Covert: The artist as voyeur

Abstract

An engagement with the aesthetics, rhetorics and methodologies of surveillance presents a canvas on which visual artists can critique, subvert or just play with emergent technologies. This paper probes artistic methodologies that implicate surveillance and the ethical tensions of appropriating the surveilled lives of strangers for creative pursuits. The ethically challenging practices of several contemporary artists are discussed, including Sophie Calle, and the author reflects upon her own body of work, Covert. The role of the artist, the nature of the gaze, privacy versus artistic expression, surveillance as an art platform and the eternal tensions between objectivity and subjectivity of using a mechanical device/prosthetic eye are explored. © The author(s), 2013.