Interview with Michael Garner

Michael Garner is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art’s MA in Contemporary Art Practice. His work — which folds together autobiography, bureaucracy, and absurdism — has attracted attention for its reflections on secrecy and surveillance, drawn from his time working within intelligence structures. We met to talk about truth, paranoia, and why the smoke detector might know more than it lets on.

1. Much of your work begins from personal encounters with institutions like the CIA and secrecy. How has that background, the culture of watching and being watched shaped the stories you choose to tell through art?

Yes, I wrote a whole book about that [laughs] which I appreciate you reading. My time working for CIA was really complex – – enough to fill almost 120 pages. I was under stifling surveillance and experienced bizarre occurrences regularly. As someone who previously studied sociology and human rights, I like to think I attack issues of surveillance and privacy with a multi-headed scalpel. Or maybe just multiple scalpels. I think it’s important to note that I also worked for Amnesty International and NASA and a few other places – – people hear CIA and they often assume that I am a certain kind of person. They might not expect to learn that I designed Amnesty’s website in Taiwan and helped Chinese citizens across the Strait learn about human rights issues.

But more to the point of your question, I use these experiences as jumping off points for my work. One work that is nearly finished involves using cameras to watch people as they walk around a gallery. It takes note of which paintings or sculptures they linger in front of, and when they leave my system gives them an analysis of how long they looked at each work and what that means about their personality. Even though it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going through someone’s mind when they are looking at art, I love to engage with the new field of neuroaesthetics – – as well as playing with the somewhat creepy phenomenon of surveilling someone as they enjoy artwork. So even though what my artwork says might not be accurate, it is the lie that shows us the truth, as Camus and Picasso observed.

I live very much in the gray area, and my work inhabits that area too. Having worked both in the intelligence community and human rights field, I can see the tension and that there is not always an easy answer to society’s problems. I do, however, believe strongly in human rights. I talk in my book about what happened when I said “waterboarding is torture” at the CIA.

2. You made quite a leap, moving from the world of intelligence and policy into art. What did you need art to do that those other fields couldn’t?

At a certain point, I thought about what I’ve done in my career and the kinds of changes I’d like to see in the world. I had no intention of going into politics, and in academia I believe professors often discover the truth, but it gets muddled and mistranslated in the real world. As I thought about how I would like people to “wake up” to possibilities in the world, I realized that art has a singular power to do this. That is to say, if you show someone a bunch of statistics and facts, their eyes might glaze over. But if you show them a powerful film or work of art, you have a chance of getting through to them.

Since that time, the world has become so much darker. Even though my aspirations feel a bit suffocated right now, I still have hope that I can plant some seeds that increase empathy and critical thinking in society. That is absolutely my most important goal. I would add that I also want to have fun along the way. Some of my art is humorous, and I actually perform comedy sometimes, as well—I can neither confirm nor deny that I performed as a CIA drag queen.

3. What brought you to the UK and to the RCA in particular? Has the culture or atmosphere here changed the way you think or make?

The RCA actually wasn’t my first choice. [laughs] Because I am now an Austrian citizen– – I got citizenship

because my grandparents escaped the Holocaust – – going to university in Europe is much cheaper for me. But I didn’t get into the KABK in The Hague, and it turns out the RCA is an exceptional school.

Now that I am here, though, I absolutely love Britain and plan to stay. People are kind, thoughtful, caring, and funny. In a recent book talk, I was discussing how the kinds of social capital that Robert Putnam mentions in his book Bowling Alone are still relatively strong in the UK, even if people here take it for granted. Of course I don’t pretend it’s a utopia, but I’m loving it here.

I would have to think some more about how being in the UK has affected me, but one thing I have noticed is that I am less on edge, partly because people are so disarming and polite.

4. Your work touches on subjects that can make people uncomfortable: power, surveillance, private

experience. What kinds of reactions do you get, and how do you live with them?

It’s true that it can make people uncomfortable; in fact, that’s an explicit goal of my work. Getting a little bit uncomfortable is the way that people grow. I want to shake people from the torpor of everyday life and get them to imagine a different world. And I use almost every medium to do this, except painting. [laughs] I was talking to an artist I admire, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, about how she has very specific goals about how she wants people to react to her work. It’s like she micromanages the viewer’s experience. I don’t always have an exact goal in mind for one of my works, but I like to introduce people to new ways of thinking that might affect them in a positive way.

