Talking Points Memo calls it "Rage & Performance Art," which is complicated only if you let it.

Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and former half-term governor and Fox News personality Sarah Palin headlined a protest at the WWII Memorial today. They were decrying the memorial's closure as a result of the government shutdown. The shutdown they orchestrated and perpetuate. Personally.

The protestors, Tea Party Republicans and truckers, siezed the barricades and marched them up 17th Street to the White House, where they waved a Confederate flag and demanded President Obama come out with his hands up.

image: @davidfrum

On a process note, it's interesting that where Sforzian moments were once centrally conceived for and executed by professional photojournalists, nowadays photo-op political stunt events are disseminated through amateur snapshots.

One thing that hasn't changed, though, is Karl Rove's Sforzian dictum that you should be able to get the message even if you have the TV sound turned off. And I think that comes across loud and clear.

As in this photo from [decidedly non-amateur, non-bystander] Texas Republican congressman Steve Stockman, which includes a flag behind Palin that cites John Locke's "appeal to heaven" to call for revolution against the government. [via andrewsullivan.com]

The Guardian commissioned this animated short by director Jonathan Hodgson about the ongoing hunger strikes by prisoners in Guantanamo. The content and text are all based on testimony of five men who are still imprisoned six years after being cleared for release.

The disturbing treatment depicted in the film is largely dictated by the US military's standard operating procedure regulation manuals for handling prisoners and administering force feedings.

Guantánamo Bay: The Hunger Strikes - video animation [guardian]
Previously, related: Standard Operating Procedure

So like twelve years ago, I stumbled across this photo in some dealer's bin. It's a portrait of a young woman with hair pulled back, a braid just peeking out across the back of her head, and she's wearing a very plain, even severe outfit. There's a great rhythm of contrasts between the sitter's hair and forehead, her cheeks, and her dress and shawl.

On the back was written "photograph by Berenice Abbott, N.Y.," in one hand [but not the signature Abbott's known for], and in another,

Mrs Joseph Barber
2 col cut
Sun Soc
EBL

Which meant this was Mrs Barber's engagement photo? Pretty modern. And it was a print submitted to a newspaper with a wedding announcement, where it ended up in a morgue for decades.

So I bought the print, and figured I could sleuth it out and authenticate it. Abbott would have been a bold choice for a wedding portrait in 1935-6. Most Abbott portraits we've seen are of sitters we know: in Paris she famously photographed James Joyce and Eugene Atget, for example.

Mrs. Barber was not, for example, included in the portrait portfolios Abbott published at various times; she's not one of the 42 portraits on the website of Commerce Graphics, the outfit which acquired Abbott's archive. Of course, they didn't have a website when I got the photo. Google Images had barely launched, and still kind of sucked, in fact. So the only way to research was through books, where Mrs. Barber didn't appear, or through newspaper archives, where, eventually, she did.

Joseph Barber Jr., of Andover, Harvard, and Columbia Journalism School, was an editor at The Atlantic Monthly when he married Eileen Paradis, a graduate of Mt Holyoke College and the University of Grenoble, on 15 February 1936. He would later become the magazine's managing editor and hold editing and reporting positions at the Washington Post. A collection of Barber's reports for The Atlantic was published in 1941 as a book, Hawaii: Restless Rampart. In it, he maps out the monopolistic plantation feudalism of the island territory's politics, as well as the massive US military buildup of the book's title. He quoted an army official as saying, "We intend to make the price of taking Pearl Harbor so prohibitively high that no enemy would want to pay it."

Anyway, Eileen Paradis. The only mention I could find of Paradis at the time was her wedding announcement in a Boston paper [on microfiche!], where she was reported to have worn "an oyster white chiffon gown made on Grecian lines," with a matching veil held by a gold wreath, and a gold belt. Which sounds like it'd match the hair. But the photo in the Globe that day was for Miss Mary Redmond Davidson, who had announced her engagement to Mr. Samuel Loring Ayres, Jr.

And that's where it stood. A dead end, confirming Paradis/Barber's marriage, but no proof of whether the photo was actually her, and, of course, whether Abbott had taken it. I didn't have a hallway packed salon-style with vintage photographs, and I'm not really into hanging lone pictures of other peoples' relatives, so I put it away.

And I just found it this morning while looking for some documentation of another work. On a whim, I typed "Eileen Paradis" back into Google, and whaddyaknow. Amid all the citations from the alumni newsletters and the Harvard Club directories is a collection of silver and art donated to the Mt. Holyoke College Museum of Art by The Estate of Eileen Paradis Barber (Class of 1929) in 1997.

