ART REVIEWS : Douglas Hall Creates Private Experiences in Public Spaces

The terror of public space is this: You are always being watched. You may not see the surveillance camera, but it is there, silently recording your every move. As you stroll through the mall, hurry through the airport, make a transaction at the bank, linger in the arcade and wait in the hospital, it is watching--and, it is waiting, too.

You are no longer unseen. But, are you really known?

Douglas Hall’s chilling exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery is about public spaces, private experiences, watching and being watched. Here are framed photographs of the cool, marble corridors in which power resides; a massive photo-mural of the towering skyscrapers in which institutionalized culture is determined; and, the omnipresent TV monitors through which state-sanctioned knowledge is disseminated.

Here you are, too--videotaped and then magnified through a sophisticated computer-imaging process--slapping a child in a Greyhound bus station, arguing with a clerk in the Department of Public Records, marveling at the splendors of Trump Tower, renewing your license at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

It isn’t you, of course; but, then again, it might be. Are you powerful enough to have remained hidden from view?

Hall’s power, by contrast, is palpable. Hidden from view, he controls the machinery, determines the vantage point, composes the “Computer/Surveillance Portraits.� These are made by going into videotapes of people interacting in various institutional settings, and modifying and zooming up the image so as to focus on individual faces.

What these portraits configure, however, are not individuals, but the casual ubiquity of the official eye and the mechanized brutality of digitized knowledge. Grouped in threes and fours, each set of photos is prefaced by an image of the overall scene (at the bus station, and so on), the faces concealed by black squares. The “close-ups� are intended to offer more particularized information.

The irony is that the closer in you move, the less definition you receive. The expanded pixels fragment the very information they ostensibly convey--so much so that some of the portraits become abstract, multicolored blurs. You are seen without being known, categorized without being granted an identity, incriminated without possibility of recourse.

The “Computer/Surveillance Portraits� dominate this large exhibition. Also featured is a video installation, “People in Buildings II.� Finally, a suite of 12 large photographs stare down vacant institutional corridors, materializing the invisibility of power.

Slightly disjointed from the rest of the show is a trio of large, wooden tables, each with a geometric configuration appended onto or embedded into its surface. At first, the tables appear as examples of Postmodern furniture design.

They begin to make sense, however, once you open their drawers and discover small images from Japanese pornography. The mysterious black shapes on the tables’ surfaces correspond exactly to the black marks concealing parts of the intermeshed bodies. Suddenly, the questions of voyeurism, power, fear and anonymity are redoubled. Not only has the roving video eye caught you, it has necessarily caught you looking.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through May 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Dynamiting the Documentary: Connie Hatch is well-known for her feminist-derived critique of the conventions of documentary practice. Manipulating archival imagery through techniques of reflection and distortion, transparency and projection, Hatch undermines documentary photography’s claim to unmediated truth and, more broadly, the master codes of a male-dominated historicism.

On view at Roy Boyd Gallery through Saturday is her latest body of work--which, like this artist’s work in general, is quite remarkable for its internal consistency, rigor of argument and strength of purpose. Here, the forms are familiar: pairs of full-length photographic portraits, suspended via steel cables; positive transparencies mounted to the wall at 45-degree angles; double images embedded in tiny magnifying cubes. But, the subject matter is different.

Rather than found photographs of known and unknown women, Hatch uses photographs of known and unknown men: Rock Hudson, Salvador Allende, an anonymous black soldier and, in the centerpiece of the show, the late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and his assailant, Dan White. She uses these common photographs to interrogate the troubling ways in which we allow pictures to fabricate our historical and cultural memories.

This work insists that a feminist critique doesn’t have to begin and end with the question of woman. Feminism, as interpreted here, concerns itself with the larger questions of activity and passivity, power and the lack thereof. What this work emphasizes is the manner in which male and female, the guilty and the innocent, the famous and the anonymous are equally subjected to the cruel and fixed mechanisms of history.

* Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-1210, through Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday.