OVEREXPOSED

Overexposed is a twenty-eight-minute video: a continuous panning shot across the facade of 500 Park Avenue in New York City, one of the signature curtain-wall buildings of the twentieth century. Originally commissioned by the Pepsi-Cola Company, the building was designed by architects Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and was completed in 1960. The pan briefly pauses at each office window to describe a scene witnessed by a voyeur in a neighboring building; the accompanying voiceover narrates observations and clues.

Overexposed emerged from a long-running fascination with the utopian expectations applied to high-strength, long-span architectural glass when it was first introduced, and their parallels with teletechnologies in our own time. Both were infused with the rhetoric of freedom: in the early twentieth century, curtain-wall construction would liberate vision from the enclosure of masonry walls. Glass buildings guaranteed a world without boundaries in which access would be available to everyone, the familiar promise of telecommunications.

The democratization of information was an important theme in the ideology of the modern movement, and glass was accordingly considered a material of truth, an instrument of disclosure. By mid-century, however, the utopian future construed by Modernist architects turned dystopian. The transparent building, which was intended to permit unlimited vision out, was in fact a two-way system: the material that offered visibility out was vulnerable to surveillance that could look back in. The material that had guaranteed unlimited spatial freedom became subject to the same restrictions as conventional space. The liberating aspects of glass—and its mirror in tele-technologies—made us feel vulnerable and anxious instead. As both became ubiquitous, the pathologies have inverted: the fear of being watched has been transformed into the fear that no one is watching. Former vehicles of truth and disclosure, have both become representational surfaces—instruments used to display false appearances.

Overexposed was first presented at the Getty Center. It has since been acquired by the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.