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The faceless Gaze
11 01 2007 - 03 03 2007
>Markus Gradner , >Philipp Haupt , >Bernhard Hosa , > MIR , >Ralo Mayer , >Hannah Swoboda , >Stephan Uggowitzer ,
OPENING: Thursday, 11. 01. 2007, 19.00 Uhr
Catalogue on the exhibition "The Faceless Gaze":10 Euro
CURATOR: Alexandra Schantl, Vienna
In
view of – or rather, under the pretense of – the struggle against
terrorism, on the one hand, and the fear of increasing crime in
everyday life, on the other, Western democracies today are confronted
with a variety of forms of supervision and control. The concept of a
“disciplinary society”, a term coined by Michel Foucault in his book
Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison Society, therefore,
appears timelier than ever. In his analysis of disciplinary
institutions, Foucault invokes Bentham’s “panopticon” – a design for a
prison, whereby all prisoners could be observed from a single location.
The English jurist, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) known, among other
things, for his theory of social ethics, had devised a plan for a penal
institution featuring a tower at its centre, from which the overseer’s
inspecting gaze could monitor the prison’s concentrically arranged
cells at all times, thus subjecting the inmates to the permanent
control of an all-encompassing surveillance.
| Hannah Swoboda, Suspicous, documentation fotos, 2007 |