The Barbers turned out to collect a fair amount of modern art in their day. There were watercolors by Arthur Dove, works by Max Ernst, Isamu Noguchi, Reginald Marsh, Romare Bearden, and John Marin, along with a sheaf of Japanese woodblocks and a couple of impressionist drawings. There were also five photographs, all by Berenice Abbott: three classic images from her Changing New York project--and two prints of Paradis' portrait.

Berenice Abbott, Eileen Barber, prob. 1936, MH 1997.14.4

One print is much lighter, and the background especially looks to have been dodged or retouched. The other is closer to mine, though the image is a little longer. From the jpg, at least, the image looks like the best of the three, which may be why Barber kept it.

Berenice Abbott, Eileen Barber, prob. 1936, MH 1997.14.4a

Mine also has a handling crease on the far left edge and the top left corner, and a little orange spot in the image that looks like a chemical burn, which may be why she sent it to the paper.

So mystery solved. I'm kind of marveling at how something once impossible became instantly knowable. It still feels like magic sometimes around here. I'm also kind of daunted, because I found out this photograph, this piece of paper I'd bought on a hunch, turns out to be what I thought it was. Abbott's famous images are everywhere, and published in editions of hundreds. But this is one of only three known to exist. and what series of happy accidents kept it intact this long?

The fair was smaller than the first/only time I'd been in 2011, with one 32-room floor of exhibitors instead of 2.5. And some of this year's exhibitors took double/adjoining rooms. And in addition to a couple of DC galleries, there were local non-profits and agencies like Transformer Gallery, WPA, and DC's Arts & Humanities agency.

Despite trying to keep up with art making things, I knew almost none of the galleries or artists I saw. (E)merge's emphasis on emerging galleries showing emerging artists felt like a self-fulfilling and self-limiting parameter that makes for a tricky situation in which to buy--and sell--art. It's a set-up that appeals almost exclusively to collectors' impulse purchase reflex, not their investment aspirations, and definitely not their craving for glamor, luxury, status, or social theater.

On the other hand, there seemed to be significantly more artists in the fair's Artists Platform, self-representing artists, collaboratives, and artist-run galleries who were spread out around the hotel's ground floor, deck, and parking garage. They were mostly solid, engaging, and interesting. Baltimore and MICA were heavily represented, the Corcoran, much less so. I left wanting to merge (e)merge with Artomatic.

But enough of that armchair quarterbacking. Here's some of what I saw that stuck with me, in roughly chronological order. It's like a timeshifted liveblogging highlight reel of my (e)merge visit.

From grupa o.k. comes this 1972 diagram [drawing?] by Carl Andre, Line of March, which describes a smallish floor piece. And it connects to the second inauguration, on January 20, 1972, of Richard Nixon.

Courtney Fiske blogged about finding a 1973 ARTNews article about Line of March titled "The politics of cheese." Andre had found the index card-size sheet metal pieces for the sculpture on his way to Washington, where he'd planned to protest Nixon's inauguration by installing a work, titled American Decay at Max Protetch's gallery on M Street:

The piece consisted of 500 pounds of cottage cheese anointed with 10 gallons of ketchup, resting atop tar paper, covering an area about 12 by 18 feet, with the cheese itself about 10 inches deep. Although the piece was not for sale, one collector did take home ten small cans of the Sealtest large-curd cottage cheese.

There were those who felt, on seeing the piece, that Andre had taken an obscurantist stance, but they should remember that during the campaign Nixon's lunches consisted of cottage cheese coated with ketchup. It has not yet been determined if the cottage cheese Nixon ate was Sealtest large-curd. At any rate, American Decay, which opened at the Protetch Gallery on Jan. 19, closed on Jan. 20 because of the putrid smell which permeated the premises.

The student of politics will also note that Nixon's inauguration actually took place on January 20, 1973, a full year after the date in the drawing above. Gilbert & Lila Sullivan had another Line of March drawing in their collection that does have the "right" date.

So now I really have no idea what this piece of paper is.

For a brief moment yesterday, the first morning of the GOP-instigated shutdown of the federal government, anxious confusion reigned. And as folks began realizing that in addition to the hundreds of thousands of furloughed and unpaid workers, and the halt to vital government programs across the country, Washington's museums and memorials were also closed to the public, there was a ray of hope.

A tour group of World War II veterans, The Greatest Generation, were not going to stand for this assault on our great constitutional democratic institutions. So they had someone push them in their wheelchairs into the World War II Memorial as Park Police watched from the sidelines.

Yeah, then it turns out the pushers were some of the same Tea Party extremists in the House who had voted for, nay, clamored for, the government to be shut down in the first place. Last night the likes of Michele Bachmann and Steve King were promising to personally help any veterans group fight their way back into the Memorial any day if they had to. And they just dared Pres. Obama to arrest them all. Ideally, on live cable TV.

