All is not cool in California. The state’s Resale Royalty Act, which gave artists or their agents (including their heirs) a 5 percent royalty on any resale of their art over $1,000 if the seller resided in California or the transaction took place there, was struck down by a federal court in 2012. The law was both welcomed and reviled, depending on whom you asked: Proponents claimed the law gave much-deserved compensation to artists for their efforts, especially for work bought cheaply and later sold at a big profit; critics countered that artists did not deserve special treatment and that the law put a damper on the art market while benefiting successful artists who didn’t need help. The gulf between these two views was—and remains—as wide as the Pacific.

Now a move is afoot to make resale royalty the law of the land. The first proposal by New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler, called the Equity for Visual Artists Act of 2011 (EVAA), mandated a 7 percent royalty for works sold at big auction houses (but, interestingly enough, not online auction sites) for $10,000 or more, with half going to the artist and the balance into an account set up to help fund purchases by nonprofit museums. The EVAA sought to prohibit the artist or the artist’s successor from waiving the royalty right.

That proposal failed to garner support when it was introduced three years ago. But Nadler now chairs the intellectual property subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee and put out a new version of the bill, dubbed the American Royalties Too (ART) Act, which was picked up by Representative Louise M. Slaughter of New York as a cosponsor this past March.

Before we address the problems we see with the legislation—and the reasons why many in the art world are up in arms over this issue—a little historical background is in order.

Resale royalty, also known as droit de suite (literally, “follow-up right”), originated in France in 1920, when lawmakers there became incensed that works by artists such as Gauguin and Cézanne sold for vast sums while the artists themselves often died penniless. The law passed by the French parliament in 1920 currently gives artists 3 percent of the total price of their works sold through private transaction or public auction. Moreover, since the right can’t be waived, artists cannot sell art without passing on the requirement to pay royalties each time the work is sold on the secondary market.

Today, every European country except Switzerland has followed suit and adopted a version of droit de suite. In Italy, artists may claim between 2 and 10 percent of the profit (not total price) made on sales of their works. In Germany, artists may collect 5 percent of the total price on works sold at public auction or through a dealer. The laws in some countries—such as Denmark, France, and the U.K.—provide for “collecting societies” that gather royalties from sellers and distribute them to artists.

In 1976 the otherwise laid-back state of California became the only one in the country to pass a version of droit de suite. But in the 2012 case Estate of Graham v. Sotheby’s, Inc., a federal court in Los Angeles declared that, because the statute regulated art sales outside of California, the law violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reserves to Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. In Estate of Graham, various artists’ estates and artists filed a class action lawsuit against Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and eBay for not paying California’s resale royalty and for concealing information that would trigger the law, such as hiding the fact that the seller lived in California.

In finding the law unconstitutional, the court in Estate of Graham pointed out that the California law regulated transactions occurring anywhere in the United States, so long as the seller resides in California, and that even the artist, who is the intended beneficiary of the law, need not be a citizen of, or resident of, California. The plaintiffs in Estate of Graham, who include New York-based Chuck Close, are currently appealing the court’s decision.

Supporters say that resale royalties are well deserved by visual artists, especially since their counterparts in other creative fields, like authors and composers, typically earn royalties on their works each time they are sold or played during a lengthy copyright term. Proponents also argue that the act will give artists an incentive to create, and that artists should share in the success of their careers as early works appreciate in value.

Critics point out that, whether or not one supports the philosophical position that artists should receive royalties on future sales, the proposed legislation is ill conceived and for a number of reasons would actually do more harm than good.

First, the proposal only affects sales at public auction, thereby discriminating against auction houses in favor of dealers and pushing the art market further toward private (read: less transparent) treaty sales. At the extreme, sales might move to locations that don’t impose resale royalties—hello, Hong Kong! And with an expansion of the language in the law to include online auctioneers and houses pulling in $1 million or more on fine art in the past year, the potential impact is vast.

A second criticism is that, since the new legislation would apply to sales over $5,000, it would not help the proverbial starving artist, whose works presumably sell below that level. In fact, in France almost 70 percent of all resale royalties reportedly go to the estates of just four artists, all of whom were reputedly quite well fed: Braque, Léger, Matisse, and Picasso. Indeed, the art Act might actually hurt emerging artists by dissuading collectors from taking a chance on their works—or by encouraging dealers to pay artists less for their work than they might otherwise.

