Hock Essay

7/31/2019 Hock Essay

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Constructed Evidence: Work by Louis Hock, 2000-2006August 29October 15, 2006University Art MuseumCalifornia State University, Long Beach

Seeing Things Hidden: Louis Hocks Constructed Evidence

Just before sunrise craggy peaks are seen, capped by similar, invertedpeaks, which gradually become flatter and flatter, frequently stretching outlike great arms from the summit and uniting with those from neighboringpeaks. Once a city with all its buildings appeared in a valley many miles tothe north, but the morning sun quickly resolved it to a number of largeboulders, near the foot of a craggy mountain.

J.W. Barlow, Surveyor, International Boundary Commission Report (1893)

Full Disclosure

Constructed Evidence presents a series of recent works by Louis Hock that

explore arts complex relationship to visual experience. How does the image

produce meaning? Is it a conduit to some higher truth, or merely a veil drawn

over reality? Does the work of art allow us a privileged access into the machinery

of visual contemplation, or does it merely replicate the immersive, specular

economy of consumer culture? The rhetoric of visibility and invisibility, of

revelation and disclosure, has remained central to Hocks practice over the

years, and links his gallery-based work with his earlier public projects, produced

in collaboration with David Avalos, Liz Sisco and others. InArte Reembolso/Art

Rebate (1993) Hock, Sisco, and Avalos distributed signed and stamped ten-

dollar bills to undocumented workers. As the currency begin to circulate through

grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations and other businesses, it revealed the


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hidden contribution these workers make to the southern California economy, and

challenged the perception of illegal immigrants as parasitic. Welcome to

Americas Finest Tourist Plantation (1988), again in collaboration with Avalos and

Sisco, used a mock civic booster poster campaign on public buses to

acknowledge the labor of the underpaid (and often invisible) workers who sustain

San Diegos sun-drenched tourist economy. And NHI (No Humans Involved)

(1992), produced by Hock and Sisco along with Scott Kessler, Carla Kirkwood,

and Deborah Small, sought to humanize forty five women murdered in San Diego

between 1985 and 1992. The killings were downplayed by the local press and

the police, who focused primarily on the fact that many of the victims were

prostitutes and, by implication, less deserving of public sympathy and official

concern.

As these examples suggest, issues of representation are not merely

hypothetical concerns for Hock. Rather, they are central to the ways in which we

negotiate our relationship to social and political power, and they are imbedded, at

the most intimate level, in our lived experience of the world. For Hock, this

experience is marked with particular force by his proximity to the border. The

border is both a physical and a cognitive barrier, defined as much by its

permeability as by its opacity. It allows us (living in southern California) to

preserve the fragile myth that our material and economic privilege is

autochthonic, arising naturally from some intrinsic superiority, rather than

dependent on, and subsidized by, the labor and poverty of others. The border is

both defensive and offensive (Hock describes it as a weapon). The demanding,


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even life-threatening, ordeal of the border crossing allows us to punish illegal

immigrants for reminding us of this dependency, and for shaming us with their

own capacity for labor and self-sacrifice in pursuit of opportunities that we take

for granted. The border literalizes a process of curtaining or partitioning (we dont

have to see Tijuana as the chaotic antipode to San Diegos rational and affluent

order), and demands in turn a choreography of subterfuge, evasion and escape

on the part of workers coming north. The visual and spatial sequestration of

poverty and suffering that was produced historically through the suburbanization

of the modern city is thus reiterated in the relationship between San Diego and

Tijuana, which encapsulates in turn the gradual globalization of this division

through the inexorable expansion of a neo-liberal economic order. The border

emerges as a central motif in Constructed Evidence: the border between north

and south, between the vicissitudes of labor and the pleasures of consumption,

between the viewer and the object of scrutiny, and between the visible and the

invisible.

1. Pirmide del Sol

Pirmide del Sol: A Monument to Invisible Labor(2002) consists of six thousand

green berry baskets, stacked into the form of a pyramid roughly nine-by-nine feet

across and six-and-a-half feet tall. Pirmide del Solmerges the stripped down

formal language and modularity of minimal sculpture with references to the

Meso-American tradition of ziggurats and stepped tombs. The baskets are


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familiar to shoppers across the United States, and create an evocative bridge

between the gallery and the grocery store. The labor necessary to produce

fragile agricultural commodities like strawberries remains intensely human. The

fruits are too soft, too prone to bruising, for their harvesting to be mechanized.

