Tim Sharp
allowed enough rope to run wild for a time. This was sufficient to radically curtail any ‘anti-American’ tendencies in Hollywood and to establish liaisons and cooperations ensuring that the content of films did not stray too far from the mainstream political script. Further help was sought by bringing God onside — ‘In God We Trust’ on every dollar note, the official US motto, was adopted in 1956— elevating US foreign policy and business enterprises onto a higher (and rationally unassailable) plane. The world, said President Truman, was divided into two kinds of men; ‘those who reject and those who worship God,’ but not, of course, just any old God. It was also during this period that the successful attempt to wrest the title of cultural capital of the western world from Paris was made by CIA-instigated and financed organisations. New York was the destination. Anti-communist literary periodicals were established in London and Paris, and the US-based school of Abstract Expressionist painters —many of whom were apolitical— suddenly found themselves propelled onto the world art stage supported by sales and exhibitions organised by a network of museums, galleries and private trusts. The board members, trustees and donors of many of these, from the MOMA to the CIA-run Farfield Foundation were part of a covert anti-communist cultural front. The effects were so widespread that it is tempting to regard the CIA as not only an intelligence service and covert military machine but also a lightly camouflaged anti-communist Ministry of Culture. As an artist I can only draw strength from one of the poets supported (and then dumped) by the CIA, Robert Lowell, who epitomises the dilemma and suggests a solution, ‘we artists’, he said, ‘should be the windows, not the window dressing.’
Tim Sharp lives and works in Vienna. His photo and installation works explore the relationship between image and text; his films explore the mutability of the documentary assertion made by lens-based images. Recent work is concerned with the mechanisms and patterns of power involved in the (re) construction of historical, cultural and personal memory. https://www.timsharp.at Right now this demilitarised, privatised site is a slowly deteriorating architecture, while the surrounding former rubble hills have become tree-covered slopes and grassy meadows with dog walkers, bird watchers and the occasional family picnic. It remains to be seen whether it will be allowed to add another layer of rubble to the hill or become official heritage — deserving repair, restoration and monumentalising into official history. Either way, it really does seem to be a unique point of collision between past and future. I flip open my phone and use it to find out that the Devil’s Lake acquired its name from the Christian church which was confronted with a revered and deeply rooted pagan site and employed a re- naming strategy to turn it into a spiritual no-go zone. I don’t know how much these trains of thought would hold up to closer scrutiny, but I keep circling back to the same core concern: the covert methods and state-of-the-art technology of those times, that was first and foremost directed against the enemy without, has now been turned inward and by implementing a policy of category creep, governments are slowly turning non-conformist citizens into a suspects and every non-citizen into a prima facie criminal. At the same time, lax or non-existent controls on companies allows them to bleed data from our every act.
15 on site review 46 :: travel
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