John Player

As the streets and monuments of Rome, Angkor, Istanbul, London, Vienna and so many other imperial capitals testify, each empire inscribes its capital city with a particular architecture of power. The capital of our era’s most powerful nation, Washington, DC, boasts a dizzyingly dense concentration of such inscriptions: obelisks, domes, zodiacs, porticos, mythological allegories, sphinxes. Even its geometrical street grid, laid out in 1791 by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, is part of this symbolic architecture.

Montreal painter John Player examines the architecture of American power, but his is a second, parallel one. His images do not show us DC with its monuments and colonnades, as portrayed in the opening sequence of House of Cards, the popular Netflix series.

To a great degree, American power issues from a new kind of architecture, one that’s come, ironically, to resemble what currently houses the millions it subjugates: the suburbs, industrial malls, trailer parks. In its permanent impermanence, this parallel power architecture embodies the institutional analog of the residential trailer park—an endless aggregate of hangar-like warehouses, steel sheds, mirror windows, welded-wire fences and anonymous white trailers, all surrounded by vast parking lots and lawns tended by an army of precarious labour.

The National Security Agency’s installations feature prominently in Player’s work, but not exclusively. One painting portrays a nuclear submarine listening station that could easily be taken for a Christian boys-and-girls camp in the woods. What appears to be a couple of beige lunch boxes in a parking lot are in fact shipping containers for unmanned aerial drones, while a pair of trailers with tall antennae are in fact drone command posts. A separate set of nine small watercolours in desert hues shows airstrips and other installations in locations from Arizona to Pakistan.

Often Player depicts locations from an aerial drone’s elevated perspective; other subjects are seen as though shot through fish-eye lenses. And certain painted elements simulate the mechanized eye, depicting an electromagnetic field or an illuminated heads-up display.

Player joins a growing lineage of artist-trespassers exploring restricted places, a lineage that began, perhaps, with BIT Plane (1997–98), the Bureau of Inverse Technology’s playful series of flyovers of key Silicon Valley headquarters: Apple, Lockheed, Netscape, Xerox, etc. BIT Plane was notable not for what the plane’s camera saw—all those HQs might as well have been a bunch of Wal-Marts—but because of its successful transgression into restricted airspace. More recently, US artist Trevor Paglen has photo-surveilled secret government installations throughout the southwestern US deserts. In contrast to Player’s detailed images, the conditions of Paglen’s work—long distances imposed by security restrictions, plus the desert’s heat distortion—result in blurry, indistinct images, a sort of de facto self-censorship.

America isn’t the sole focus of such investigations and like Player, the artist-trespassers who conduct them aren’t always Americans. Consider Russian photographer Lana Sator, who collects her images whilst spelunking in abandoned or poorly controlled Soviet/Russian industrial installations; or French artist Laurent Grasso’s video simulation of the top-secret High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) installation near Gakona, Alaska, a favourite of conspiracy researchers.

Why should artists wish to represent secret places? Do images like Player’s, which comprise a kind of subversive fantasy of trespass, represent merely gratuitous curiosity, or do they mirror popular revulsion at the rapid expansion of all this secrecy?

For decades, the technocratic dream of surveillance exemplified by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, in which prisoners are watched but unable to see their watchers, has been held at bay by the democratic oversight of police forces and secret services. Today, however, governments everywhere are giving away the store to these top-secret trailer park boys. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has facilitated the government’s wholesale infiltration by the FSB security services. Here in Canada, Stephen Harper’s Bill C-51 treats protesters as terrorists, while compromising citizens’ privacy and giving security agencies a host of new powers.

Considering today’s tendency toward secret government impunity, Player himself admits to a sense of powerlessness. What contribution can a painter make? The same, maybe, as any individual citizen may do in any country where governments have restricted oversight by citizens: to bear personal witness to what in a democracy is truly abominable—the exclusion of the people from power. While citizens—and indeed, artists—still seek to watch the watchers, the dystopic Benthamist dream of total surveillance remains incomplete. ❚

“New Paintings” was exhibited at Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal, from May 14 to June 20, 2015.

Edwin Janzen is a Winnipeg-born writer, editor and artist living in Montreal.