Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy Exhibition Review

“Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy” addresses topics of hidden power and manipulation in our world. This exhibit includes varied works by over 30 artists from 1969 to 2016. Despite the range of artists and artworks, most of the pieces in this exhibit relate back to looking at the interactions of the government, media, and citizens and facing information that we do not have.

The artists in the exhibit commit themselves to uncovering ways that government and other powerful forces have abused their authority and influenced the public. In the first part of the exhibit you will find artists that use facts and public record, such as photographs, newspapers, transcripts, etc. to send messages and disclose conspiracies relating to the abuse of power. For example, The Salt Pit by Trevor Paglen uses photography to expose the CIA’s secret prisons in Afghanistan, where prisoners are taken to be tortured. Paglen is one of the artists that use photography to discuss an actual conspiracy by revealing one of the governments deeply guarded secrets.

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On the other hand, other artists in the exhibit do not focus on discussing the conspiracy at hand, but instead reveal ideas about conspiracy thinking and information. For example, in Jim Shaw’s UFO Photos series, Shaw forges “alien sightings” in pictures, often colliding two of America’s biggest obsessions: conspiracies about the assassination of JFK as well as paranoia about extraterrestrial creatures and UFO. By satirically combining both elements and labeling the photograph as “proof” that aliens killed Kennedy, Shaw criticizes our reliance on photography as the truth. Like Shaw, the exhibit showcases many artists who stray from facts and research, but instead “go down the rabbit hole” of conspiracy thinking.

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What makes this exhibit unique is that artists use photography to talk about conspiracy, information, and evidence in different ways. We typically associate photography as unquestionable evidence that proves a phenomenon or idea. Sometimes this can be the case as we saw with Paglen’s The Salt Pit, where photographs have led to uncovering truths and revealing critical information previously unknown to us. However, relying to heavily on photography to fuel our investigations and speculations can also be detrimental in many ways. As we saw with Shaw’s work, photography can easily be doctored and therefore further concealing truth. Photography can also be ambiguous, leading us to see what we want to see depending on our perceptions and values. We see this especially in Lutz Bacher’s The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview.

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Lutz Bacher uses photographs and interviews to contemplate Lee Harvey Oswald’s varying appearances in different settings. Bacher’s work consists of cutouts of ambiguous, blurry pictures that are clearly impossible to identify. She overlaps these pictures with snippets of short text that reveal small details about the context, but still misses a larger picture. With these photographs and texts, Bacher also includes a transcript of an interview about the photographs. The interview consists of circling and vague dialogue that fails to reveal much about the case. Bacher’s piece falls into the category of the second type of artists in the exhibit, as her message in the artwork does not relate to the conspiracy behind Oswald, but instead the “impossibility of finding truth in an image”.

Bacher and many other artists in this exhibit send the message that we must get rid of preconceived notions and tendencies to accept things as they are. Instead question we must the institutions and systems that we are under as well as the information we receive about these systems since our perceptions, which dictate the way we interact with the world, can easily be manipulated through misleading information. This message is relevant in the current environment, especially as the term “fake news” becomes increasingly popular and the ongoing Special Council investigation leads us to question what we know about our government. It is critical that we move past the “ambiguous images” and dig deeper, find facts and investigate our reality.