Ain't Misbehavin': Jessamyn Lovell's Dear Erin Hart, Project
2014
Pia Farrenkopf's sad and lonely death was made notable by a fluke. In 2009 at age 49, Farrenkopf died alone in her car in the garage of her Pontiac, Michigan, tract home. With no relatives or friends, and with all her bills paid electronically, it took half a decade for her money to run out, the bank to foreclose on her house, and her mummified body to be discovered. Her posthumous adventure is the epitome of our contemporary bifurcated existence as both individuals and, simultaneously, bundles of data. As The New Yorker's blogger Carmen Maria Machado commented on the Farrenkopf case,
The term "identity theft" is a curious one, describing a scenario in which the doppelgänger—not the most obvious you, with your weird cuticles and inner monologue and assorted love problems, but that other you, who has a Social Security number and neatly profiled buying habits and a checking account at Bank of America—can be hijacked by an utter stranger, compromised, put on the market, sold....¹
Jessamyn Lovell's Dear Erin Hart, project was initiated by such a duality. In 2011 Lovell's wallet was stolen and her driver's license was used in a string of frauds by a career criminal named Erin Hart. For the thief the connection with a victim is intended to be fleeting and impersonal. The unintended consequence for Hart was that she instigated an ongoing engagement with a dogged artist who insisted that the incident was both personal and long-term: Lovell demanded a quid pro quo exchange. Both women were inveigled into an involuntary and unknowing form of barter. Hart got to use Lovell's identity but, unknown to her, became material for Lovell's artwork and her gesture at revenge. Lovell has documented her own and others' experiences as Hart's victims, but she hasn't stopped there. She also has pursued Hart herself, using the guidance of private investigators to first locate her and then to take videos and photographs of her from hidden cameras. Lovell has in essence stalked Hart for three years.
Lovell's project establishes a doppelgänger relationship between the artist and the criminal; even their names suggest a coincidental and odd connection (i.e., love and heart). Encountering one's other, evil self is an experience out of literature—but whereas for Jekyll and Hyde, for example, the bridge is a magic potion, the deus ex machina between Jessamyn and Erin is crime: the intentional violation of each other's privacy.
Artists have for some time been concerned about privacy and surveillance, issues that have so dominated the news since 2013 due to revelations about spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Interest in Jeremy Benthem's 18th-century panopticon prison surveillance architecture was already high in the 1970s. One of the nationally respected artist-run art organizations of the time, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, mounted an ambitious exhibition in 1987 titled Surveillance, curated by Deborah Irmas and Branda Miller.
It included works by 28 artists and teams, such as Sam Samore's Suspect, in which he hired private detectives to photograph people on the street at random as though they were subjects of surveillance. To what should have been no one's surprise, in the resulting large-scale black-and-white images everyone appeared suspicious and guilty. Peter D'Agostino, in Coming and going, showed footage from real surveillance video in the Paris Metro that followed an individual's journey. Nancy Buchanan's installation Security included her late father's resume and FBI file. Julia Scher's Personal Reception Area was an early example of her ongoing leadership in the field of art and surveillance, using heat sensors to react to a visitor's presence.
Almost 20 years before Surveillance, artist Vito Acconci made his infamous Following Piece (1969). Performing it every day for a month, Acconci would follow a person chosen at random on the street until he or she went indoors. In describing the piece, Acconci observed, "I am almost not an 'I' anymore; I put myself in the service of this scheme."² He becomes a bodily substitute for, or addition to, common surveillance mechanisms of the 21st century. These performances were documented in a series of photographs now in the collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum. A decade later, French artist Sophie Calle, in Suite Vénetienne (1979), ostensibly followed a man she met at a party in Paris to Venice, where she disguised herself and followed him around the city. Calle's record of her surveillance of the man includes black-and-white photographs accompanied by text.³
Lovell sees herself not only in the tradition of these seminal 20th-century artists but also as a member of a cohort of contemporary peers. These include artists who subvert existing surveillance systems or mimic the activities of the industry. British artist Jill Magid is well known for "performing" for the citywide video surveillance systems of police in Liverpool in her 2004 work Evidence Locker. San Francisco artist Jill Miller took a course from a private investigator and then used her new skills to surveil well-known Bay Area art collectors. Merry Alpern took photographs through the alley window of a sex club to suggest the translucent goings-on just on the other side. Trevor Paglen has used extremely powerful lenses to take grainy images of lights in the Nevada desert coming from secret military bases, bringing espionage and quasi-illegality into his art. Trish Stone uses the surveillance cameras in public places such as the beach in southern California to perform in her series of works Things I Never Say; in them she holds up a series of large signs confessing secret feelings and thoughts to be seen by whoever is watching. Most recently, artist Rosella Biscotti installed a work at New York's Sculpture Center in March 2014 about Joseph Pistone, the true-life FBI agent who was the source for the popular movie Donnie Brasco starring Johnny Depp. This work explored the boundary between documentation and fiction, including police surveillance footage and interviews with Pistone alongside original artwork.