Hocks pyramid reiterates this sense of fragility, as the flimsy berry containers

seem only precariously perched, one atop another. The thin, translucent plastic

radiates a soft, green energy. The pyramid form evokes the methodical labor

required to harvest the berries; a reference that Hock underscores via a nearby

wall text comparing the labor necessary to collect the two-and-a-half million tons

of rock in the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan outside Mexico City (over a

period of three centuries), to the labor necessary to hand-pick two-and-a-half

million tons of strawberries today (a task taking only four years), by a vast army

of poor workers. Pirmide del Solasks how we come to honor and memorialize

some forms of work, while others remain invisible to us. It is easy enough to

celebrate the cultural achievement of pyramids, tombs and cathedrals. The

grandeur of the structures themselves allows us to forget the violence and

coercion necessary for their creation; the lives lost, the grinding labor of

generations of slaves or serfs, the resources directed towards the valorization of

some divine hierarchy and its attendant caste, rather than the sustenance and

prosperity of its subjects. How do we recall what could have been but never

was? How do we forge an anamnetic solidarity with those who came before?

How do we memorialize a social order based on the concentration of power and

wealth in the hands of an elite, and dependent on the immiserated labor of


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others? Hocks pyramid, in its modest way, attempts to honor this forgotten labor

and the human cost of the food that we consume every day.

2. Nightscope Series

From the green aura of the berry baskets, Hocks exhibition leads us to the eerie

green bodies of illegal immigrants, captured by the cameras of the U.S. border

patrol. Hock drew many of the images forNightscope Series (2000-2003) from

an earlier video project, The Mexican Tapes: A Chronicle of Life Outside the Law.

The images, replete with gunsight-like cross-hairs, were produced with a night

vision camera that uses radiant body heat rather than reflected light to record an

image. Again the invisible is rendered visible. Like so many forms of new media

later employed by artists, from portable video to the internet, thermal imaging

cameras have their origin in the technology of destruction. They were first

introduced during the Vietnam war as a way to track the movement of the

Vietcong up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail; part of the US militarys futile

attempt to subdue a resistant population through sheer technological superiority.1

Today, thermal imaging cameras are used by the border patrol to detect illegal

immigrants crossing into the United States at night. Their bodies are registered

as blurred silhouettes against the cool void of the darkened desert as they try to

elude detection. The syntax of the Nightscope images, the inversion of

figure/ground relationships as warm bodies glow green against a black backdrop,

and the reduction of those bodies to indistinct biomorphic shapes, reflects on a


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formal level the cultural reduction of singular people to the generalized type of an

enemy, as anxieties over geopolitical differences are mapped onto individual

human bodies. The night vision camera reduces the immigrant body to an

abstract graphic notation, like an incoming missile on a radar screen. The Other

becomes a covert invading force to be revealed, targeted, and removed. At the

same time, Hocks subjects remain poignantly human and real to us. We identify

with them in their furtive gestures: crouching, running, and as yet unaware that

their visual capture by the camera has already ensured their subsequent physical

arrest.

3. Shelter

Shelter(2006) is the previously unrealized companion piece to Hocks 2000

Poinsettia installation at Ex Theresa Arte Actual, a sixteenth-century church and

exhibition space in Mexico City.Shelter

offers a quasi-architectural meditation on

the metaphysics of the image. Constructed of unpainted steel, it replaces the

algae-stained window panes of a conventional greenhouse with three hundred

reproductions of the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud is a kind of ur-text for an

indexical model of signification. It both covers and reveals. The sacred imprint of

Christs face marks the shroud like a photographic negative bearing the trace of

an absent original. The divine world is made visible and real via a sign

recognizable in the material realm. The image of the Virgin in the condensation of

an office window or Christs face on a grilled cheese sandwich, offer an

undeniable proof of their divinity that comes to the faithful with the force of a


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revelation. In the age of Photoshop, only the true believer still endows the image

with a metaphysical significance. Hock gives us a greenhouse, but what,

precisely, does it nurture? Credulity? Blind faith? The very repetition of Christs

face in the original shroud, and in its myriad reproductions, threatens to render it

banal; equivalent to a Warhol disaster scene or the cover of a super-market

tabloid. In place of the heavy-handedness of works like Andres Serranos Piss

Christ(1989) or Chris Ofilis Holy Virgin Mary(1996), Hocks Shelterconveys a

deeper sense of ambivalence about the religious power of the image. Viewed

from its interior stool Shelteroffers either a comforting haventhe solace of the

masters visage conveyed via theophanic revelationor the mise en scene of an

interrogation. Is Sheltera prison cell or monastic retreat? And what, Hock asks,

is the attitude proper to those who occupy a glass house?