Today, with conservative media attention riveted on this Mussolinian plaza which slices the National Mall in two like a hernia operation, Park Police decided to stand aside as congressional tour guides boldly shouted, "Tear down this fence!" and "Stand our ground!" and whatever.

And GOP chairman Reince Priebus himself stood in the glare of cameras and the afternoon sun, brandishing a GOP check and offering to pay to keep the memorial open (for vets) or, in Gawker's words, "to rent the WWII Memorial for shutdown theater," and --hey, how'd those people in the background get past Obama's Black Fence of Tyranny? It's almost like that little fence was put there, in front of the sign, and strewn with police tape, just so, just to be photographed. Can we get a wide shot on this one?

[image tweeted by HuffPostPol reporter @RyanJReilly: "'Go do your job, idiot!' -- protestor to @Reince at WWII Memorial"]

Here is a photo-op House GOP Leader Eric Cantor tweeted out after shutting down the government today. "We sit ready to negotiate with the Senate."

Because yelling at empty chairs on camera is apparently the only good idea the GOP's had in the last five years, and even that ended badly for them.

So Knoedler Gallery's Ann Freedman didn't only traffick in forged Motherwells and Pollocks; she moved a couple of fake Barnett Newman paintings, too. But, I guess, because the owners of them didn't sue, we haven't seen images of those works. Which doesn't mean they're not out there. Or that they haven't been seen. In fact, at least one Newman painting was included in a high-profile gallery exhibition in New York, and at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, making it one of the most prominent paintings in the whole Knoedler forgery scandal.

The details come from the complaint filed by Freedman earlier this month as part of a defamation lawsuit against dealer Marco Grassi, which Art Market Monitor has posted. Freedman sued Grassi for giving a fairly nonspecific quote about how she hadn't done her due diligence before selling dozens of previously unknown AbEx masterpieces brought to Knoedler by Glafira Rosales. I'm struck by how incidental Grassi's actual comments are, especially compared to the extensive details which Freedman lays out in her complaint. It's almost like she is suing someone just so she can inject her version of the facts into the public discourse on the case, attempting to bolster her own claim that she's a victim of Rosales' deceptions, not a collaborator or enabler.

And so Freedman goes artist by artist, describing all her gallery's research efforts, and piling up the comments and credentials of the art world experts she says saw--and praised, i.e., authenticated--the Rosales paintings. She mentions two Newmans. For Untitled (1949, a 59x34-in Newman canvas, the list included Ann Temkin, who curated the Philadelphia Museum's Newman retrospective; Richard Shiff, who co-authored the artist's catalogue raisonne; directors and curators from the Albright-Knox, who she said tried to acquire the painting; and the National Gallery's Harry Cooper:

These experts and scholars likewise believed in the authenticity of this painting. For example, when Cooper viewed it, he stated that it was "beautiful" and "bore a relationship to the feeling in Stations of the Cross," a well-known Newman work.

Another expert was even more deeply involved with the 1949 "Newman," though; art historian David Anfam included it in his 2008 show, "Abstract Expressionism: A World Elsewhere," that inaugurated Haunch of Venison's New York space after Christie's purchase of the gallery. The exhibition, stuffed with works borrowed from both museums and other dealers, was technically a non-selling show, though as Roberta Smith's scolding review noted, Haunch of Venison's statements on the matter were coy, dissembling, or both. Smith counted a dozen, but based on the number of gallery-organized loans, I figure at least 30 of the 62 works in the show could have been for sale. And sure enough, in Freedman's lawsuit, she says that Anfam had "eagerly marketed [the Newman he borrowed] to potential purchasers."

Smith's review mentioned "an unfamiliar Newman" as a worthwhile element of the Haunch of Venison show, but there was none visible in installation shots online. [And of course, Christie's deleted HoV's website after the gallery was folded into the auction house's private sales division.] So I headed to the Strand to pick up a remaindered copy of Anfam's catalogue for the show.

In his essay for a New York School show in New York, blocks from dozens of well-known masterpieces on constant view, Anfam said he sought works that provided "freshness and variety." So "a hitherto almost [sic] unknown Newman from his annus mirabilis of 1949" must have fit right in.

Whatever my original interest in seeing what a successful fake ur-Newman looked like, it couldn't compare to the odd sense of skeptical anticipation I had flipping through the catalogue. There were four Newman's in Anfam's show, and as I saw each one, I wondered if it was the fake.

It didn't matter that I had the title and dimensions of the forgery; suspicion still tainted that first look. The expectation of uncovering a forgery had me questioning every work, searching for anomalies. That zip didn't look right. The brushy, translucent fields are obviously off. That's just a poorly proportioned copy of a classic. And in each case, of course, the work turned out to be an authentic Newman with immediately unassailable provenance. The Newmans Newman had painted had been set at odds with my mental image of what a Newman "should" be.

