world now, which is ultimately what I’m interested in.

Trevor Paglen Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: The notion of seeing remains consistent in your work. As you mentioned before, this idea can be explored through the use of photography or by referencing specific moments of art history, when considering how other artists have seen the world and then represented that view in their work. Beyond these methods, much of your work is also investigating technology that is designed to see us, but not be seen. I find it interesting that the main way you shed light on these objects is to track and photograph them yourself, further reinforcing the idea of seeing. It seems that you are actively engaged in watching that which watches us. How do you feel about this cyclical processes?

TP: I think that there is a little bit of any irony in the act of “watching the people who are watching you” here for sure, and it’s certainly something that I’ve developed into a sub-theme quite explicitly in some works. But overall, I don’t think that particular dynamic is something I’m categorically interested in. That reading seems to emphasize the “surveillance” aspect of the work too much, and I’m actually not particularly interested in surveillance, per se. But it does point towards something that I am interested in, something I call “entangled photography” or “relational photography” – what I mean by this is thinking about photography beyond photographs. What happens if we start thinking about the practice of photography as embodying the critical moment in the work? In other words, what if the “fact” of photographing something is the essential critical point of a work? I started thinking about this a while ago when I was photographing secret military bases and CIA prisons – for me, a crucial part of those projects is not always what the images look like so much as the politics of producing them.

Trevor Paglen Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 - Detail / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

I think I’m going to revise what I said about these relationships of seeing not being interesting to me. They are. But I think they’re part of what we might call the spatio-ethical dimension of the images’ conditions of production, rather than the aesthetic part of them. Sometimes the “entangledness” of the photograph can arise from these complex relations of seeing and counter-seeing in my work (i.e. photographing spy satellites or Predator drones photographing me), but not always. Sometimes the relational dimension can arise from the very fact of taking a photograph of something that, for political purposes, “isn’t there.”  Or any number of things. But, yes, the “relational” aspects of my work are absolutely crucial, even though they’re often not self-evident in the prints themselves.

Trevor Paglen Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: It’s intriguing to consider the fact of photographing being the critical crux of the work. However, I think I am still unclear exactly what you mean by entangled or relational photography in this context.  Can you provide me with a little more insight? Are you saying that the fact that you are able to produce the photograph supersedes the photograph itself? If so, why show the photograph at all — does it then become about exhibiting proof of the action?

TP: With regard to your question about whether “that the fact that you are able to produce the photograph supersedes the photograph itself,” what I mean is a little more subtle. The “fact” of being able to produce the photograph is just one aspect of this. Let’s think about what photography is in two ways: we have one aspect of “photography” that happens prior to the photograph itself, and we have another aspect which is the photograph or image itself. In the former sense, I’m talking about all sorts of things – on one hand, you have a technological and social history of “seeing with machines” (my definition of photography). You also have specific sets of relations that  “set the stage,” as it were, before you open the shutter. In every instance, those relations are going to be different, but what I mean by “entangled” photography has to do with making those relations somehow part of the work – whether visible in the final photograph or not. And yes, the photograph in a sense does become “proof” of the action, or, more precisely, the photograph may point towards the action. But that doesn’t mean that the “relational” or “entangled” aspects of the photograph supersede the photograph itself. On the contrary, we also have the photograph itself. The image or photograph is an opportunity, related yet distinct from the “relational” aspects of the photography process, to convey other sorts of meaning, metaphor, allegory, or, if you’re so inclined (I tend not to be), documentation. So I’m not really talking about either part of the photography process superseding the other, I’m talking about the fact that there are all sorts of opportunities to develop the “relational” side of the work that can contribute to what the overall artwork is.

Trevor Paglen Untitled (Predators; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 - Detail / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: As you often turn to the sky to track objects such as satellites, planes and drones, you seem to present these objects engulfed in a sea of space. Formally this presents a vastness that seems to echo the sublime. I feel like this gesture is also referential of moments in art history, but I also suspect that the idea of vastness itself operates as a metaphor for the unknown, or at least that which is present but rarely detected.  What are your thoughts on the concept of vastness and the sublime as it relates to some of the images on view now at Altman Siegel Gallery?

TP: This notion of the “sublime” is a really important part of what I do. I think about the sublime in relation to Jean Luc Nancy’s definition of it, which has to do with the sublime being the “sensibility of the fading of the sensible.” In other words, the sublime arises from those moments where we can sense that we cannot sense let alone understand something. This brings us to the “aesthetic” dimension of the work. In terms of contemporary critical theory, an investigation or discussion of the aesthetic is often thought of as a philosophical dead-end, a discussion that ended quite some time ago (except in reactionary ‘neo-art-for-art’s-sake’ conversations which usually function as little more than apologies for vapid art). But I’m not willing to cede aesthetics to the more reactionary corners of the art world. Historically, aesthetics has often been linked to notions of freedom: ambiguity and the sublime can be quite powerful and is something visual art can be quite good at dealing with. So it’s important to me that it’s a part of my work, but the underlying “relational” and ethical aspects of the work are crucially important. Without them, it’s just pretty pictures. And there’s no reason to care about pretty pictures.

Trevor Paglen PAN (Unknown; USA-207), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: Well, I appreciate that you are able to balance both political and aesthetic concerns without either seeming arbitrary. Taking a different turn, I’m also interested in the intersection of vision, geography and time in this new work as it applies to the 21st century. As an artist and scientist that produces artwork and research in this area, I am curious what you feel is happening right now? What are the implications of new technology and how do you feel it is changing the way we, as a collective society, view ourselves and the world around us?

TP: Ha! That question is too big for this interview, I think. This is really something I’m trying to think through. I’m not someone who thinks there’s something historically new about the fact that human perception is being radically reconfigured at the moment (I think that those in the 19th Century were probably greater, and this is a big hint to looking at some of my newer works), but at the same time, I’m interested in the ways that what “seeing” is, is historically specific. I’m extremely interested in what seeing is, and what seeing means in the contemporary moment. Of course, this has everything to do with machines, which in turn has everything to do with time (in several senses: 1) the ways in which machines rationalize time; 2) the ever-increasing “speed” of vision – think Predator drones in Pakistan flown by pilots in Nevada), which of course has everything to do with space (what Marx called the “annihilation of space with time” – again, think Predator drones flown from Nevada creating a relationally contiguous geography even though they’re obviously on opposite sides of the world). You can see the question gets really big really quickly.

Trevor Paglen: Unhuman Installation View / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: Thanks for entertaining a question of that magnitude. I know that you currently have an exhibition on view, but I’d love to hear more about the research that you are currently engaged in. What are you working on now, and what projects or exhibitions do you have on the horizon?

TP: In the immediate future, I’m continuing my work on drones and continuing my work on “invisible” infrastructures that the piece The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) points to. I’ve also begun work on a longer-term project dealing with time and universality. I know that’s pretty vague, but it’s going to be a while before I begin to understand that project.

Unhuman will be on view at Altman Siegal Gallery in San Francisco through April 2, 2011.