SECRET AGENTS IN CONVERSATION WITH
AN ARTIST
Commissioned by the AIVD, artist Jill Magid had conversations with eighteen agents of the AIVD.
The codified language of the secret service was sometimes very poetic. 'You have to prove the white raven does not exist'.
This is what a spy could look like: 'His brown hair is styled with gel.
The sides are combed back-the traces of comb teeth still visible- and the top
is piled in haystacks like an oily Van Gogh field. He drives an old, dark-grey Audi
that he himself calls black. He is 38 years old, has grey sideburns and an extremely large forehead.
He studied history. He stutters when he is on the phone.'
But a spy could equally well be a woman with a pointed nose and dyed, red-wine colored short hair, as shows from the notes of the American artist Jill Magid (1973). Or a fat man with a large face that speaks many languages and who is a also dedicated photographer.
Eighteen descriptions of secret agents are carefully framed and mounted on the walls of the Hague Art Centre, Stroom. And all of them reveal sensitive information about people that normally want to be as invisible as possible: the employees of the General Information and Security Service, the AIVD.
Jill Magid knows what spies look like, how they talk and how they behave. In the past three years she spoke for hours with the eighteen agents, often in anonymous hotel bars or at airports. She did that, remarkable as it might seem, on commission of the AIVD itself.
In 2005 Jill Magid was asked to produce an artwork for the head office of the AIVD in Zoetermeer. The building had to be renovated extensively and thanks to the percentage-rule [… for art in government buildings there was a budget for an art commission. Since the secret service wants to present itself in a more open way towards the general public the occasion was seized to upgrade the organization's public image. The new artwork, so the assignment called for, 'Should give the secret service a human face'.
It is no coincidence that Jill Magid was chosen to do the job. The American artist who was a resident at the Rijksakademie in 2001 and 2002 built a reputation in a short time span with intelligent art projects dealing with issues like security and privacy.
For her most well known work 'Evidence Locker' she worked together with the police and city security company 'City Watch' in Liverpool that is responsible for the camera surveillance in the city. Magid had herself filmed by the surveillance cameras during a one month period and established an intimate relationship with the professionals spying on her.
Two years later the artist befriended a New-York police officer in order to accompany him for five months during his nightly patrols. In 2007 Magid published the short story Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy about the experience.
'In my work I establish intimate relationships with impersonal power structures', Magid explains. 'I am interested in the psychological aspect of power-relations and in the eroticism which is a part of that. Most people have a love-hate relationship with institutions like the AIVD. We are all critical towards them, but at the same time there is something appealing about a secret service. Because you are unaware of what happens there. The AIVD is untouchable. I have tried to penetrate it nevertheless.'
Magid made an unusual proposal to the AIVD. She said: I will not provide you with a ready-made artwork, but I want you to hire me. I shall collect the personal information of secret agents and mix it up, so they will not be recognizable. From all that information in the end the human side of the organization will be constructed.
At first the AIVD was hesitant. To get hired Magid would have to be screened completely, an expensive process that takes ten months time. But Magid insisted and did indeed get hired, as a consultant. She was provided with a contact within the organization that arranged the meetings with the secret agents. Magid: 'She would call me and say "Jill, you have to be at the American Hotel at four o'clock on Saturday where you shall meet a man named Vincent." Since it was strictly forbidden to tape the interviews Magid collected all the information in notebooks. In the show three of these notebooks are on display, safely locked in glass vitrines. On the tab sheets the names of the agents are just readable: 'Vincent' for the men, 'Miranda' for the women.
Magid named her show at STROOM 'Article 12' referring to the law on information and security services. That article states that no information can be processed that has to do with someone their religion, life philosophy, race, health or sexuality. 'I thought that was very funny' she says 'because then what else is left? When I think of the people I lov e it is those things I think of'.
During the interviews therefore Magid asked the agents especially after those five categories. Sometimes the interviews were like therapy sessions. Most of them were very open. I got the feeling they were happy to be able to talk for once about things they normally cannot speak about.
My assignment was to give the organization personality (a human face), Who but I personally was more interested in an existential question: what is the personality (face) of power? Who is at the core? Does it have a core? Is there someone who oversees everything and knows it all? I thought that if I would get to know the agents well enough I would understand how the AIVD is constructed. Of course they were not allowed to talk about the organization, but with time I got to know details about the job and started asking more about it.
'At a certain point I said: "I cannot make this artwork until I have been taught by you how to be a secret agent". I was at the point where I wanted to risk it all. Let me try. "Make me operational. Put me in the field." I wanted to feel what it is like to live an anonymous life, to have secrets, to have control over somebody's life. Because that is the opposite of my job as an artist.
With her insistence Magid overcame many barriers. She passed the screening and got a B+ security clearance: no access to secret files but more privileges than someone that works at the airport. She was given an official AIVD archive-box with her personal investigation number #2485536/01. She was even invited in the director's office of the department Special Investigations. But for her to actually become a secret agent was one step too many for the AIVD.
Magid did however pick up some practical information from her talks with the secret agents. Especially Vincent IV, with whom she developed a close bond and who she affectionately calls 'my guy' , taught her the trade.
Phrases from their conversations appear in the work The Directives, an endless roll of paper listing the regulations a spy has to conform to. The words are cryptic and could be read as a strange kind of love poem 'Put your cowboys behind you / mimic me until I believe you understand / Use me to penetrate the places you cannot / give me a reason to work all night / tell me who's a threat.
'For The Directives I adapted the words I learned and gave them an erotic undertone. When you are incorporated in the AIVD at the opening speech They say you 'enter a warm bath'. So I say: 'Take me into your warm bath'. They also teach you to let go of your work when you head home. So I write: teach me how to have my day but not bring it home'. The interesting thing is that to an outsider the words are nice and rhythmical, but for the AIVD agents they have a deeper meaning. They know exactly what is meant with each individual word.
Magid could not show the agents physically so her words were all she could use as material for the artwork. She was surprised, she says, about the wonderful terminology the AIVD uses. The language of the agents was often very poetical. Someone said for example 'You have to prove the white raven does not exist.' 'I also spoke to a man whose task it is to search the web for dangerous material. He said: "You do the same job as I do, you make the invisible visible". I thought that was very well said.'
There was a point at which the AIVD started to worry about the nice looking American girl on their premises. Magid: at first they thought: it is only art. But soon they noticed I was not joking. I was told I was getting a little too dangerous, although I did not understand why. It was not like I knew what was going on in Afghanistan. Later I understood I was a risk because I could betray eighteen of their people. That was the power I held: the power of observation. I could publicize the things I had seen.
In her show at STROOM Magid clearly alludes to that power. The central work in the show is called "I Can Burn Your Face" which inside the AIVD is used as a metaphor exposing someone's identity. On the floor of the art centre those words are placed, sculpted from red neon light, directly copied from Magid's notebooks. Words like 'catholic' 'soft-spoken', 'almond-shaped eyes', and 'born in 1963', but also quite specific phrases like 'the man in the band playing trumpet is the spider in the web' The neon's are under constant high-voltage power and make a sizzling sound. To touch them is a danger to one's life- that's how explosive the information is that is given. It hurts the eyes merely to look at it.
Magid says that five of 'her agents' came to the opening of the show last Saturday. STROOM was asked to produce a report on the safety measures at the show. Especially the notebooks that were visible in the vitrines worried the AIVD. They were not prepared to expose themselves to that extent.
Magid does not know whether her phone was tapped or she was spied upon in these last years. 'But I do hope so. My greatest fear is that they would not care. What if the AIVD saw all this as a joke and provided me with fake agents and fake information?' All the agents I spoke to seemed very honest, but no doubt they sometimes lied to me to protect themselves. Often I did not know what to believe and what not to believe. And that at the same time is what intrigued me: 'Who knows what? Who holds the cards?'
Sandra Smallenburg (Translated by Bart Groenendaal)