The Art of Bureaucracy

• In Event: Visualizing State Power

Abstract

Secret government records, prior to their declassification, might be redacted. To ‘redact’ now means ‘to conceal from unauthorised view’, to render ‘unreadable’, or to ‘sanitize’. Scholars of official secrecy recognise redaction’s paradox: in a regime of transparency, redaction enables us to glean the existence of a secret, but not its contents. Some writers have observed that redaction is itself an art form; classifiers may use black marker, opaque tape, sharp razors, photocopiers, or products from the expanding redaction software market. Others have immersed themselves in creative endeavours to ‘un-redact’ these documents in order to ‘see beneath the black’.
This paper examines redaction through several artworks made from government documents. Drawing from legal scholarship into secrecy and transparency, and cultural and art criticism into the ‘documentary turn’, it argues that the transition from secrecy to disclosure, and the transformation of official records into art works, forces us to scrutinise the bureaucratic labour, and also the artistry, demanded in the act of making and redacting official records.

Author

• Katherine Biber, University of Technology Sydney