A new exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art features six grainy, black-and-white ink-jet prints showing passports used by CIA agents involved in the widely reported 2003 abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan, Italy.
The CIA station chief claimed Abu Omar had perhaps fled to the Balkans, but Italian authorities later charged that the cleric had been taken to two American military bases and then transferred to Egypt, where he underwent torture.
The printed passport data, said to have been retrieved from Italian hotels where the American agents stayed, made me wonder two things:
First, could foreign agents -- say, from Spain -- be checking into California hotels right now with falsified documents, preparing to kidnap UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo to stand trial for war crimes in international court? (Yoo wrote Bush administration memos authorizing waterboarding, an interrogation technique also employed by the Khmer Rouge.) And second, what relationship do grainy prints of passport photos have to the long tradition of portraiture in art?
Both questions, the paranoid and the prosaic, have resonance in "The New Normal," a provocative if uneven traveling show from New York's Independent Curators International.
The 13 works of art, all made since Sept. 11, 2001, are pegged to then-Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion a few weeks after the World Trade Center attacks -- specifically, on the day before passage of the Patriot Act -- that a "new normalcy" was now operative in American life. In the wake of the catastrophic terrorist assault, "normal" would henceforth encompass minor annoyances, like removing your shoes at airport checkpoints, and major intrusions, like having routine telephone conversations bugged by Washington.
Trevor Paglen's "Six CIA Officers Wanted in Connection With the Abduction of Abu Omar From Milan, Italy" is a contemporary breed of "found image" art, pictures already in circulation and whose context the artist simply alters. Here, the tradition of official yet fictionalized portrayals of people -- say, France's King Louis XIV done up as the Greek god Apollo or British actress Sarah Siddons decked out as "the tragic muse" -- gets a darker, more sinister edge.
In forging new identities for clandestine government documents, how did U.S. spy-masters go about choosing fake names, false birth dates, phony addresses? Are they banal and random? Or did rhyme and reason guide imaginative choices?
