Suzanne Treister: Post-Surveillance Art, Maggs Gallery

Suzanne Treister’s psychedelic counterculture posters take on the issue of burgeoning surveillance in the 21st century

History, according to the historiographer, E.H. Carr, is a series of facts which are then interpreted. A figurative painter in the Eighties before taking inspiration from technology, for example early video games, Suzanne Treister’s work in the 21st century has focused on questioning how and which events we interpret, as well how they connect. As the time traveller Rosalind Brodsky, her alter ego, she has revisited historical events, mostly through highly refined drawings, graphs and diagrams, from the view of a dystopian future. Her talks organised for Raven Row brought together a collection of futurists and conspiracy theorists under the title, The Real Truth. Her work attempts to make connections in which we might see truths better. She says, 

“...what has changed for me personally, post Snowden, is not an awareness of our new condition, but the knowledge that now almost everybody else knows...something which was clear as day if you kept your eyes open..”

This new grouping of digital prints – to be exhibited in the gallery of an antiquarian bookshop - insinuate the eponymous phrase ‘Post-Surveillance Art’ into our consciousness. Very much using the aesthetic of the psychedelic posters from the last century, Treister’s latest endeavour is motivated by Ed Snowden’s revelations about American surveillance. Phrases like ‘NSA Monochrome Dreaming’ or ‘One World Data F*cking Love’ printed over ambiguous or abstract imagery easily fall into the tradition the counter culture poster. It is both observation and satire, and follows with the posters of Allen Ruppersberg and even the arch textual paintings of Ed Ruscha. But when isn’t art being 'watched' ?