Clore visit to USA: Public records, NYPD surveillance, performance art

This is the sixth blog on my Clore Fellowship/Wellcome Trust sponsored study visit to the USA. See the others here.

Kameron Neal is one of the three artists participating in New York City’s Public Artists in Residence programme in 2022-23. I was fortunate to interview him in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn. I learnt about his fantastic practice and developed my thinking on how artists could play a role in policy in the UK.

Kameron

Kameron’s practice revolves around themes such as time, duration, storytelling, identity, the gaze on the body. He has a graphic design background, and a quick look at his beautiful website reveals how expertly Kameron brings together this graphic aesthetic with movement, video and a looping temporality (see image). His previous work includes a performance piece with his partner relating to South Asian funeral practices and he has been in residence at Digital Graffiti in Alice Beach.

DORIS

Kameron is doing his residency at the New York Department for Official Records and Information Services, belovedly known as DORIS. It is the New York city government’s archive, similar to the Kew archive for central government in the UK. It’s interesting how such record keeping institutions can appear quite technical and dry but get under the surface there are emotive subjects ready to be revealed. This is where Kameron’s work enters.

NYPD surveillance films

Kameron was working with officials in DORIS to sift through New York Police Department (NYPD) archive records from the 1950-90s. This material is publicly available, but there are vast quantities and technical support is helpful in making sense of it. The archive includes digitised NYPD surveillance footage on 16mm film, largely black and white; lots of police reports, including notated newspaper clippings, fliers; still photography from the NYPD photo unit. The footage, in particular, provides an incredibly rich - and invasive - record of the period, including the tapestry of street life. It also includes surprising moments: police officers goofing around with the cameras at home with their family, after a day surreptitiously filming people and groups supporting social change. Kameron says of this work ‘how am I, a black queer artist, uniquely positioned to reclaim and repurpose NYPD surveillance footage that framed my people “enemies of the status quo”?’

It’s powerful and playful work and I wish Kameron all the success with the PAIR programme.

Thoughts from our discussion for the role of art in policy

The archives are publically available; the information is out there. Kameron’s work resonated with me in that he is using artistic strategies to raise awareness of that information, which is often dry and hard to find. I’ve written in the past how one of the roles that artists can play in policy is creating a multimedia sensory experience of policy information and evidence. I’ve also created artworks with the same objective, albeit on very different subject matter - most recently Glass House, which excavated climate data from deep online repositories and surfaced them in an exhibition.
Kameron’s work is not just raising awareness of the information; it is much more active than that. As he notes, his work is reclaiming, repurposing and, I might add, researching the archive, drawing out insights for contemporary policy dialogues. I’ve written of the six possible roles of art in policy. Perhaps an emission in my thinking has been this research and development question (inexcusable as it was central to many people’s practice on my MA and I’m an advocate of practice-based research!).
There are practical learnings when thinking about artists working in policymaking settings. A year is a short amount of time for an artist to get up to speed, do research, make and show work. Government processes can move ‘at their own pace’ - which generally means a lot slower than an artist might need or want. So where artists are collaborating with policymakers, or policymaking organisations, this can slow things down (this echoes my discussion with Janet Zweig). There are possible ways to ameliorate this. A central team could play a role in organising things like exhibition space, meetings with policymakers, access to information/events etc.

Thank you so much to Kameron for taking the time to meet, and best of luck with the amazing work!

I am the Wellcome Trust sponsored Clore 16 Fellow. In 2022 as part of this Fellowship I travelled to New York, Santa Fe and Los Angeles. I met an artist in New York thinking about criminal justice by using shape, the artist-led entertainment space innovating how audiences engage with evidence, and the climate team in the New York City Government who brought artists in to transform the culture of the workplace. Read about them and others here.