Douglas Heingartner

Nicoline van Harskamp

From DE APPEL READER No 3: 'On Patrol', 2005

If the practice of impersonating an officer is as old as uniforms themselves, then artistic investigations into the role uniforms play must have followed close behind. The language of standardized dress and the way it imbues its wearers with meaning has proved fertile ground for everyone from the Russian Constructivists and Italian Futurists to Andrea Zittel and Vanessa Beecroft. And in her recent "Guards" series, Nicoline van Harskamp highlights the fleetingness of modern surveillers' nominal power, exposing the yawning disconnect between the sovereignty they radiate and the level they actually possess. Van Harskamp shows not only how mutable authoritarian identities are and how easy it has become to assume them, but also how willingly civilians submit: the trade-off between defending personal liberties and relinquishing them for the supposed greater good is a simple calculation for harried urbanites who would generally prefer to avoid confrontation with a vaguely menacing and likely bothersome watchman.

With governments increasingly outsourcing their policing and imprisoning chores to private companies, the landscape of paid sentinels expands in many strange directions at once, as the borders between officially-sanctioned police and self-styled security forces begin to blend indecipherably. As Van Harskamp points out, legislation defining the various forces' spheres of influence is sorely lacking: most guards have no more legal powers than normal citizens, a fact the industry cloaks by desperately over-emphasizing the peril that implicitly lurks in any un(der)surveilled space. Since uniforms are all that provides these notional sentries with any influence, the private policing industry tries to increase the scope of its illusory authority; the very presence of a guard enhances the appearance of a hostile atmosphere, a bulletproof and implicitly self-justifying strategy for infinite growth. Yet in many ways, the modern guard's raison d'etre is purely optical, a phantasm of public safety, especially considering how ill-equipped most of them would be to deal with an actual catastrophe.

Van Harskamp has staged several iterations of "The Guards Project" since 2003, charting the rise of (private) security forces in cites including Istanbul, London, Rotterdam, Glasgow, The Hague and Amsterdam. She usually presents the results in the form of detailed booklets, photographs, video registrations, and sometimes events in which "real" guards are invited into the art space, or fake ones are sent out to monitor the public at large. The version at De Applel, entitled "Team Samenscholing Randstad," shows a video of young Amsterdam hangabouts whom Van Harskamp has outfitted with custom uniforms that mix urban street fashion with the generic trimmings of the modern sentry, including a swoosh-like logo that speaks to the merging of public and private forms of contemporary heraldry. Their casual appearance references the dressed-down look of the “street wardens” recently appointed by Dutch municipalities to provide a non-threatening version of officers on the beat. The teams are often composed of long-term unemployed who work in small groups that inadvertently begin to resemble gangs, acting as the eyes and ears of the street without any specific targets to guard.

But just as guards can easily take on the identity their costumes imply, civilians can do so as well: reemerging Superman-like after their instant makeover, Van Harskamp's fictitious sentinels quickly manage to convince passers-by and would-be colleagues of their legitimacy. They don the mantle of authority with aplomb, politely giving out directions while patrolling the city, as their previously shiftless loitering instantly becoming purposeful surveilling. Their visual appearance trumps any actual behavior, much in the way that biopic actors become more authentic to their audiences than the historic figures they portray. And the bonafide guards' eagerness to embrace their counterfeit counterparts unwittingly erases the distinctions between the two camps. Van Harskamp tests the borders of people's willingness to blindly defer to arbitrary regulations; in an era where a whiff of resistance is inherently suspicious, the surveilled here are obliging in good faith, with an eye towards maintaining a civil society: they assume that the mandate of the uniformed is genuine, that they are not part of an art project, much as we assume in good faith that the videos we see are indeed unscripted registrations of what actually took place.

Van Harskamp's "inventory" booklet of London's dense web of guards could also be called a catalogue; its miniaturized photos transmogrify them into collector's items for the expert guard-spotter, with the yeomen, beadles and Salvation Army soldiers who shape the public face of the city literally cut down to size. In reality, many of these quasi-officials are now little more than freakish tourist attractions, like the Buckingham Palace guards who stand at attention for hours on end, a form of pure theater no more credible than the blacksmith at a Renaissance fest. Van Harskamp turns their supposed public service into a tawdry spectacle, one to be catalogued and exposed, neutered, compartmentalized and commoditized. The sham uniforms she designs uncloak the gimmicky conventions of the real ones, thereby undermining the fatuous authority that formal dress conveys. By deconstructing these trappings and then inviting the guards into the gallery space, where they reveal themselves as vulnerable and perhaps ridiculous, their putative capacity to maintain order is questioned, and their impotence is laid bare.