4. American Desert

In the Nightscope Series Hock used thermal imaging technology to reconfigure

the practice of landscape photography in the western United States. This

tradition is typically associated with the romantic, large-format images of Ansel

Adams and Edward Weston, which portray the west as a dehistoricized and

depopulated realm of snow-clad peaks and crashing surf. In his work Hock

seeks, instead, to register the complex power relations that define the west

today. His interest in the cultural and political symbolism of landscape is apparent

in theAmerican Desert(2006) installation, exhibited here for the first time. The


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installation combines a diverse range of source material, including appropriated

advertisements and cartoons, night vision footage, and video documentation of

Hocks own perambulations in the desert outside of San Diego.American Desert

brings together many of Hocks longstanding concerns, extending back to his

own childhood growing up in Arizona and his early discovery of George

Herrimans innovative Krazy Katcartoons, a perennial source of inspiration for

artists from Picasso to Willem de Kooning. Hock first investigated the unique

representational demands of the desert in an earlier work, Southern California

(1979); a thirty-foot long cine-mural projected onto the walls of gallery spaces

and outdoor venues including the Carnegie Museum, the Pacific Film Archive

and, most recently, the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The very openness of the

desert, its uninterrupted vistas and featureless terrain, make it particularly

susceptible to what Hock describes as a mythifying processthe projection of

particular visual clichs and cultural narratives. This process is epitomized for

Hock by Disneys 1953 documentary The Living Desert, which reinvents the

desert as an odd amalgam of Darwinian jungle and anthropomorphized domestic

scene. The semiotic availability of the desert stands in marked contrast to its

physically inhospitable nature.

How, then, to construct a genuine image of the desert (to use John

Rajchmans phrase)?2How do we reveal the experience of the desert, not as a

vehicle for our own agency and self-actualization, but as something that exceeds

our grasp? How, as Hock has written, can the deserts overwhelming character

move out of a films background and into the foreground?3 Hocks solution is a


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tactical refusal of the image and a reversal of the figure/ground hierarchy of

conventional art, which subordinates the landscape as receptive void to an

imposed, figural content.American Desertis divided into two sections. The first,

which Hock terms the red desert, presents the desert as a symbolic resource;

iconic and mediated. Here he features appropriated footage from advertisements

and mass media (ranging from Roadrunner cartoons to John Ford films to

commercials for Toyota and the US Army that treat the mesas of Monument

Valley as glorified climbing walls). Hock then systematically effaces the

protagonists, leaving only a fast-moving blur and trail of dust to mark their

passage through the desert terrain. In the white desert section this distanced,

appropriated material is contrasted with a set of images that provide a more

immersive experience. These include two flat-screen video projections. The first

consists of a gradual pan across the landscape, using a thermal imaging camera

that reveals the detailed topography of the desert in a glimmering, almost lunar,

twilight. The desert floor seems to move forward and then recede as the skyline

appears and disappears from the cameras field of view.

The second projection features a seven-minute loop that Hock shot of a

colleague walking into the distance, at an oblique angle to the viewer. The long

lens compresses the deep space of the desert, even as the panoramic scale of

the projection draws it out laterally. The solitary figure merges, literally, into

ground, as hes absorbed into the shimmering bands of a mirage, only to re-

materialize as the video loop repeats itself. The final element inAmerican Desert

is a grid of nine separate video images that Hock shot during an all-day hike


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through the Camino del Diablo trail in southern California. Here Hock retraces the

path taken over the centuries by Indians, conquistadors, gold miners, surveyors

and, most recently, illegal immigrants, as they negotiate the majestic but

unforgiving terrain. The point-of-view footage puts the viewer, literally, into Hocks

footsteps and, by extension, the steps of those who came before him. This

footage is complimented by a spatialized audio componentsound recordings of

his actual movement through the desertto further heighten the viewers

identification with the physical nature of the desert habitus.

Hock locates the experience of the desert at the intersection of four very

different representational systems: the quasi-scientific mapping of the thermal

camera, the embodied, haptic perspective of the walker, the overloaded cultural

symbolism of the mass media, and the desert as a site of sublime encounters. It

is, I suspect, this last version of the desert that is closest to Hocks own

experience. For Hock the sublimity of the desert lies precisely in its resistance to

representation, or to any single representational mode; its insistent horizontality

challenges the enframing drive of conventional art, which subsists on objects

clearly differentiated, set in place, and available to our inspecting gaze. The

desert defeats this optical paradigm, dissolving the opposition between figure

and ground, the visible and the invisible, in the warm, heavy air of the mirage.

Hocks concern with the dynamic of visuality and disclosure has been consistent

throughout his work: from the hidden labor of the immigrant, to the forgotten face

of the victim, to the concealed bodies of the border crossing, to the Shroud of

Turin as the measure of divinity which is, by definition, beyond our grasp. And


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herein lies one of the central paradoxes of his work; the drive to make visible

that which is hidden and the simultaneous recognition that the process of

exposure will, inevitably, destroy that which it seeks to reveal.

Grant H. KesterMay 2006University of California, San Diego


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1 See Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold WarAmerica (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) for a useful overview of the use of new technologiesin the Vietnam War.

2John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p.10.

3 Louis Hock, unpublished Project Description forOpen Frames (2006).

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