“In case signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong

if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.”

Lord Nelson, memorandum at the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805

When an artist cannot directly counter the concrete forms of domination, he can still appropriate its symbolic systems. In this way, Alain Declercq’s investigations reveal the various strategies of representation that serve the society of control. Where the first Gulf War saw the American authorities strictly limit access to information, the second chapter of the conflict gave rise to the subordination of journalists to protection by Allied troops. Declercq responded to this control of “embedded reporters” with a series of “embedded stories”. His reflective pieces constitute warnings about the illusory transparency of dominant ideologies. “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura . . . this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” The artist has adopted a similar movement of inversion as he constructs a meta-ideology. Behind the apparent immediacy of his works is a complex mechanism which echoes the relation between propaganda and state machinations. Opacity often prevails where least expected. Copying the modus operandi of the spy or investigator, and thereby stirring up more confusion than contestatory dogma, Declercq “stole” images from the law courts using a homemade camera obscura, passed off the preparations for Bastille Day celebrations as preparations for a siege, and “militarised” a yacht in Brest.

The infinite multiplication of images seems to eat up the real. External reality seems now to exist only in its mediation. And yet, the attack on the Pentagon of September 11, 2001 was not publicly represented anywhere. There simply weren’t any images, say the authorities. Hence the creeping doubts: how come the numerous surveillance cameras set up around the ministry failed to record anything? The artist decided to conduct his own investigation and took hasty photographs from the places where such images should have been produced. He also created a mutant object, Tomahawk American Airlines, an ironic hybrid inspired by the theory according to which it was a missile – and not a commercial aeroplane – that hit the state building. Or again, in a cinematic mode, he continued his “great period of transparency”, equipping himself with a miniature camera and microphone to make Mike, a docudrama about the events of 9/11, or inviting real prisoners to act out an escape wearing the clothes of their guards in Escape (2001).

With Declercq, indeed, incarceration and its panoptical model represent archetypes of the hegemonic tendency of the powers of control: when the desire to see everything works to reinforce subjugation, then the obsession with omniscience makes vision, knowledge and power all equivalent. In June 2005, for example, agents of the French National Security Division (DST) thought they knew all about the activities of Declercq, this “self-declared plasticien by profession, meaning an artist” who in reality was the missing link between Al Qaida and ETA. Whereas many acquittals are made in the name of respect and protection for the legal status of the artwork, it was precisely the artist’s work that was incriminated here. Would that not be the perfect cover? During his interrogation, when threatened, Declercq eventually confessed his motives: “My point of view was to survey those who do the surveying.” As he sees it, the surveillance and paranoid tendencies of the state require artistic counter-offensives involving critical reflexivity and mimesis. Showing a strong sense of humour and an eye for the ridiculous, and inspired by Soviet political reforms, in 2005 the artist invented Glasnost 1 and 2, consisting of attaché-cases with false bottoms concealing an assault rifle and handgun.

Sometimes, it is true, there is good reason to doubt. When the forces of order seem to have become their own caricature, Declercq does not hesitate to play with the limits of legality. Working in the same vein of sarcastic faux-camouflage, he has created a perfect replica of a police car, which he offers for hire. If, when parked in an art centre, the vehicle is well protected by its status as artwork, once on the public highway its driver (and owner) are liable to legal prosecution. In this regard, Declercq could echo Dennis Oppenheim’s statement about his Violations (1971–72): “I was creating objects that could turn against me, contaminate, spread my activity through the gallery-museum system, imbuing all with possible legal repercussions.”

Declercq’s moving sculpture, Crash Cars (2001), like a new kind of mobile, also got him into trouble with the authorities. Its very basic apparatus features two cars, and no driver – or nearly. Declerq gets these two vehicles driving round in circles, in opposite directions, and crossing paths where their trajectories intersect. Here he is developing an empirical geometry of risk: nothing in the real is perfectly geometrical and the cars are constantly at risk of colliding. Echoing the original function of geometry, as a science for measuring land, the aim here is to induce a new apprehension of space by means of a set-up intrinsically threatened with chaos. Is this literal giro mimicking the disturbing, almost comic absurdity of the fragile Cold War equilibrium? Or does it evoke the methodical rotations of the B52s flying off to Iraq that Declercq, in a homage to Chris Burden, just managed to photograph before he was arrested once again? Continuing with this circular logic, the artist has explored various kinds of feedback. He has also created a loop out of the CCTV system used to protect a market research centre. In a more metaphorical register of retroaction, he has begun reflecting on conspiracy rumours and theories.

Declercq’s tactics may vary but his strategy is constant: instead of redundant iteration, he practices a kind of “artistic proximity” through infra-thin disparities. Ultimately, his work questions the very essence of the document, which is “rawer and more enigmatic” than is commonly believed. For example, by creating a set of false evidence in support of various conspiracy theories, ranging from incriminating verses on Saddam Hussein’s headed notepaper to tampered Polaroids or a copy of a terrorist handbook, he is questioning not only phenomena of falsification and disinformation but also, more profoundly, the efficiency of the photographic image. In this context, his production of images is tantamount to taking power by forming a symbolic counter-power. Overturning the imperative discretion of surveillance systems, in Welcome Home Boss (2001) Declercq exhibits the capture of an intrusive gaze by shadowing “powerful men” in Montreal in order to locate their homes. Using a tower surmounted by powerful spotlights fed by electricity from a generating set pulled by a pickup, at night he would then photograph the homes of the mayor and of rich industrialists. His bulky lighting apparatus is always evident in the foreground of the images. And while the blinding artificial light trained on these domestic seats of power contrasts violently with the darkness of the night, the tone is not so much one of political or social denunciation as of a commentary on the posture of the artist, practitioner of chiaroscuro, in an acute dramatic tension between spectacular transparency and romantic darkness.

Béatrice Gross is an art critic, a curator and she teaches photography

at the MOMA, New York.