The look of many of these private forces now owes more to pop-cultural representations of the police and the military than the real thing, a fever dream of references that attempts to mask the actual borders of the guards' ill-defined activities. The goal is not to replicate the actual appearance of today’s officers, but rather to copy the way officers are now represented through the kaleidoscopes of fashion and cinema. Designers from Prada to Walter van Beirendonck, for example, have recently tried their hands at uniform design, which contributes to the dizzying hall of mirrors in which fashion reflects military trends reflecting movie cops -- consider how television mines police lore for easy plots, and how the policing industry now borrows from Hollywood just as readily, as betrayed by recent American security-mission titles like Operation Crusade, Silent Thunder, and the FBI's über-spy project Magic Lantern (seemingly aware of its special place in cinema history). With the presumption of surveillance now the default expectation in more and more urban (and even sub- or exurban) settings, the panoptical illusion has become so complete that many of the video cameras supposedly keeping an eye on public space are now dummies, their mere suggestion being enough to compel the desired obsequiousness.

Yet the ubiquity of so many makeshift patrollers actually democratizes the magic of safeguarding. We, too, can now consume as much security as we desire; commoditizing surveillance presents a new layer of class differentiation, the personal bodyguard as status symbol, tangible proof that you are worthy of being guarded. And why settle for an online avatar when a few dollars more lets you step into the physical world as a lifelike gendarme, with the mass-customizable cloak of authority now adaptable to a user's wishes. But the democratization of ocular authority is having alarming consequences for the existing security apparatus, with many actual police forces recently reporting increases in impersonations, due largely to the ease of ordering the accoutrements online. One bogus police officer with uniform, badge, and gun managed to patrol Washington D.C.'s corridors of power for months before anyone thought to question him, and New York's police now have a division specially devoted to rooting out phony cops. Likewise, the Netherlands’ railway police recently decided to redesign their uniforms with white shirts in order to stand out from the pervasive blue worn by hired hands, and Germany is now looking to revitalize its officers' attire as well.

But are these frantic attempts to convey authority really so hollow? Despite reflexive references to increasing crime rates, much evidence indicates the opposite: in many areas that have stepped up their public monitoring efforts, criminality has decreased, and the public perception of safety and order - however delusional - also improves in areas with high concentrations of eyes in the sky and eyes on the street. In the Istanbul project, Van Harskamp noted how people who might elsewhere be considered loiterers actually serve a social control function, resulting in remarkably low rates of street crime. These pubic eyes have largely disappeared in the hyper-individualized cities of, say, London or Amsterdam, perhaps explaining the uncontested introduction of new forms of surveillance. So however artificial the guards' spectacle may be, their mission is in many ways succeeding, paving the way for more of the same.