One example of this is the work Slow News Day, an imagined newspaper. One article talks about a device that measures empathy and rage, and if a political candidate does not pass the test, they cannot run for office. Another article says that a particular billionaire ended homelessness overnight – – something that truly could be possible. I was at a Finissage and someone came up to me and said they know three billionaires and one of them is interested in ending homelessness, and asked if I would speak to them. I was elated.

5. In your book you mix philosophy, anecdote, and this almost journalistic voice. You quote Baudrillard,

Jenny Holzer, and others, but the references feel lived rather than academic. Who or what has really shaped your thinking?

I appreciate the way you phrase that question because I really want to be accessible rather than obscurantist. There are a huge number of influences on me – – everyone from the novelist Kurt Vonnegut to the scientist E. O. Wilson. I talk about a bunch of these in the book. Wilson in particular talked about something called consilience—how different branches of science can inform each other. I’m currently working on a piece for an upcoming exhibition called “The Austrian Part of My Brain.” The University of Birmingham will scan me while I think of Austrian German or visualize my Austrian grandparents and see how my brain responds. I am going to portray that in a hyper-specific way, showing which neurons fire, in consultation with neuroscientists, and I’ll add a bit of twist. It’s fascinating to engage with.

6. A lot of your pieces invite a kind of participation. For example, people speaking to devices or responding to absurd prompts. What do you hope they discover in that encounter?

That’s true. I am against the Disneyfication of art, but I do wish to include the participant in my work, to hook them and get them thinking about deeper issues. The work Conversation with a Smoke Detector is based on a time that I wrote about in my book. While I was working at CIA, I was sent to East Asia. When I got to my hotel room, I noticed a smoke detector above the bed. I was lying in bed, talking to myself, when I observed something weird. The smoke detector was flashing irregularly, as if it was responding to what I was saying. I asked, “Are you listening to me?” and the smoke detector immediately flashed.

So I created an installation where you can ask questions of a smoke detector and it will respond to you as if it were an absurdist philosopher. There are a number of quotes in the work, as well, often by Camus, explaining the core meaning of absurdism and existentialism.

In my heart of hearts, I hoped that people would ask deep, searching questions about the meaning of life. A few people did, but a lot of people asked things like “is my boyfriend cheating on me?” And that’s OK – – sometimes we can just have a laugh.

7. How do you decide how much to reveal and how much to leave suspended in that fog? Or maybe it wasn’t your decision?

I know there is a longstanding debate in the art world about how much someone should explain a work of art, and how much context to give. Earlier you mentioned Jenny Holzer, and one of her quotes that I always cite is “I want people to get my work, or at least be constructively mystified.” Because I think constructive mystification is a perfect term for what great art should do. But as I've released my work into the world, I've seen how people do interpret it in different ways, and that’s fine. You know, I think it's interesting to see how one person can say, “Oh, this is funny. It's satire, right?” And another person can say, “This is wonderful. It's utopian.” And then another person can say, “This is weird. Is it true?” All about one work. For Slow News Day, I got all of those reactions.

8. Looking ahead, what ideas or themes are you interested in exploring next, and how are they taking form in your current projects?

I’m someone who cares deeply about free speech, human rights, and democracy. But I am

also someone who tends to tread carefully and act methodically. A writer for ArtReview, Al

Hopwood, said something really nice about my work. He said that my work is political, yes, but that it is political in a way that makes the viewer feel included. We’re all figuring this out together. I love the Ani DiFranco lyric, “Learn to be shy and then you can sting.” I want to draw people into my work and then possibly provoke or surprise them to think about the

world differently.

One immersive work that I am in the process of fleshing out examines this tension that we

have right now. We see the world changing in sometimes terrifying ways, and there are many heroic people out there fighting for the planet and against authoritarianism. The work examines the tendency that people have to run away from reading the news and want to be in a happy bubble. But that happy bubble – – a space to relax – – is also, contrarily, something that is important even for people who are fighting the good fight to experience at times – – to back away and simply enjoy life and not focus only on something like social change. That’s it. That’s the tension.