Launched in 2003, Hasan Elahi’s "Tracking Transience" captures the artist’s location and activities on an ongoing basis. Not unlike Marcel Duchamp’s "Wanted: $2,000 Reward", on view in the first gallery, Elahi’s work exposes the disciplinary use of a ubiquitous medium that might often go unnoticed—in this case, digital pictorial recording. The work amounts to an act of self-defense, conceived after the artist was mistakenly identified as a terrorist in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. By co-opting surveillance as an artistic strategy, Elahi simultaneously turns portraiture inside out. As the artist explains: “Instead of having the camera pointed at me, I have basically held up a mirror and pointed that camera outward and in that process I am generating so much noise or you could say a smoke screen or a camouflage. There is so much of my information out there that I am completely blurred in there.”
Object Description
Launched in 2003, Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience captures the artist’s location and activities on an ongoing basis. Not unlike Marcel Duchamp’s Wanted: $2,000 Reward (see cat. 28 and Goodyear, fig. 1), or self-portraits by Glenn Ligon (see Goodyear, figs. 2 and 3a–b) that critique the format of the mug shot, Elahi’s exposes the disciplinary use of a ubiquitous medium—in this case, digital pictorial recording—that might often go unnoticed. The work grew out of a strategy of self-defense, after the artist was mistak- enly identified as a terrorist in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. In turning surveillance on its head, Elahi simultaneously turns portraiture inside out. As the artist explains: “Instead of having the camera pointed at me, I have basically held up a mirror and pointed that camera outward and in that process I am generating so much noise or you could say a smoke screen or a camouflage. There is so much of my information out there that I am completely blurred in there.”1
Ironically, of course, as the artist recognizes, an activity that began with sub- versive undertones in 2003 has now become common, as countless individuals eagerly capture their every movement through “selfies,” instantly disseminated through social media. The attendant collapse, then, between art and life, which the artist relishes,2 raises a critical question: Just what space remains for the personal in an era of obsessive self-monitoring?
ACG
1. Hasan Elahi, as quoted in Matthew Clay-Robison, “Conversation with Hasan Elahi,” in Hasan Elahi: An Undisclosed Location (York, Pa.: Brossman Gallery, York College of Pennsylvania, 2012), n.p.
2. Ibid.
