Edmund Clark on Controlled Environments

In conversation with Rebecca Newell, Head of Art at Imperial War Museums, we'll hear how Clark tries to capture the invisible, how relationships form an integral part of his process, and the stories and artwork that come be created from the seemingly mundane. This... is Conflict of Interest.

Which I realised was completely inconsistent with the relationships I actually had with the women who were working with me, who were looking after me, who were showing me around the Red Light District. I just realised that I had been making work entirely for a kind of western media aesthetic of what would be a dramatic story about sex workers in Calcutta. And that struck me as so wrong and so inappropriate that that changed very much fundamentally how I went about making work.

A key moment after that would be what was my first book, which was working in a prison that was called Kingston Prison in Portsmouth, where I worked on and off for about two years on a body of work about E Wing, which was the former administrative part of the prison which had been converted to house old, aging long-term lifers. So men who had been in or were going to be in for 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

When I made images of people who were in such a contested position and showed them to people outside the prison, all they wanted to know was, is he a murderer? Is he a rapist? Is he a paedophile? That was as far as people's engagement with the human form went. So I started working differently. I worked with a much larger format camera, and I looked at the environment. I looked at the spaces around these men and I looked at two kind of key themes.

One were the communal spaces, which were set up by the prison officers and the prison staff. And secondly, looking at the personal spaces which the men had. So the old offices had been converted into kind of bedrooms with 2, 3, 4, 5 people in a room. And it was looking at themes like the disorder of aging within an environment which is entirely about order and routine. But then looking at how individuals organise their personal space.

To what degree they actually engaged with routine, to what degree they actually engaged with kind of time itself. It all related very much to the ideas of still life painting and how ordinary objects are represented and what they mean.

That actually artists of all kinds are trying to get to something and say something about environments, but actually where that roots is something deeply socially engaged about people's lives and personal experiences. And actually sometimes taking the human form out of the image frame can be hugely revealing about the human condition.

And it was working in that prison environment, which over an extended period of time, and just looking at the spaces around me, which I started to reconnect with what I had studied at university, with what I knew about art, what I knew about still life painting and how that represented people's experience. And there is something really interesting about finding the connections between very ordinary, mundane environments and situations and how they connect with power.

Which, often the human form, particularly in photography, doesn't allow you to do. 'cause in some ways, I think particularly with the photographic representation of the human, because it is in theories, to a degree, indexical, we look at representations, we can identify in the people around us. We look like, we look in our photographs. That acts as a sort of barrier or a kind of mirror.

So when someone is looking at an image of someone who is known to be in a contested, problematic situation they don't really look any further than the face. Taking the face out of the frame and looking at what is around them. Looking at possessions, looking at architecture, looking at the organisation of domestic space, of personal space, is something everyone can relate to. We all have places that we eat and we sleep and we wash, and we exercise and we shop.

We have objects in our domestic environments which we all use on a daily basis. And actually those spaces, those forms, those objects are things that can intrigue and engage in a way which the photographic face, I think, sometimes doesn't.

And I wonder how you, if there was in fact a turn or whether you arrived at that through that integrated process of looking at those research themes that you've already touched upon. Can you identify some turning points as to when issues around terror, for example, the War on Terror, really first became part of your practice?

I could see the kind of resonances between the environment I was in and what was happening there. But that began by working with some of the first British detainees who had been released from Guantanamo and come back to the United Kingdom. But the aesthetic concept, the visual strategy was to photograph where they were living back in the United Kingdom.

So I was still interested in their ordinary domestic daily spaces, but what really intrigued me there was the contrast between those spaces and the representation associated with them as having been in Guantanamo Bay. So the images from Guantanamo, the people in orange jumpsuits, bound and gagged, were implicitly dehumanising, but at the same time they were incredibly exotic. It was a geopolitical event. It was about terror.

These were supposed to be the worst of the worst, as we were told, who didn't even deserve some form of legal process apparently. Yet here were these first 3, 4, 5 men who had come back to the United Kingdom, and I remember thinking when they came back, okay, there must have been some kind of a deal here. The British government has said, we've gotta give these people a legal process, there'll be a legal process when they come back to the United Kingdom.

And they came back and they were held for one night in a police station, and then they went home the next day as free and innocent as you and me, as anyone. They weren't charged. They were never charged with anything. Yet they go home to live in the British homes that they came from, forever associated with that exotic, dehumanising, demonising representation and spectacle on our screens.

So I was really interested in looking at how these men, looking at their environment to say, you know, these are British homes. These are British people, you know. This is where someone eats and sleeps and washes. That's a very different representation to what's happening on our screens about this event over here.

So in a sense, it was trying to recalibrate, to reconfigure, to in some way disturb the representation of what was happening at Guantanamo and who the people that were there were by looking at something that's incredibly ordinary, which is where they eat and sleep and wash. I had the space, I created a way of working which enabled me to do this over a period of time, so different forms of material would become relevant.

