Strategic Visuality: a project by four artist/researchers: Trevor Paglen, The Speculative Archive, J. Morgan Puett with Jorge Colombo, and the Center for Tactical Magic

In the following pages, four artist/researchers present their work in print form for Art Journal. What unifies their individual approaches is a shared attempt to deploy the aesthetics of truth in order to raise criticality. By aesthetics of truth, I mean an intellectual manipulation of visual codes that signify a truth claim. To be clear about what this entails, examples might include videotaped confessions, textbook-inspired design strategies, and experimental lectures in which claims are asserted that are, in fact, inaccurate, if not flagrantly false. Yet these projects do not simply manipulate the visuality of what may lead us to accept them as truth but, more important, they use this method critically to raise concrete historical issues. Their work is not simply sign play. The subjects of the individual projects range from Ninjitsu to beekeeping to the prison industry to the United States--backed coup in Chile. Generally, these artists work in a wide array of media including video, installation, and performance-based presentations such as lectures, laboratories, or street actions.

In asking these artists to produce projects for print, there were two goals: First, this is an opportunity to see how effectively their practices translate to print. Second, the following pages may indicate if their work points to new strategies for art and, more specifically, art publications. For example, in the case of the artist J. Morgan Puett, we have included pages from a catalogue designed by Jorge Colombo that accompanied The Grafter's Shack, an installation she produced at Wave Hill in the Bronx in summer 2002. In this particular instance, the catalogue embodied this practice so successfully that it is featured in this publication experiment.

Each artist in Strategic Visuality gains momentum from the belief that the production of knowledge is a performance. The emphasis on a performative, critical pedagogy appears to mix the insights of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the reflexive studies of Pierre Bourdieu. Combining these theoretical antecedents with formal skills of craft, design, and installation, these practices come into a more interpretable light. As you will see, the projects are extraordinarily reflexive. While a performance in the vein of Boal, the Brazilian liberatory theater director, may actually enlist the assistance of the spectators, these projects use ambiguity and even misinformation as creative material. The artists' research results in lacunae in which readers insert their own answers. If fictions are deployed in the manner of truth telling, it is not to mislead, deceive, or pull the wool over readers' eyes, but to provide a critical incongruity. In contrast to the spectator form of knowledge that Boal actually vilified (in the theater he spoke of spect-actors), can there be a reflexive form of knowledge production? In an increasingly consolidated and mediated field of vision, ambiguous information may encourage criticality in its viewers. If some of these projects appear too strange to believe, insert yourself into the discussion. What do you believe?

The projects also point to a growing art-world genre, which includes experimental documentary, lectures, and various other forms of empirical and theoretical research. The most recent Documenta (2002), widely criticized for its orientation toward documentaries and video, is evidence of this. While the emergence of this genre is often a source of conservative controversy, including accusations that it isn't art, its presence forces uncomfortable, yet significant questions about the role of art today.

The research component of these projects frequently determines a documentary sensibility, but in several instances the projects do not even tell the truth. Is this art? Maybe art is the wrong word. Perhaps postmodernity has undermined the productive use of the term "art." Art historian and theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff prefers the term "visual culture." He writes: "Visual culture is the study of the hypervisuality of contemporary everyday life and its genealogies. Given the 'weaponizing' of the visual during the recent Iraq war and the ongoing--and televised--iconoclasm of certain terrorist groups, I don't think there's any danger of it becoming a complacent field in the near future!" (1) This definition positions visuality within a discursive field of power where visual sign systems are deployed to achieve certain ends. Visuality is a strategy. It is not neutral. With this in mind, we see these four projects use the dominant visual system as a dancing partner that spins into something altogether different. They twist and turn, bend and weave, conflating and problematizing the notion of a neutral visual culture.

Discourse is framed in the Foucauldian sense when bodies of knowledge are policed, protected, managed, and authorized. It is in this sense that these artists adopt the role of interventionists. They move fluidly between discourses. Trespassing between borders, they are able to provide criticality while demonstrating the mutability of borders. For example, artist/activist Trevor Paglen moonlights as a Ph.D. geography student. He presents his work in the same way at both geography conferences and the College Art Association conference. This fluid hybridity is impressive yet strange. It is important to bear in mind that these artists' movements between discourses are only one part of their practice. The aggressive criticality of their works distances them from a number of the critiques aimed at contemporary cultural studies. The artists do not accept a relativism that validates all things cultural but, instead, maintain an analysis that provokes a materialist sensibility. The practices are grounded in a material reality with actual, material consequences. They analyze power. Understandably, this visual and semiotic tango upsets some whose worlds are allied to a field called art.