Third, because of the secretive nature of the art world, there is little hard data available on the effect of resale royalties, including the number or frequency of resales or how often royalties are paid in jurisdictions that have adopted the right. The U.S. Copyright Office actually recommended against adoption of resale royalties in 1992 because of the lack of “sufficient empirical data.” More recently, in December 2013, the Copyright Office suggested that Congress might consider endorsing resale royalty rights, but only with “caution.”


Fourth, such a law would arguably penalize buyers who take a chance on less-established artists, as they end up paying out more as the work appreciates. As one of our smarter colleagues has observed, the proposed act isn’t so much a royalty payment to artists as a tax on collectors.

Finally, say critics—and, in the interest of full disclosure, we are in that camp—the art Act is simply a bad fit for the Anglo-U.S. common law system, which, with some few exceptions, codifies the free alienability of property and freedom of contract. This is in contrast to European “civil law,” which recognizes moral rights that are naturally inherent in creative persons. Nevertheless, the U.K. and Australia recently enacted their own resale royalty laws.

For now, whether there is enough support in Congress to carry Representative Nadler’s legislation into law is an open question. The proposed droit de suite certainly won’t be happening tout de suite. That is sweet news for those of us who believe in a free-market approach to the art trade.

Charles and Thomas Danziger are the lead partners in the New York firm Danziger, Danziger & Muro, specializing in art law. Go to Danziger.com for more information.

Nothing in this article is intended to provide specific legal advice.

A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Art+Auction magazine.

Iranian, New York-based artist Shirin Neshat is well known for her work in film and photography, which often addresses the experiences of women in the Islamic world. With pieces in the Garage Museum of Art’s upcoming show, “The New International,” opening August 1, and La Biennale de Montréal, opening in October, we thought it was the perfect time to catch up with Neshat to talk about her background and practice.

You have work in Garage’s upcoming show “The New International,” which focuses on artists who came of age in the ’90s. Do you feel that decade was particularly influential on your work?

Yes, the ’90s were extremely critical years for me, as I began my career in 1993 after years of not making any art at all. I remember right after graduating from art school and moving to New York in the 1980s, I had lost all interest in pursuing art as a career, as I found myself quite disillusioned both by my own artistic potential and the competitive nature of the art world. But in the early 1990s when I began to travel again to Iran, I found a renewed interest in making art — by then I had gained a maturity I needed as an artist, and a compelling subject matter that I felt so passionate about.

While that exhibition is looking back, you also have work in this year’s La Biennale de Montréal. The theme of that show is “looking forward.” It will be the first time your film “Illusions & Mirrors,” from 2013, is shown in North America. Do you feel that work fits well the biennial’s theme?

Well, usually it’s the curator’s task to identify whether someone’s art fits the description of the exhibition’s theme or not; but I happened to personally think that this piece does fit well into the biennial’s theme for a few reasons. First of all, “Illusions & Mirrors” is a major departure for me, as for the first time, I leave behind all cultural and religious specificities of my past work and look toward making art that entirely disconnects from any specific place or time, delving into a deeply existential issues. Also, within the dreamy narrative of this short piece, one does sense in the protagonist Natalie Portman’s performance that she falls deep inside of a dark, nightmarish psychological space but only to exit into a better and bright open space.

What project are you working on now?

I have just finished working on a collaboration with a well known choreographer, Krzysztof Pastor, at the Dutch National Ballet, on a piece based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” This was a big production, which took a long time to develop, and it just finished its run in Amsterdam. I’m in midst of preparing a solo exhibition for Mathaf, a museum in Doha, Qatar, which will open in November of 2014. Also, for the past few years I have been in development stages for my next feature film, which is based on the life and music of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthoum. Hopefully we can begin to finally shoot this film in 2015. It will be co-directed, like “Women Without Men,” with my partner, Shoja Azari.

What’s the last show that you saw?

The last New York museum show I visited was at the New Museum. I particularly enjoyed Ragnar Kjartansson and Camille Henrot’s exhibitions. Also, in June I visited exhibitions in Paris, including the Ilya Kabakov and Bill Viola’s in the Grand Palais, Thomas Hirschhorn and Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Palais de Tokyo.

What’s the last show that surprised you? Why?

I was quite taken back by Hiroshi Sugimoto’s wonderful exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Up to now I have admired this artist as a master photographer, but his exhibition showed a new side of him. A highly conceptual show, for the first time I saw him taking a more sculptural approach in the way that he used space, installing both his own art work and objects all leading to a highly moving and poetic show.

Describe a typical day in your life as an artist.

I am a hard worker and the day usually starts by jogging in the park and returning people’s emails and phone calls before I get to my studio. I work all day sometimes six days a week but I leave my nights free as I enjoy my time off by going to movies, seeing friends, and most often taking my dance classes.

Do you make a living off your art?

Yes.

What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?

My laptop and my paint brushes.

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

My projects tend to be long-term projects, and not so much developed on spontaneous ideas, but I guess most often my inspirations arise from reading, travels, and good conversation with friends.

Do you collect anything?

I have begun to collect some art, particularly those of my friends.  Also, I have an obsession with old tribal jewelry, particularly from Middle East and Asia.

What is your karaoke song?  

I don’t even sing in the shower. I’m too afraid of hearing my own voice!

What’s the last artwork you purchased?

It must have been some work by a young Iranian artist, Ala Dehghan, at Thomas Erben gallery in New York.

What’s the first artwork you ever sold?

In 1995, I sold my first art work at Annina Nosei Gallery from the “Women of Allah” series. This was my first solo exhibition and I remember two people who acquired my work from that show were Kiki Smith and Cindy Sherman, and I was so flattered.

What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum or gallery?

I thought the recent exhibition by Thomas Hirschhorn at Palais de Tokyo in Paris was quite weird but in a nice way. He had filled one floor of the museum with truck and car tires, creating a maze of spaces that included meeting rooms, a library, art studios for children, a bar, and a TV room where the visitors could select and watch a movie of their liking.

What’s your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant?

Fanelli bar and restaurant in Soho.

Do you have a gallery/museum-going routine?

Yes. Sometimes I take an afternoon off to see shows in Chelsea or the Lower East Side with my friends and co-workers at my studio. 

What’s the last great book you read?

“Museum of Innocence” by Orhan Pamuk.

What work of art do you wish you owned?

One of Goya’s black paintings.

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

Cuba, Lebanon.

What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about? 

As far as artists go, I believe Laleh Khoramian is a great Iranian artist who deserves far more recognition than she has received.

Storefront for Art & Architecture remains one of New York City’s best kept secrets, even though its doors have been open since 1983.  

Who’s your favorite living artist?

Marlene Dumas. Although I am not a painter, her work moves me deeply.

What are your hobbies?

African dance.

— Lucas Taps Museum Architect: Beijing-based MAD Architects, founded by Ma Yansong, has been chosen to design George Lucas’s Museum of Narrative Art in Chicago. Chicago-based architecture firm Studio Gang will oversee the landscape design. The museum plans to release designs by the end of 2014 and open the museum by 2018. [TAN]

— Rebels Take Museum Tank in Ukraine: Ukrainian rebels took a World War II-era tank and two howitzers from the World War II museum in the insurgent-held city of Donetsk. “They had written authorization to take them away,” said a guard at the museum. “They loaded them into a big truck. They took the tank that was least damaged. I think they’re going to use them to fight.” [AFP]

— Versaille Gets First Permanent Sculpture in 300 Years: Sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel will be the first artist to have his work permanently added to Versailles’s gardens in more than 300 years. The artist is producing three fountain sculptures, made of nearly 2,000 glass orbs, to be installed later this summer as part of a complete renovation of the André Le Nôtre-designed gardens. Othoniel told the Wall Street Journal, “As an artist, and a French artist in particular, there is something very special about making a mark on the land that Le Nôtre and Louis XIV designed.” [WSJ]

— Santa Fe Indian Market Has a New Competitor: The Santa Fe Indian Market, which draws close to 175,000 to the city each August, has a competitor for the first time in its 93-year history, with the inaugural Indigenous Fine Arts Market set to open the same week. [NPR]

— Construction Puts Pressure on Met Food Vendors: Construction on the Met’s plazas through September 9 has left room for only eight food vendors outside the museum, who have been camping out all night to secure their locations. [NYT]

— MOCA’s Blank Exhibition Schedule: LA MOCA’s upcoming exhibition schedule for the Geffen Contemporary and main building on Grand Avenue is puzzlingly blank. [LAT]

— The Delaware Art Museum now expects to raise $19.8 million (instead of $30 million) from the sale of three of its works — causing the museum to consider selling a fourth. [Delaware]

— Someone spray painted images of Homer Simpson all over the exterior of the MFA Boston. [Boston]

— The Louvre Abu Dhabi will announce 300 yearlong loans from 13 French museums by the end of this year. [TAN]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

Manfred Pernice’s “Bbreiland,” at Regen Projects in Los Angeles through August 16, is the latest manifestation of something seen before, a restaging of the artist’s 2012 exhibition at Anton Kern in New York titled “Pezzi.” That it has been shown elsewhere is not important: Pernice wants this body of work to be regarded less as a set of unique objects and more as a way of life. As in 2012, a number of similar boxes are filled with material, arrayed on steps of wood that become shelves when the boxes are hung vertically. It doesn’t really matter what material Pernice chooses, for, as his manifesto on the project’s website attests, “every gesture and glaring manifestation is only a bubbling mumble, an overcooked pea.” What the viewer gets is essentially a pizza with multiple toppings: some may satisfy, while others will just be seen as junk. 

Pernice collects potential for meaning, rather than directing or arbitrating it. This may seem like an intellectual trick to dodge any systematic form of composition or ideology, and for the most part, it is. Critic Roberta Smith initially read Pernice’s work as a contained form of scatter art in 2001, but as his career has progressed, his lineage becomes clearer: less scatter art and more in line with irreverent hoarders like Dieter Roth and Martin Kippenberger. Pernice picks up right where they left off, tossing packs of cigarettes and half-empty bottles of rum onto middle-class throw rugs. 

The result at Regen Projects is a sort of museum of punk entropy. Some boxes lie on the floor, others hang on the wall with their contents sitting on shelves and behind glass. There are no grand theories, but there are shifts in meaning. The objects feel more in the realm of life on the floor, but more in the realm of art on the wall. Assorted papers, for instance, feel discarded and haphazard while horizontal, but when vertical, they take on the quality of collage and seem firmly in the world of the image. This is art as strategy, as posture. Even the sale of the works speak to its slippery punk ethos: 20% of the profits “supports leisure facilities in Spain and southern Sweden, organizes street parties, and helps young painters in the procurement of work material.” In other words, Pernice will have fun in Ibiza and will always have paint. Charity, indeed. 

A version of this article appears in the October 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.

The Asian Art Museum first opened its doors in 1966 and was built on the collection of Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, who wanted to make San Francisco “one of the world’s greatest centers of Oriental culture.” Nearly 50 years later, the institution has grown significantly, moving to stately new digs in the heart of San Francisco’s Civic Center, just next door to City Hall. The museum is mostly known for showing historical and traditional work from a variety of Asian regions, but that is all changing with a new institutional mission to show more contemporary art, as well as work that doesn’t necessarily find its origin in Asia.

Director Jay Xu said that the museum will show non-Asian art more often in the future. “Our museum’s new artistic vision calls for it,” he explained. “We aim to explore Asia’s global relevance and spark connections across cultures and through time with art experiences that inspire new art, new creativity, and new thinking. These efforts support our new artistic vision. We believe Asia is for all, Asian art is for all.”

With that mission in mind, the museum has stepped outside its comfort zone for an unorthodox summer exhibition titled “Gorgeous.” The show, which runs through September 14, presents a spectrum of objects that might be described as gorgeous and in the process seeks to provoke the audience to wrestle with the term for themselves. Bridging 2,200 years and dozens of cultures, the sundry objects in the show were sourced from the Asian Art Museum’s collection and that of SFMOMA, which is currently closed for renovations, as part of the latter’s On the Go offsite programming.

The exhibition is part of a strategy to appeal to new audiences and comes complete with a Barbra Streisand-inspired hashtag: #hellogorgeous. Xu acknowledges that the show is trying to bring in younger people, but calls them “low-hanging fruit.” “I hope that it also draws more mature audiences, ones who might be accustomed to more traditional fare,” he said. “If they come, and enjoy it, then I think we’ve definitely succeeded.”

The museum’s galleries are filled with unlikely bedfellows. Items like an erotic Tom of Finland drawing that depicts two muscled men literally bulging out of their pants, from SFMOMA’s collection, sits in a room with a Japanese silk Noh robe covered in an elegant flower pattern, from the Asian Art Museum. Elsewhere, Jeff Koons’s marble bust “Self-Portrait” from 1991 (also currently on view in his Whitney retrospective) is steps away from a statue of the Buddhist deity Simhavaktra Dakini, dated 1736-1795. There’s even a first generation iPhone on display. Co-curators Forrest McGill and Allison Harding admit that the show is a gamble.

“Certainly the museum has been wanting to find opportunities to experiment with various approaches and to take some risks,” McGill said. “Definitely this one was a risk for us because some of our core audience isn’t very interested in international modern and contemporary art. Things like taking this very subjective approach, having a degree of playfulness, having the labels all signed by either Allison or me, and having them in very personal voices — all of that stuff we’d never done before. We wanted to try it.”

Eschewing political or theoretical context, the curators wrote highly informal wall labels that offer up personal reflections on the works and are signed with their names. They also designed the catalogue to look like a fashion magazine.

“It felt very vulnerable for us to share our personal reactions to objects that you could write books and books about from a scholarly perspective, but I think what it’s done is make unfamiliar objects seem less intimidating to people,” Harding said. “You have to keep in mind, we are talking about two very different audiences coming together. The show is so diverse that something is going to be unfamiliar to everybody. To give people a way in and to model that behavior of  ‘I just looked at this object for a long time and this is what occurred to me,’ I think that is giving people the confidence to approach objects in a very open way.”

So far, in terms of attendance at the museum, it seems that the risk has paid off. “We’re about one third through the run of the show, and we’ve drawn more than 20,000 visitors,” Xu said. “Attendance can vary between season and an exhibition topic, but attendance for ‘Gorgeous’ is outpacing last summer’s exhibition of Japanese masterworks from the collection of Larry Ellison by 30 percent.”

Going forward, the museum plans to continue to explore connections between East and West. Next year, it will borrow masterworks from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibition titled “Monet to Matisse: Japan and Western Masters.”

“As Asia’s world influence grows, so does the importance of understanding the cultures of this diverse and vast region,” Xu said. “The Asian Art Museum is ready to help facilitate that understanding.”

— Tate Gets Emin Bed for 10 Years: Cologne-based industrialist Count Christian Duerckheim, who purchased Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” for £2.5 million earlier this month, has agreed to give the Tate a 10-year loan of the work. “I always admired the honesty of Tracey, but I bought ‘My Bed’ because it is a metaphor for life, where troubles begin and logics die,” Duerckheim said. [TAN]

—  9/11 Museum Cross Will Stay: A three-judge panel has dismissed the lawsuit brought by a group of atheists against the 9/11 Museum for displaying a cross-shaped beam artifact. The group was hoping that the museum might add a plaque to the display that read something along the lines of, “atheists died, too.” “Such an observer would not understand the effect of displaying an artifact with such an inclusive past in a Museum devoted to the history of the September 11 attacks to be the divisive one of promoting religion over nonreligion,” federal Judge Reena Raggi wrote in the court’s decision. “Nor would he think the primary effect of displaying The Cross at Ground Zero to be conveying a message to atheists that they are somehow disfavored ‘outsiders,’ while religious believers are favored ‘insiders,’ in the political community.” [WP]

— Art Museum Attendance Soars Worldwide: As attendance at the world’s art museums increases, institution officials are trying to find ways to accommodate the crowds while protecting the art. The New York Times cites a growing middle class in Asia and Eastern Europe as one of the main factors for increased attendance at museums like the Louvre (which had 9.3 million visitors in 2013) and the British Museum (which saw 6.3 million). Some tactics museums have used to control the flow of people include timed tickets and extended hours, but sites like the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel are still resorting to overhauling air conditioning systems to preserve Michelangelo’s masterful frescoes from the 22,000 people visiting each day. [NYT]

— Goldsmiths Picks Art Gallery Designer: The London-based architecture firm Assemble has been chosen to design Goldsmiths College new art gallery. [ArchDaily]

— St. Louis Art Museum to Keep Egyptian Mask: Even though there is evidence to suggest that the ancient Egyptian mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer was stolen, the US Department of Justice is forfeiting its fight to reclaim the artwork from the St. Louis Art Museum, where it is currently housed. [STL Today]

— Palestinian Museum Plans Move Forward: Jack Persekian, director of the new Palestinian Museum in the West Bank, has said that plans for the institution are moving forward despite escalating conflict in the region. [TAN]

— A donation of work from Picasso’s daughter to Paris’s Picasso Museum shows confidence in the institution’s new president, Laurent Le Bon. [TAN]

— London’s famous Gherkin skyscraper is up for sale for about £650 million. [The Guardian]

— New York’s uber hip shared workspace Neuehouse is opening an LA branch in the city’s historic CBS radio building on Sunset Boulevard. [NYT]

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A major shift in the narrative of British rock music, from the noisy barrage of the late 1980s underground toward the massive bombast of 1990s Britpop, is charted over the course of two films playing at “Sound + Vision,” a series of music-related documentaries at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, July 31-August 6. Today, the two distinct schools of sound represent two epochs — albeit one significantly more commercially popular than the other — and have reemerged in recent years, with musicians capitalizing on their influence through comeback tours directed at a whole new, and much younger, audience.

Series opener “Beautiful Noise” (July 31) focuses on a group of bands that heavily redefined the sound of underground music across the world. The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and the Cocteau Twins — the three most significant bands to materialize from this period — produce wildly different sounds live and on record. What they share is an attraction to noise, at times ethereal and at times aggressive, which is marked by the influence of classic pop.

Some bands demonstrated this approach more clearly than others. The Jesus & Mary Chain produced a mutated form of Brill Building pop, equally informed by the screeching feedback of punk as Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, that still today feels like a kick in the teeth next to the hiss-and-whirl of the Cocteau Twins, who looked toward Brian Eno and his ambient experimentations as their inspiration. My Bloody Valentine seemed to meld the two, and the result was the most highly developed sound of all three, beautiful one moment and damaging the next.

But by the mid-1990s, all these older bands had faded away. The presence of grunge music in America put a hold on their commercial prospects across the Atlantic, and at home the popularity of Britpop made their introverted music practically retrograde. The British bands of both genres shared a middle-class antagonism, but the new sound was big and dramatic, and the scene became defined by competition. Bands like Oasis and Blur built fan bases by forcing audiences to pick sides. Groups traded barbs in the press, wrote coded songs about each other, and made their feud the central narrative running through the Britpop era.

Outside of the central drama existed Pulp. Their discography overlaps with many of the bands featured in “Beautiful Noise,” but they were decidedly Britpop in sound and image. Their true distinction was their eclectic sonic range, which captured everything from early Scott Walker crooning to the slick pop of Abba, as well as a focus on the performativity of rock music, led by one of the era’s greatest characters on stage: singer Jarvis Cocker.

“Pulp” (August 6), which closes out the “Sound + Vision” series, documents the last night of the band’s 2012 reunion tour in their hometown of Sheffield, England. But instead of the typical concert film — which sees the band running through the hits, the fans screaming in agony — we get a more nuanced portrait of their roots. Director Florian Habicht spends a good deal of the film roaming the streets of Sheffield, interviewing local residents, and visiting the far corners of the city in an attempt to capture something on film that is deeply embedded in the music: a sense of place. Blur and Oasis, who fizzled out after their early success, were global bands that appealed to local sensibilities. Pulp was a local band, rooted in a specific milieu and ideology, whose music resonates with people all over the world.

Many of those fans show up for the concert that frames the documentary. And many of them are there not just because of the songs, but also because of Jarvis Cocker himself. The singer has always been a strange idol, lanky and beautiful in non-traditional ways, displaying a Bowie-like otherworldliness. His persona oscillates between the working-class roots of Sheffield (displayed on “Common People,” the best song produced in the Britpop era) and the fabulousness of rock ’n’ roll stardom. The persona is at once tongue-in-cheek and deeply serious, critical and embracing. On stage in front of thousands of people, Jarvis withers around, humping speakers and falling to the floor in ecstasy. It’s all performance, a mask but not a deceptive one. Nothing is hidden. The message is clear: I’m just like you, and you can do this too. 

“Plein Air,” the title of Mark Tribe’s solo exhibition that opened this month at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, evokes the unspoiled landscape tradition of painting’s past. But Tribe has created photographs of a depopulated earth by running raw data through an advanced cartography program, prompting questions about visibility, representation, and political violence. In advance of the show’s opening he spoke with Chelsea Knight, a fellow New York-based artist and collaborator, about this exhibition and his larger body of work. The final iteration of Knight and Tribe’s ongoing project Posse Comitatus, a video and performance work that combines movements of militia groups with contemporary choreography, will be on view at DiverseWorks in Houston November 2014 through January 2015.

Tell me about “Plein Air,” your upcoming exhibition at the Corcoran.

I’ll be showing new work—a series of aerial photographs of virtual landscapes. Like the series “rare earth” and my recent cloud studies, they relate to my interest in how the physical world is increasingly enmeshed with the virtual worlds of computer simulation and data.

So these aren’t actual places? They’re fictions?

They’re not fictional, but they aren’t quite real, either. I guess it depends on what we mean by real. They’re simulations of actual places, created using real geospatial data—latitudes and longitudes and altitudes—and software that generates the trees, grass, rocks, snow, light, and atmosphere.

I see your work as a kind of fictional documentary or a parafiction. Looking at the images, which are seductive, calls to mind the inverse of what I experience much of the time. I think of real spaces not
as a commonwealth or an endless landscape of trees and grass but as congested cities and threatened, fragile environments haunted by the specter of full-fledged global warming. With that in mind, yours are somewhat idealized spaces.

Yes, that’s right. On one level they’re symptoms of a longing I feel for an unspoiled nature. We’re part of a generation that’s presiding over the wholesale destruction of the earth’s ecosystems—deforestation, mass extinction, climate change. Part of me does have a desire, almost a fantasy, for a kind of shangri-la that isn’t subject to the history we’re living through right now. But your question also points to the tenuous status
of photographs today. Photographs have always been a mix
of fact and fiction. They have the indexical quality of recording an actuality, and they’re also almost always selected and manipulated. The advent of digital photography intensified this instability, but now photographs are being enhanced and contextualized with data in ways that give them a new kind of legibility. Take, for example, a smartphone photo that’s geotagged with GPS coordinates and uploaded to Instagram, or the video feed from a CIA drone. The content of these images is not just in the pixels; there is a lot more than meets the eye. It seems we have entered a new era in the history of representation. We might call it the era of the data image. This is certainly true of the landscapes I’ll be showing at the Corcoran; they look remarkably vivid, but in fact they are images of data. Unlike traditional photographs, which are made with machines called cameras that use lenses to capture reflected light, these photographs are made with a new kind of machine that captures information.

Does the fact that they bleed outside the traditional rectangular shape have to do with the type of imagery?

Initially it’s simply an artifact of the technology. I take multiple images at each location and stitch them together. The software
I use produces composite images with complex, polygonal
shapes. Every once in a while the results are really nice. They remind me of the shaped canvases of certain 20th-century painters like Ellsworth Kelly or Kenneth Noland. The shapes appeal to me both on a techno-symbolic level and on an aesthetic level.

Of your piece Dystopia Files, 2009-11, you said: “I think of protest and the policing of protest as public performance, and I’m interested in the ways in which video mediates these performances and inflects their position in the public sphere.” For that project, you appropriated videos of police interacting with protesters. In the current series, you’ve removed both the viewer and the viewed.

Right, it’s like a robotic eye looking at a world without humans.

So can you talk about how you envision what a performance is in this piece, or if this piece is engaging with performance?

I haven’t thought about it in those terms. I have thought about this work in relation to the history of landscape representation, which I’ve come to learn is never neutral. Representations of landscapes aren’t just pictures of nature but projections of our relationship to nature. So we could see the 19th-century American landscape paintings in the Corcoran’s collection as manifestations of the ideology of Manifest Destiny. The paintings of Albert Bierstadt, for example, were a way of laying claim to the frontier.

Today, the skies are buzzing with drones. Not just the military drones that are in the air over Waziristan but civilian drones, little quad-copters with onboard cameras. The other day one landed
on our roof in Manhattan! Aerial photography is almost as old
as photography itself, but I feel like with the rise of the data image, it is also a new frontier, a new way of laying claim to the land.

But if this colonizing eye is, in this case, not a human eye, what does that mean about the document that it produces?

It’s a way of projecting power by seeing and knowing at a distance.

Looking at these images, I imagine untouched spaces. I think about being stranded on a desert island, a place where we are outside the range of the owned.

They appear to be uncolonized, untouched by the human hand, but it’s an illusion. As Rirkrit Tiravanija says, freedom cannot be simulated.

Freedom is a loaded word.

There are all different kinds: economic freedom, political freedom, existential freedom.

In Dystopia Files you talk about freedom from a kind
of mind control, like in George Orwell’s 1984, not even being able to imagine a free space. That relates to things like the Cecily McMillan case, the Occupy Wall street protester who received a guilty verdict for assaulting an officer and was sentenced to three months in prison and five years’ probation.

Here we go again. Show me a landscape and I’ll show you a screen onto which we’ll project a fantasy. They really do function that way, as a tabula rasa.

What kinds of things are you projecting as the maker?

My attraction to these images of unspoiled nature could be a kind of reaction formation, a defense against the specter of environmental catastrophe.

Is there an element of the cynical in this work?

I would rather think of them as critical than cynical.

Do you think that relates to your series of protest reenactments, The Port Huron Project, 2006-09?

That was more wrangling with nostalgia, whereas this work is more about fantasy. The Port Huron Project was engaging with what one critic called “new left-wing melancholy,” the idea that, in the mid 2000s, when we were mired in the Iraq War and protest seemed futile, we idealized the new left movements of the 1960s as a time when protest was more effective, when
the youth were more engaged and less apathetic. I tried to
deal with that nostalgia critically, but in a way that was
also open-ended and not didactic.

I don’t want to oversimplify, but wasn’t part of
the success of the radicalization of the left during the Vietnam War due to the nature of photography, how much of the war was represented? Now our images of wartime atrocities are much more sanitized.

Maybe. My sense is that photography and television were disruptive in part because governments were not yet very good
at censoring and manipulating the images that were coming
back from the battlefields and from the streets. And activists and revolutionaries were able to leverage those images to shift public opinion in favor of civil rights and against the war. The post-
9/11 period was a time when it seemed like protest was ineffective, and I think it largely had to do with activists’ not yet having quite figured out how to use new media to their advantage. That all shifted really quickly with the Arab Spring and Occupy
Wall Street, when bodies-in-the-street protest and social media finally synergized in a way that was really disruptive.

You could say that your simulated images are hyper-political because we don’t see your hand. You use these distancing techniques, and you’ve used them before. Can you talk about that in relation to our project, Posse Comitatus, 2012-14, in which dancers re-perform militia and paramilitary exercises?

One of the things we were trying to do in that project was to represent a certain kind of political activity that for most of
us is alien and deeply problematic. So we filmed militia exercises and then translated it into the more abstract language of dance as a way of making it more immediate. That allowed people to engage with it, this political other, without dismissing it as crazy, via an encounter with the body that has an inevitable intimacy. One of the things that make dance so compelling is the simple but powerful fact that the bodies of the dancers are physically present, which reminds viewers that their bodies are present. What fascinated me about these different kinds of political performances—protest speeches, demonstrations in the street, militia training—is the role of the body and how those embodied performances are affected by the technologies we use to represent them, from network television in 1968 to social media today. So The Port Huron Project, Dystopia Files, and Posse Comitatus were all about the body, whereas the images in “Plein Air” are completely disembodied.

They’re lush landscapes, but it’s an austere operation.

Yeah, it is. They’re post-human.

So there’s a lot of distance between them and me, but
it’s a distance that I long to bridge. Can we say they’re objective in some way?

I’m not sure. I can’t remove myself from the process, and I’m
not really trying to. I’m not following Sol LeWitt’s recipe for Conceptual art where the idea is like the machine that makes the work, and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The execution
of this work is not perfunctory at all. It’s full of highly subjective, intuitive aesthetic judgments about what looks “real,” or what’s
a compelling shape. In that sense, they aren’t objective at all. Yet at another level, at the level of the geospatial data from which the images are produced, they are absolutely objective. The same is true, of course, for traditional lens-based photography. Somewhere, behind all the subjective layers of selection and manipulation—where you point the camera, when you press the shutter, which negative you print, and what you do in the darkroom—lies the referent. In this way, all photography is haunted by the real.

This thing about data seems really important.

Yeah, it is, and I admit I don’t fully understand it. These are pictures of virtual reality. It’s a reality made of data, yet it’s a reality that we inhabit. When we navigate the landscape with a GPS app, we’re using data to steer us through physical space. We can’t see it, but we’re swimming in it, and these images are a way of making it visible.

If you think about something that was once futuristic, like old-school virtual reality, it seems clunky now. I’m curious to see how these images will feel in 10 or 20 years.

That’s certainly one of the things that we do as artists: produce artifacts of our moment that capture what it is like right now. Technology is evolving so quickly. This is what virtual reality looks like in 2014. In a few years, it will be different. This version of it will be gone.

A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.