For example, in relation to the Guantanamo work, there's a series called Letters To Omar, which I came across through a relationship with Omar Deghayes, who had been in Guantanamo for about six years, came back, released without charge, was living down on the South Coast. He had only been out about six months when I met him. And I probably, well certainly, of all the ex-Guantanamo detainees he was the man I worked with most.

I would always ask people who I worked with, did you bring anything back? Did you keep anything from this experience? And I did photograph some of that material. And he said, oh, I've got these scans of letters people sent me. And he showed me about half a dozen, six or seven sheets of paper scans. And as my relationship with him went on and I went and worked in the house he was living in several times, he eventually said, actually, I've got all this stuff.

And he produced this huge white box with folders full of thousands of sheets of paper. He was always at the highest level of non-compliance within Guantanamo. So everything, every aspect of his life, every detail of his life was controlled by his interrogators, including when and if he got any correspondence. And because he was at that level, everything that he got went through a process of being scanned and redacted and stamped and given an archive number.

And eventually he got some of the stuff while he was there. And then eventually when he left, he was given this big box of all this stuff.

So what my time looking at this work enabled me to do was to see that these pieces of paper, these scans he had been given were on the one hand documents, but they're also new images created by an administrative process whereby pieces of paper, backs of envelopes, blank sheets of paper, were scanned and redacted and stamped and given an archive number and these kind of strange and very, very low resolution.

So all these cards, all these postcards and the imagery which people had chosen to send to someone in this situation was really interesting, the kind of creative, the visual choices. But the way in which that material had been reproduced and abstracted and intervened on meant these were images in their own right, but images created by a process of control.

Which spoke to the forms of control and the kind of the absurdity that was going on, the minute detail of control that was taking place within Guantanamo. So they show things which my photographs could never show. We don't see pictures of abuse or torture from Guantanamo. You wouldn't want to see them. But these pieces of paper speak to that, represent that in a way which is incredibly articulate and eloquent and say so much more than a photograph ever could.

So I think it's really interesting about how you, working at that time, dealt with that emerging canon of images within that early noughties period because it was still coming to light essentially at that time. It wasn't as fixed as it is now perhaps.

They're trying to show them in a different way through their art practice, painting or drawing. So they're taking those images from the screen and changing them.

And I think a lot of my work is actually about either trying to reconfigure the way in which these incredibly emotive subjects have been represented in incredibly simplistic and highly propagandistic forms on our media screens, mediated by organisations who are deeply implicated in the systems and processes of control behind the conflicts in the first place. So I try to avoid that and get people to see these things in a different way.

And secondly, often I am actually representing things which are not being seen on our screens. I'm representing what's happening behind our screens. I'm trying to look at, show people, what is there that is not actually visible. Photographing what you can't see is more interesting often than photographing the things you can see, if that makes sense.

You are using imagery to trace presences, to trace patterns, to show connections between places, objects, and events, which are not immediately evident. My work tries to show that this is part of the system that operates ordinary life around us. It's not something exotic, which only happens on battlefields, a long way away. Processes of control and detention, and power in relation to contemporary conflict through the events in this century are ongoing and they're happening all around us.

you know, my work is about contemporary conflict and the processes of power and money and control which go on behind the events which we normally assume to be what war looks like. So to that extent, yes, my work is about conflict. But I'm not a war artist, no I don't spend my life on a front line in a foxhole.

We don't have soldiers, we don't have boots on the ground, so the media are not so interested in going there. And actually it's incredibly dangerous for the media to go to a lot of places where conflict are happening now because they themselves are a target because they are understood to be complicit in the processes of exercising or carrying out the conflicts or supplying the weapons for those conflicts.

So how do artists, how do photographers, visualise these processes and these events that are taking place? That's a big challenge. How can we do that? How can we visualise and keep these issues present in audience's minds so that we are asking people to question what's happening? It's not just about people in camouflage or battlefields. It's all about wider social implications of conflict as well.

Either in terms of describing how some of the barriers that you might face or some of the long form process that you've touched on in terms of getting to some of these spaces that are very closed off to the majority of us. And perhaps just in terms of the importance of collaborative partners and other voices within your work.

There were, at the time I was working on that subject, 52 Men all Muslim, who had been detained under a control order, which effectively is a form of detention without trial, based on secret evidence, where every detail of your life is controlled. You're made to go and live somewhere else away from your family. The government provides you with this location that you live in, and they provide you with a control order, which details what you can and can't do. You are tagged.

You live under a curfew. You can only move in a certain area around where you're living. You have to go to a police station. You have to let the security forces come and search you and your premises. You hand over your passport. You're given a phone, which is by the government. You have no internet. You're always being monitored.

A really extraordinary process in this country, which effectively overturned 800 years of the principle of habeas corpus, whereby the state can detain people without due legal process based on secret evidence. I've been wanting to work on that for a long time, but the lawyers who represented men held under these conditions were very wary of any kind of media presence, for very good legal reasons.