	The New York Times The Economist Wired The Village Voice The Associated Press The Washington Post The Los Angeles Times Frieze Flash Art I.D. Artbyte home	Nicoline van Harskamp From DE APPEL READER No 3: 'On Patrol', 2005 If the practice of impersonating an officer is as old as uniforms themselves, then artistic investigations into the role uniforms play must have followed close behind. The language of standardized dress and the way it imbues its wearers with meaning has proved fertile ground for everyone from the Russian Constructivists and Italian Futurists to Andrea Zittel and Vanessa Beecroft. And in her recent "Guards" series, Nicoline van Harskamp highlights the fleetingness of modern surveillers' nominal power, exposing the yawning disconnect between the sovereignty they radiate and the level they actually possess. Van Harskamp shows not only how mutable authoritarian identities are and how easy it has become to assume them, but also how willingly civilians submit: the trade-off between defending personal liberties and relinquishing them for the supposed greater good is a simple calculation for harried urbanites who would generally prefer to avoid confrontation with a vaguely menacing and likely bothersome watchman. With governments increasingly outsourcing their policing and imprisoning chores to private companies, the landscape of paid sentinels expands in many strange directions at once, as the borders between officially-sanctioned police and self-styled security forces begin to blend indecipherably. As Van Harskamp points out, legislation defining the various forces' spheres of influence is sorely lacking: most guards have no more legal powers than normal citizens, a fact the industry cloaks by desperately over-emphasizing the peril that implicitly lurks in any un(der)surveilled space. Since uniforms are all that provides these notional sentries with any influence, the private policing industry tries to increase the scope of its illusory authority; the very presence of a guard enhances the appearance of a hostile atmosphere, a bulletproof and implicitly self-justifying strategy for infinite growth. Yet in many ways, the modern guard's raison d'etre is purely optical, a phantasm of public safety, especially considering how ill-equipped most of them would be to deal with an actual catastrophe. Van Harskamp has staged several iterations of "The Guards Project" since 2003, charting the rise of (private) security forces in cites including Istanbul, London, Rotterdam, Glasgow, The Hague and Amsterdam. She usually presents the results in the form of detailed booklets, photographs, video registrations, and sometimes events in which "real" guards are invited into the art space, or fake ones are sent out to monitor the public at large. The version at De Applel, entitled "Team Samenscholing Randstad," shows a video of young Amsterdam hangabouts whom Van Harskamp has outfitted with custom uniforms that mix urban street fashion with the generic trimmings of the modern sentry, including a swoosh-like logo that speaks to the merging of public and private forms of contemporary heraldry. Their casual appearance references the dressed-down look of the “street wardens” recently appointed by Dutch municipalities to provide a non-threatening version of officers on the beat. The teams are often composed of long-term unemployed who work in small groups that inadvertently begin to resemble gangs, acting as the eyes and ears of the street without any specific targets to guard. But just as guards can easily take on the identity their costumes imply, civilians can do so as well: reemerging Superman-like after their instant makeover, Van Harskamp's fictitious sentinels quickly manage to convince passers-by and would-be colleagues of their legitimacy. They don the mantle of authority with aplomb, politely giving out directions while patrolling the city, as their previously shiftless loitering instantly becoming purposeful surveilling. Their visual appearance trumps any actual behavior, much in the way that biopic actors become more authentic to their audiences than the historic figures they portray. And the bonafide guards' eagerness to embrace their counterfeit counterparts unwittingly erases the distinctions between the two camps. Van Harskamp tests the borders of people's willingness to blindly defer to arbitrary regulations; in an era where a whiff of resistance is inherently suspicious, the surveilled here are obliging in good faith, with an eye towards maintaining a civil society: they assume that the mandate of the uniformed is genuine, that they are not part of an art project, much as we assume in good faith that the videos we see are indeed unscripted registrations of what actually took place. Van Harskamp's "inventory" booklet of London's dense web of guards could also be called a catalogue; its miniaturized photos transmogrify them into collector's items for the expert guard-spotter, with the yeomen, beadles and Salvation Army soldiers who shape the public face of the city literally cut down to size. In reality, many of these quasi-officials are now little more than freakish tourist attractions, like the Buckingham Palace guards who stand at attention for hours on end, a form of pure theater no more credible than the blacksmith at a Renaissance fest. Van Harskamp turns their supposed public service into a tawdry spectacle, one to be catalogued and exposed, neutered, compartmentalized and commoditized. The sham uniforms she designs uncloak the gimmicky conventions of the real ones, thereby undermining the fatuous authority that formal dress conveys. By deconstructing these trappings and then inviting the guards into the gallery space, where they reveal themselves as vulnerable and perhaps ridiculous, their putative capacity to maintain order is questioned, and their impotence is laid bare. The look of many of these private forces now owes more to pop-cultural representations of the police and the military than the real thing, a fever dream of references that attempts to mask the actual borders of the guards' ill-defined activities. The goal is not to replicate the actual appearance of today’s officers, but rather to copy the way officers are now represented through the kaleidoscopes of fashion and cinema. Designers from Prada to Walter van Beirendonck, for example, have recently tried their hands at uniform design, which contributes to the dizzying hall of mirrors in which fashion reflects military trends reflecting movie cops -- consider how television mines police lore for easy plots, and how the policing industry now borrows from Hollywood just as readily, as betrayed by recent American security-mission titles like Operation Crusade, Silent Thunder, and the FBI's über-spy project Magic Lantern (seemingly aware of its special place in cinema history). With the presumption of surveillance now the default expectation in more and more urban (and even sub- or exurban) settings, the panoptical illusion has become so complete that many of the video cameras supposedly keeping an eye on public space are now dummies, their mere suggestion being enough to compel the desired obsequiousness. Yet the ubiquity of so many makeshift patrollers actually democratizes the magic of safeguarding. We, too, can now consume as much security as we desire; commoditizing surveillance presents a new layer of class differentiation, the personal bodyguard as status symbol, tangible proof that you are worthy of being guarded. And why settle for an online avatar when a few dollars more lets you step into the physical world as a lifelike gendarme, with the mass-customizable cloak of authority now adaptable to a user's wishes. But the democratization of ocular authority is having alarming consequences for the existing security apparatus, with many actual police forces recently reporting increases in impersonations, due largely to the ease of ordering the accoutrements online. One bogus police officer with uniform, badge, and gun managed to patrol Washington D.C.'s corridors of power for months before anyone thought to question him, and New York's police now have a division specially devoted to rooting out phony cops. Likewise, the Netherlands’ railway police recently decided to redesign their uniforms with white shirts in order to stand out from the pervasive blue worn by hired hands, and Germany is now looking to revitalize its officers' attire as well. But are these frantic attempts to convey authority really so hollow? Despite reflexive references to increasing crime rates, much evidence indicates the opposite: in many areas that have stepped up their public monitoring efforts, criminality has decreased, and the public perception of safety and order - however delusional - also improves in areas with high concentrations of eyes in the sky and eyes on the street. In the Istanbul project, Van Harskamp noted how people who might elsewhere be considered loiterers actually serve a social control function, resulting in remarkably low rates of street crime. These pubic eyes have largely disappeared in the hyper-individualized cities of, say, London or Amsterdam, perhaps explaining the uncontested introduction of new forms of surveillance. So however artificial the guards' spectacle may be, their mission is in many ways succeeding, paving the way for more of the same.