lauren, vito, and other followers

The following is an essay about performance art, old and new, which i wrote in the summer of 2019.

Follower (2017) is a project by performance artist Lauren Lee MCCarthy which offers people the service of being physically followed for a day. The website’s landing page asks you to fill out a form to indicate your interest, prompting, “Why do you want to be followed?” and “Why should we follow you?” If you are chosen, you get instructions to download an app from the App Store, which tracks your location via your mobile phone. On the day of your following, an unseen person follows you around your city as you carry out your daily activities, “just out of sight, but within your consciousness.” At the end of the day, the follower sends you a single photo they have taken of you during the day, as evidence that you have been seen.

McCarthy is joining a tradition of performance artists who have been interested in notions of the private and the public since the 1960’s. The most prescient example is Following Piece (1969), in which Conceptual artist Vito Acconci would discreetly follow a stranger’s movements across New York City. Selecting a passerby at random every day over the course of a month, Acconci would follow behind the subject until they entered a “private space,” such as a shop or a home.

Following Piece tested our notions of privacy and the invasions thereof, what counts as private actions in a public space, and where the demarcations of public/private are in a city environment. As a product of the tail end of the Sixties, Following Piece can also be seen as an aspiration towards an empirical experiment, as well as Acconci stepping back to see what happens when he renounces his own authorial decision-making.  Following a procedure methodically in a dynamic environment, the artist attempts to isolate and control a singular variable in his observation. The outcome of the work – the maneuvers of his feet and where his pursuits take him – are ultimately left up to chance, determined by the stranger selected at random, and by the dynamic movements of the swarming traffic around them.

If Vito were re-creating his piece today, he might be shocked at how radically our attitudes towards privacy and the public sphere have shifted. Working 2017, McCarthy effectively exploits these brand new resources at her disposal as she re-imagines Following Piece with Follower – starting with the most basic premise that today’s subject are not discreetly tracked; they freely consent and even actively seek out the experience of being viewed. 

The exhibitionist kink which neoliberal subjects seem to have in desiring the degradation of their own privacy has been observed and theorized ad nauseum. Posting the details of our lunch take-out and our evening jog for others to view seem to do crucial work in our ability to maintain the belief that those details matter, and by extension, that we do too. And why not participate in this free-for-all influence melee? Microcelebrity is not only ubiquitous but also often gainful, and if you’re forfeiting your rightful share of the attention market, it’s probably due to imperfect information or mismanagement of resources on your part. 

McCarthy highlights this self-objectifying quality of the neoliberal subject by requiring the viewer to work for it: the  application process to be selected to be pursued. In fact, the performance begins not at the moment the artist initiates her discreet pursuit, but rather, when the viewer fills out the application form. 

Requiring the viewer to install an app from Apple’s App Store – rather than from a direct link, for example – forces the viewer to run through a familiar script of mobile app usage she has done dozens of times before: permitting the phone to install, giving location-tracking permissions to the app, and opening it in anticipation of some reward. In this way, the piece’s existence hinges on the viewer’s consent and participation, and forces the viewer to reckon with the privacy invasion and self-exhibition implicit in her participation of the mundane operations in today’s economy and connectivity.

Follower’s website is also a considerable component of the project: its copy co-opts Internet startup jargon, the design sports an instantly recognizable Squarespace template, McCarthy insipidly satirizes the overbearing entrepreneurial ethos of Web 2.0, with its countless digital storefronts and its moral imperative of self-marketization.

Using website deadpan, geolocation technology, and the App Store’s affordances, McCarthy delivers a cheeky critique of surveillance and privacy, the exhibitionism of the modern subject, and a new experience economy in which consumers line up for the opportunity to share about that time they were pursued by a performance artist.