Lovell in fact first engaged in surveillance for her art practice when she and her estranged father were both living in the Bay Area, years before the Hart incident. With the ambivalence of an abandoned child, she followed and photographed him from a distance, wanting to know him yet not wanting to engage with him. This brief experience of the sensual frisson of watching while unseen, a duet known to only one of the performers, lay dormant in her until reawakened by Erin Hart.
This takes us to an issue that usually lies beneath the surface of much of the work discussed above. Viewers are asked to suspend their disbelief about the artists' explication of the events they depict. There is more than enough room for hijinks, for aesthetic strategies that deliberately undermine any kind of objective truth. One's engagement with such work is contingent on an ability to accept these altered parameters, to cede control to the artist. We do not know for certain whether Lovell has actually done any of the things she claims; we do not know if she surreptitiously photographed her father, if Erin Hart truly exists, or if the crimes ever even took place. We find ourselves in the realm of narrative, of storytelling, in which the emotional and intellectual power of the tale is more important than any set of facts. The meaning is ours to decipher, a delicious state of not knowing.
Jessamyn Lovell grew up in an impoverished but close family in upstate New York—her dad was not around. She put herself through college and graduate school with the same determination that surfaced when Erin Hart's path crossed hers. Lovell comes from a working-class background, and her entrance into the middle class through a career as an artist and professor was intentional, an act of will—one that remains fragile, as she still cannot shake the ingrained sense of living paycheck to paycheck, especially now that she has a family. Hart, then, is someone who Lovell could easily have been, someone from whom she has worked diligently to distance herself.
Lovell recognizes not only the serendipity that has given her a different kind of life than Hart's but also the empathy she can't help but feel for a woman whose biographical DNA is nearly identical to her own. Her initial desire to pursue Hart was as a form of retribution, and that intention is still there. However, she has also had to admit a certain fascination with how Hart lives her life, a look at what might have been, and a certain undeniable pleasure in walking the fine lines of legality and taste. Dear Erin Hart, has led the artist to learn more about herself, her own values, her behavior, her identity, than she will ever learn about the woman who stole her identity.
An undeniable hostility is at the root of staking out an unsuspecting target. To avenge a perceived violation through public excoriation, a kind of aesthetic vigilantism, has a notable history in political satire. One thinks of Philip Guston's savage 1971 Poor Richard caricatures of President Nixon, but Lovell's ad hominem project is striking in its eccentricity. More relevant are the obsessed characters—both played by Jimmy Stewart—in Hitchcock's Vertigo and Rear Window. They research, respectively, a doppelgänger of a lost love and a murder suspect through surveillance. Rear Window in fact chronicles the crime in large part through the telephoto lens of a still camera.
The images that make up Lovell's Dear Erin Hart, are also documentation of her amateur detective work: files spilling out of a briefcase on the back seat of a car, a mundane apartment building staircase (Hart's) made ominous by suggestion, steep Expressionist angles, and the stock device of imminent possible discovery. Two images are particularly arresting. In one, the ordinarily innocuous liquid crystal display on an apartment house lobby telephone paging system reads simply "Hart, E. Enter Code: __," begging the question of what code—that is, what crucial missing information Lovell lacks about her protagonist, her project, and herself—and what we viewers-as-voyeurs, in our turn, are after. Finally, there is the striking image of Hart taken after her arrest. Her badly dyed hair is a mess; she's fleshy and simultaneously defeated and defiant, pitiable and banal. Jessamyn Lovell in her private life is unremittingly upbeat, positive, and enthused, with a fresh-faced youthfulness. Yet she and Hart are not that far apart facially. With a half hour's work by a Hollywood makeup artist, Lovell could take the project one step further and impersonate Hart. She would then inhabit two simultaneous narratives of the avenues available for contemporary American women not born into privilege.
NOTES
1. C. M. Machado, "The Afterlife of Pia Farrenkopf," blog, March 27, 2014 (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/03/the-afterlife-of-pia-farrenkopf.html).
2. See http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/283737.
3. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Calle.