Trevor Paglen: the artist visualizing the surveillance state

(credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

For the last 14 years, the US—and much of the rest of the world—has been engaged in a secret war. This is a profound change for a culture that grew up watching armed conflict in Vietnam, then Kuwait, and then the Balkans unfold during the evening news. Visualizing this secret war, the architecture of the surveillance state it depends upon, and the symbology of the people who wage it has been the theme of artist Trevor Paglen's work for some time now. A small overview of his work is currently on exhibit in New York, and Paglen recently gave the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. We were on-hand at both to check them out.

Trevor Paglen gives the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.

Paglen has been documenting what he terms the "black" world—where projects and even their budgets are classified from public scrutiny—for quite some time. His 2007 book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me, consisted largely of embroidered, real-life patches from secretive aerospace and intelligence-gathering projects, often having to do with the missions or statements of morale. Paglen became interested in the iconography of this secret culture while visiting the Antelope Valley in California, part of the empty Southwestern US that the secret world has chosen for its own.

Often unofficial, the patches are often nonetheless revealing. Projects based out of Groom Lake in Nevada—better known to some as Area 51—will often have a group of five stars kept company by another single star, for instance. A more obvious example is the Boeing Bird of Prey, a classified experimental aircraft built in the mid-1990s. When the project was declassified in 2002, it was suddenly apparent the plane's unconventional shape had been hiding in plain sight on the mission patch all along.

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