Crisis Vision : Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders. "In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan uses critical arts projects as an entry point to investigate the racializing effects of contemporary surveillance. The book explores the surveillance vocabularies such artworks generate, the subjectivities and relationships they represent and catalyze, their assumptions and omissions, and their participation in the cultural production of surveillance as a social category. Monahan develops the concept of "crisis vision" to describe a pervasive, destructive way of seeing that amplifies differences among individuals and inspires the scapegoating of those marked as Other. Monahan turns to artwork that engages with opacity, an aesthetic intervention that interferes with crisis vision by rejecting authorized regimes of visibility. These artworks, including Kai Wiedenhöfer's WALLonWALL project, Dries Depoorter's Jaywalking project, and Dread Scott's installation Stop, challenge viewers to question their own place within inherently unjust social orders -- emphasizing ethical relations between strangers and thereby disrupting crisis vision"-- Provided by publisher Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 15 1. Avoidance 35 2. Transparency 57 3. Complicity 83 4. Violence 104 5. Disruption 129 Conclusion 153 Notes 161 Bibliography 193 Index 219 Torin Monahan explores a range of critical surveillance art to theorize the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance.