Surveillance and Performance in Norman Eberstein

The central investigation of my practice lies in reconsidering surveillance through performance art by subverting its role in the everyday and questioning its reliance on technology. This paper introduces my visual art process and describes how the project Norman Eberstein is manifested in a gallery. This body of work suggests that the concept of surveillance is open for interrogation: Can altruism be reconciled with surveillance? Does technology create safe spaces? Is surveillance necessary? These queries reflect critiques on surveillance written by Matt Hern, John E. McGrath, Michel Foucault, Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong. Referring to their texts, I trace the proliferation of surveillance and the excessive production of technological devices in public and private spaces. My practice is multi-faceted, simultaneously manifesting elements of performance, drag, craft, drawing, writing and video. Within these medias I have developed an experimental methodology, in which the performance of surveillance is core. Norman Eberstein is an ongoing series of performances and body of work in which I use a persona to re-identify myself in the guise of surveillant. The performance is the process that creates the work itself. This is enacted through the role of a security guard in training, the persona Norman Eberstein, who finds himself subsumed in certain settings that he is compelled to guard and document. In discussing works by Marcel Duchamp, Jill Magid, Bernadette Corporation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood, I will demonstrate how key concepts and methods in these works speak to my practice. Though my work is informed by the history of performance art, it is rooted in an experimental process in which performance is a method, and its fruits are valid not only as documentation, but as art. I’m interested in performativity as a process that feeds a range of experiences in galleries and public spaces. To frame this idea, I will specifically refer to the catalogue and essays from the exhibition Not to Play with Dead Things. Like many of the artists in the exhibition, my work is as invested in the attendant objects and relics as it is in the performance itself.