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Dan Graham

Exploring the limits of self-consciousness and its representation, Dan Graham’s mid-1970s video and performances were highly charged experiments in the ‘splitting’ of the self via its reflections and representations. In Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1977, Graham adopted the no-nonsense cadence of a sportscaster as he gave a ‘play by play’ account of his activity in the space between an audience and wall-sized mirror. Shifting from banal descriptions of his movements reflected in the mirror to the audience’s responses, and then back again, the artist presented the dilemma of the socially constructed self as a moment-to-moment process requiring constant re-focusing. Negotiating between the social self and its representation via a running monologue which noted simple gestures and shifts in posture, the body is revealed as a somewhat cumbersome site of exchange between private experience and public expectation, alluding to the latent schizophrenia present in everyday experience.

Innocence Project

The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal clinic affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and created by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld in 1992. The project is a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. Mistaken for another person and forced to answer for their actions, the wrongfully accused exist in a double limbo in which they hope for the chance to correct the governments profound error, while involuntarily maintaining the identity of the guilty party. Marvin Anderson, Ronald Cotton, Clarence Elkins, and Jerry Miller, whose cases are addressed in Mistaken Identity, are four of the 254 people who have been exonerated through DNA testing, including 17 who served time on death row. They served an average of 13 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Eyewitness misidentification was the single greatest cause of their wrongful convictions.

Carol Irving

Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon has become synonymous with multiple, sometimes conflicting versions of an event, presenting the narrative as a phenomenon plagued by the difficulty of determining its one true version. In the context of criminology, the need to determine the truth of an event has meant the adaptation of scientific methods, with varying results. The polygraph test, as much a part of folklore as science, has turned to the physiology of the body as a materialist means of summoning what the mind might be reluctant to reveal. In Carol Irving’s PL/90-0559A, the artist makes use of the polygraph machine as way to examine her own experience of being the victim of an assault. The ensuing investigation, trial, and newspaper reportage are all contextualized via a series of questions derived from friends (personal), representatives of the state (police, lawyers, judges, etc.) and the media (journalists), which are asked of the artist during a polygraph exam. What emerges is a layered, sometimes contradictory portrait of an individual’s traumatic experience reconstructed through the perspective of others. The sometimes brutal, sometimes curious, and occasionally banal questions reflect the differing relationships and attitudes toward the criminal and the victim. Presenting her own case as an archival reconstruction of a subject through the experience of a crime, PL/90-0559A reveals the intricacies and biases which the artist confronted in the complex overlapping of reactions to her traumatic experience, while offering an equally revealing account of the social make up within which the event took place.

John Schabel

Conveying the anonymity and momentary isolation characteristic of long distance travel, John Schabel’s discrete portraits of passengers seen through the windows of a plane also reveal an underlying tension between public decorum and private refuge. The waiting passengers are shown in a suspended moment, paralleled by the “in-between-ness” of their identities as both individuals and members of a group. As portraits, these subjects are defined as much by their circumstances as by who they appear to be. Beyond categories of gender, race, and guesses at age and occupation, the identities of these people are up for grabs, suggesting a momentary lack of definition characteristic of being “in public.” The tension produced by the uncertainty as to who they are is exacerbated by the grainy, surveillance quality of the photographs. The viewer is compelled to join the photographer in this unsolicited observation, so that the portraits posses a quality of suspense somewhat like film noir, but because of the passive nature of the subject matter, the tension is far more subdued. Wavering back and forth in the process of travel, the identity of the passenger is in constant flux, as patterns determined by personal behaviors are at moments lost in or subsumed by the crowd. Isolating passengers in a moment of down time, these images describe the thin border between the specificity of one’s personal nature and the anonymity of the unrecognized, public self.

Karen Yama

The disembodied voices of dubbed film actors exist in a kind of netherworld. As they try to lay claim to the actor’s identities on the screen they must deny the obvious, (cowboys and Indians did not speak German) while attempting to convey the right fit for the character they portray to achieve “authenticity.” Like a sophisticated from of karaoke, this duplicity tends to interrupt the seamless nature of film as it claims temporary ownership over the original production. In Karen Yama’s Their Hier double-sided portraits of the three principle actors in "The Shining" are placed on a shelf in front of a mirror, with Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall, and Danny Lloyd facing out towards the viewer and the reflections of the normally invisible actors who provide the German voices for their characters visible as reflections. Perhaps as an acknowledgement of the underlying terror implicit in the use of a mirror in this context, Yama’s two sets of unstable portraits appear to inhabit each other, as each manufactured persona vies for authenticity against its perpetual double.

The Yes Men

Producing fake websites, impersonating PR representatives, and making up products that test the limits of even the most cynical free-market ideologue, the Yes Men’s appropriation of corporate identities question the blind faith placed in officialdom within polite society. Exploiting the seamlessness of our belief in the daily repetition of established truths, their pranks ape the delivery of these truths while adding a common sense element that renders them absurd. Through penetrating the tightly managed information mechanisms of mass media and business culture, they managed to breach, however fleetingly, the steady drumbeat of business-as-usual, which gradually immunizes members of the population into tacit acceptance of routine destruction and pillage on behalf of a “healthy” economy. Impersonating a Dow Chemical spokesperson on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster, which killed thousands and injured over one hundred thousand, Yes Men member Andy Bichlbaum appeared on the BBC under the name Jude Finisterra and claimed that Dow would accept “full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe.” As the parent company of Union Carbide, Finesterra claimed that Dow had resolved to liquidate “this nightmare for the world and this headache for Dow, and use the $12 billion to provide more than $500 per victim, which is all that they have seen. A maximum of just about $500 per victim. It is not ‘plenty good for an Indian’ as one of our spokespersons unfortunately said a couple of years ago.” The stock market backlash was instant, as Dow shares lost $2 billion in value in 23 minutes, recovering their losses later the same day when the interview was identified as a hoax. The worldwide media response brought attention to the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster that, according to Bichlbaum, is usually ignored in the U.S.