Eventually, I met a barrister through my work with Clive Stafford Smith, an event he organised, I met a barrister who was representing someone on a control order, who put me in touch with a different solicitor who was- So these connections, these networks came about through the process, the period that I'd been working on these subjects.

And eventually I, through this solicitor, was able to go and visit someone living under a control order who did not, I did not need the permission of the government to go and see this person. I went to see him, he agreed to work with me. His case is known as CE. I am not allowed to reveal his identity or the location of where we were working, 'cause- I probably can now 'cause he's out. But there was an anonymity order on his case.

I applied to the home office to work with CE saying that I had his permission. All sorts of new conditions were enforced on him to limit his involvement with terrorist-related activity while he worked with me, to do with my equipment. All quite bizarre conditions were put on me. Everything that I made had to be seen by the government. Clearly, the house was monitored. I was originally given six days of access and the permission arrived after the first two days had passed.

So we applied to extend that and I got four days. I had two trips, two visits to go and stay with CE before he was moved for my last visit. So I never got those last two days. But that relationship with CE, that is about living in a house with someone going through this experience. Is that a form of collaboration? I don't know, but I went and shared his life and shared his space, albeit briefly.

This domestic space was really interesting because the way in which you were criminalised if you're on a control order was not through terrorist-related activity. It was through breaking the conditions of your control order. And the appendix to see his control order was a tenancy agreement about how he treated his house. So, whether he put up a satellite dish, whether he had a pet, were grounds on which he could be prosecuted on the grounds of national security. He had a cat.

And this cat becomes this bizarre, contested presence in this house. And, the security services knew he had a cat. His lawyers knew he had a cat. The home office knew he had a cat. And the cat broke the controls of the terms of the appendix. And it's just utterly bizarre. But yeah, that was, that's a collaboration of sorts.

Which, I don't know if anyone at the museum knows this, but after CE was released from his control order and was housed under the subsequent form of control called a Terrorist Prevention Investigation Measure, he was housed two streets away from where I live in London. He was out by the time of my exhibition here, and he came to the exhibition and he said, no one must know I'm here. So CE came completely anonymously. I can never reveal his identity.

And I showed him round the Control Order House installation here, and he saw his house in the Imperial War Museum, which was great.

So in some way my creative process and the interventions of censorship, or lack of access, or what you can't see, is implicit in what I'm doing and what I'm showing to my audience. And that is in part the point.

So, each year the US Department of Defense outspends about the next 10 countries put together. So in effect, the amount of money we're talking about is the budget which kinda shapes the world, which we live in, the world around us. So what we have done is we have looked at two specific dates. We've looked at 9/11, and we've looked at the last day of the evacuation from Kabul in Afghanistan.

And we have downloaded all the US Department of Defense transaction data between those two dates and anslyzed it in terms of scale. So we've built a database of about 43 million transactions and then looked at one particular field, which is called the product and service code descriptions, which is literally an alphabetical list of everything that they've spent their money on. There's kind of about 3,300 of those.

We've looked at the biggest and the smallest transactions within each of those categories. Which brings out multi-billion dollar contracts, transactions with huge names like Lockheed Martin, and it brings out individuals who might be cleaners or janitors or chaplains or courier drivers, and it takes in the whole world. So these transactions have taken place and are taking place all around the world. So we're looking at the huge, and we're looking at the incredibly small.

We're looking at the granularity, the traces that this budget, this complex, has actually left. The visual element to that is that we have created a geographical gazetteer. So all the imagery comes from the US Department of Defense image gallery. So this is all imagery which has been made by US service members and has been curated in some way onto their forward facing, public gallery. For each country, you'll get an image from that country with its caption.

You have a transaction from that country, and you have the amount spent in it as a place of performance, the top five products and service areas, and the top five recipients. We've also created a glossary of words relating to the apocalyptic and the mundane and the absurd, which is looking at the language of the military, the language of commercial practice. In its initial form, we have produced an encyclopedia.

it's called Cosmopolemos, which comes from Cosmos for the order and the universe and Polemos, which is war and the personification of war in Greek. So yeah, it's an illustrated encyclopedia of the US Department of Defense contract spending from 9/11 to the last day of the evacuation from Kabul, which are these two image kind of spectacles and disasters, which bracket this period of foreign policy.

It's taking on this edifice of power, which is too big to comprehend, a budget that's too big to comprehend, an actual military power which is too big to understand really, and a data set which is too big to understand. And bringing it down to form that we can, again, it's about the mundane and the very minute and small that we can understand, the ordinary, which connect our daily lives with these levels of awe and power and control beyond, really, what is comprehendible.

So it's illustrating that lack of comprehension, the inability to understand this power through things which we can actually identify with.

Perhaps the most successful artists, the ones who make work which is both pleasing and accessible and entertaining and also asks important questions about the societies that they live in, maybe they're the most successful artists. I dunno where I am quite on that spectrum. I certainly don't entertain the rich very much, but-