Trevor Paglen, “Cardinals”
by Mark Van Proyen
Altman-Siegel Gallery, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through November 2, 2024
October 5, 2024
Trevor Paglen, “Near Silver Island Canyon,” printed 2024 , silver gelatin LE print, 38 x 38”.
All images courtesy of Altman-Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.
Trevor Paglen is a multi-media artist who has always been full of unpredictable surprises. But one thing is clear: he has always been interested in updating and playing with what historian Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (“Harper’s Magazine,” November, 1964). To be more precise, Paglen’s interests have focused on aspects of the cultural and technological underbelly of American paranoid style politics, with special emphasis on its Cold War residue that has lingered for decades.
Paglen’s exhibition follows in that vein, leading us into the freakish psycho-geography of American UFO conspiracy culture, which slyly alludes to the false and oft-times bizarre prevarications of Trump-era political discourse. Of course, paranoid political narratives long predate Trump. Hofstadter, at the time referencing Barry Goldwater, argued that the style he coined could be traced back to the the anti-Masonic and anti-Jesuit movements that emerged during the early decades of the Republic. Late-19th century populists continued to proclaim that the hidden hands of Catholic and Masonic skullduggery lurked under every conceivable wood pile. He then cites the post-war advent of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. Hofstadter demurred that the term “paranoid” as he used it be equated with the clinical condition of “disturbed minds.” In Trump’s case the pejorative does assume a clinical dimension.
Trevor Paglen, “Near the Utah Test and Training Range,” printed 2024, dye sublimation on aluminum print, 40 x 50”.
Despite this long tradition of rampant paranoia, rising global conflict, a fraught election, and the emerging proliferation of Artificial Intelligence, Paglen is prompted to ask: are we paranoid enough?
“Cardinals,” the title of Paglen’s exhibition, consists of 22 photographs that were printed in 2024, which is not to say that they were all taken this year. In fact, they were taken over a period of many years, mimicking entries in a visual journal chronicling a wilderness quest into unknown territories. The six largest of these are grandly scaled, subtly colored and carefully composed, capturing the same sublime vistas of the American west originally made famous by the likes of Carlton Watkins and Ansel Adams. In these works, Paglen shows that he has an authentic and knowledgeable affection for that tradition, especially in images such as “Near Silver Island Canyon” and “Near Utah Test and Training Range,” both capturing the vast and remorseless aridity of the great basin in ways reminiscent of the atmospheric paintings by John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Other images such as “New Windy Hill” show a more bucolic landscape, but they all say something about the way that Robert Smithson’s work embraced George Kubler’s idea of geological time superseding biological time, as advanced in Kubler’s 1962 book titled “The Shape of Time.”
Trevor Paglen, “Near Big Bend Road,” printed 2024, instant film, 4 x 5”.
Before he lets us get too carried away the grand sublimity of these images, Paglen includes a flying saucer zooming through the clouds, almost unnoticeable because of its small size. These ubiquitous saucers are the recurring theme that unites all of the “Cardinals.” Are they the Eyes of Horus or perhaps the Eye of Sauron? Instruments of a National Security culture run horribly awry? Not this time. Instead, they are perfect doppelgängers for other such “hoax” saucers that were famously passed off as being real in early 1960s tabloid publications. Some of the smaller examples such as “Near Big Bend Road” adopt other stylistics of 1950s era snapshots, collapsing foreground and background into depthless flatness, looking intentionally amateurish in the manner of most UFO hoax photographs in spite of their stylish paper and printing technique. In all cases, there is no recourse to the use of digital image editing.
Trevor Paglen, “Near Pole Line Road,” printed 2024, pigment print, 8 x 12”.
Trevor Paglen, “Near Pole Line Road,” printed 2024, pigment print, 8 x 12”.
The important point of “Cardinals” comes from seeing the conversation that takes place between the two groups of images. That conversation interrogates the very nature of photography and by implication, representational images in general. In Susan Sontag’s 1974 essay (included in her classic compilation of essays, “On Photography”), “Melancholy Objects,” she makes the point that all Surrealist photography is fundamentally redundant, because photography is already by its essential nature Surrealist, needing no additional gilding of the uncanny lily. Paglen’s “Cardinals” seconds that motion by staging a visual debate between a high art notion of the photographic sublime and another vernacular one based on obvious parlor tricks, the former resting on Edmund Burke’s notion of a Terror Sublime and the later paying goofy homage to Andre Breton’s idea of The Marvelous. It takes a minute of reflection to realize that they are two sides of a singular coin that mixes delusion with observation.
Trevor Paglen, “Doty,” 2023, still from single channel video projection, black and white, stereo mix, 66 minutes.
Why “Cardinals?” That question is answered by the 66-minute single-channel video titled “Doty” (2023), shot in anemic greyscale. The camera fixes close-in to the face of Richard Doty, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who worked in military intelligence. Doty recounts his involvement with government projects involving contacts with Aliens and UFOs, the later code named “Cardinals” for the sake of secrecy. He presents himself as a model of trustworthy sobriety, calmly recounting things that seem patently unbelievable, including the fact that the Air Force has documented contacts with five different extraterrestrial species from different planets. Doty seems cool and rational as he delivers his soliloquy, making it hard to discount what he is saying. Of course, he offers no corroborating evidence for his assertions, but in these post-evidence days of alternative facts, all bets are off. Personally, I think that Doty is bat-shit crazy. Is Paglen in agreement? If so, he keeps that card very close to his vest.
