Double Issue
This week Memo Review publishes two reviews of two major exhibitions currently open at the Ian Potter Museum of Art: State of the Union and Eavesdropping.
Below Sophie Knezic considers the social and political stakes of the question of sound, surveillance and listening in Eavesdropping.
Eavesdropping
Ian Potter Museum of Art
24 July – 28 October
By Sophie Knezic
The most iconic disciplinary schema brought to late 20th century philosophical attention would, without doubt, be the Panopticon; a model of surveillant architecture devised for the redesign of prisons at the end of the 18th century by the British reformist Jeremy Bentham. Almost 200 years later, Bentham's brutally efficient structure was positioned by Foucault in his study of the prison system as the reigning emblem of biopower; not just a landmark in the transformation of Western penal architecture but a diagram of the new economy of internalised self-disciplinary and self-surveillant rule.