Reviews of Trevor Paglen's Bloom and Opposing Geometries
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Are you interested in Trevor Paglen’s work? Make sure to take a look at the amazing reviews from Anna Mirzayan from Art Agenda Reviews and Daniel Soar from the London Review of Books! Mirzayan focuses on Paglen’s exhibition “Opposing Geometries,” where she describes the different pieces of art and their social and political implications. Soar's review highlights Paglens sculpture “The Standard Head” exhibition at The Pace Gallery in London stating that “it represents the unreal idea of a real ordinary person.”
From Art Agenda Reviews:
Machines have eyes. Calculating, extractive, synesthetic, they collect faces, monitor behaviors and habits, capture your fingerprints, eyes, and voice. So what exactly do these machines see, and how? These questions are explored in “Mirror with a Memory” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, a multi-format endeavor encompassing a collection of essays, a podcast, and Trevor Paglen’s exhibition “Opposing Geometries.” At its entrance is a looping video of interviews with artists, curators, and professors discussing the history and current usages of AI and facial recognition, and the impact of these technologies on privacy, governance, and subjectivity. Photography is overwhelmingly indicted as “not innocent,” not objective: it concretizes the perspective of the photographer, they argue, and is a technology of overexposure, riddled with dangerous overlooked biases. Yet as you move through the gallery, Paglen’s own works appear at odds with the responses offered by his peers. The portraits, landscapes, and installations pose more subtle questions about epistemology and art as forms of production.
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From the London Review of Books:
What Paglen shows instead is a compressed – and important, and untold – history of the efforts that got us here. In the centre of the room at the Pace Gallery was The Standard Head (2020), a two metre-high model in white lacquered foam derived from the work of Woody Bledsoe, a CIA-funded researcher at the University of Texas in the 1960s, who set out to measure and define a normative face to be used in early attempts at facial recognition: deviations from his norm could be used to identify people by their differences. To make his sculpture – an accurate 3D model of the head which Bledsoe would have built if he could – Paglen had to dig through Bledsoe’s archives. One of the things he learned was that the identikit ‘standard head’, which presumably became the property of the CIA, was generated by averaging the facial measurements of the subjects Bledsoe had to hand: volunteer students at the University of Texas – ‘basically all young white dudes’. The faultiness of the model, and its built-in racism, were really a feature of the times: the dataset available to feed the composite was limited by the researcher’s assumptions about what ‘average’ meant and by the ‘average’ subjects his institution provided.
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