It reminded me of Mel Bochner's contribution to the "Artists & Photographs" box published by Multples, Inc. in 1970, titled Misunderstandings ( A theory of photography). Bochner had been collecting quotes about photography on note cards, which no art magazine had wanted to publish. When Marian Goodman asked him for a piece, he mixed six of the quotes with three he made up on his own. As he told triplecanopy & rhizome in 2010:

To this day, I have never revealed which are which. Under the principle "One rotten apple spoils the barrel," the intention of this act of forgery was to undermine any possibility of belief in the text. The "groundlessness" of the quotations became the equivalent of what I viewed as the groundlessness of photography itself, focusing attention on the artificiality of any framing device. I saw this as an attack on one of the main tenets of minimalism, Frank Stella's claim that "what you see is what you see."

I've tried to preserve, or at least approximate my sense of doubt here, by not captioning the images from the HoV catalogue. I'm sure you can figure it out, though, even without doing math or looking at img file names. It's one of those "Now that you mention it" moments. The others are, of course, unassailably authentic, with provenances and documentation and history that only emphasizes the Knoedler painting's complete lack of the same.

And meanwhile, the other Knoedler/Rosales Newman, Untitled (1950), is still a mystery. Like the 1949 forgery, it was selected for a 2007-8 show organized by the Guggenheim and Terra Foundations titled, "Art in the USA: 300 Years of Innovation," but it ended up staying home. [Though the show also traveled to Moscow, Shanghai, and Beijing, Freedman's complaint only says that Untitled (1949) went to the Guggenheim Bilbao.] Anyway, I hope (1950)'ll turn up, too.

Meanwhile, I'd like to make an open offer to the current owner(s) of the Knoedler/Rosales Newmans, to buy them for a fair price. Assuming they can be authenticated, of course.

Anxieties were rising on Capitol Hill with deep divisions (both within the GOP and between the two parties) just days before many federal services were set to close their doors. But in their private meeting, House Republicans agreed to unite on the goal that binds them together: wanting to unravel and defeat Obamacare.

"The whole room: 'Let's vote!'" Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) told reporters, according to MSNBC. "I said, like 9/11, 'let's roll!'" (The congressman was referring to the last words of a passenger aboard a flight that was hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001 and crashed in Pennsylvania.)

I guess this is what the wider shot looked like:

In 1959 Dennis Johnson, a college friend of LaMonte Young, composed November, a six-hour piano piece that basically gave birth to the minimalist music movement as we know it. Young, never shy about his own importance, credits November as the source and inspiration for his own ur-minimalist composition, The Well Tuned Piano. It was all there in November first.

But except for a rough 2-hour recording from 1962, Johnson's work had faded from consciousness, discussion, performance, and history. And Johnson himself had disappeared from the music landscape. Until musicologist Kyle Gann began investigating it, and reconstructing the score. Then R. Andrew Lee recorded it. And it got released last spring on a 4CD box set.

I found November through musician Ben.Harper's blog, Boring Like A Drill. The unfolding of November's story across several years of posts is convoluted, but really wonderful. Here's a bit of his description of attending a live performance of November by Lee, timed to the CD release:

Over five hours, the music works a strange effect on the listener. The intervening decades of minimalist and ambient music have made us familiar with the concepts of long durations, tonal stasis, consistent dynamics, repetitions, but November uses these techniques in an unusual way. The sense of continuity is very strong, but there is no fixed pulse and few strict repetitions. The slowness, spareness and use of silence, with an organic sense of rhythm, make it seem very similar in many respects to Morton Feldman's late music. The harmonic language, however, is very different. Johnson's piece uses clear, familiar tonality to play with our expectations of the music's ultimate direction, whereas Feldman's chromatic ambiguity seeks to negate any feeling of movement in harmony or time.

The semi-improvised nature of November adds another element to a performance. It was interesting to watch Lee relax as he moved from the fully-notated transcription of the piece's first 100 minutes, into the more open notation that made up the next three hours of playing. He seemed to go into a serene state of focused timelessness, perfectly matching the music he was playing.

Late November [boring like a drill]
Gann talking about November on WNYC's Spinning on Air last August [wnyc.org]
Buy R. Andrew Lee's recording of Dennis Johnson's November from Irritable Hedgehog [irritablehedgehog.com]

UPDATE AN HOUR LATER: D'oh, there I go again, I just listened to the WNYC show again.

I fell hard for Anselm Kiefer's impossible but seductive lead books back in the day. I was in college and just making my way from religiously/symbolically loaded Italian Renaissance to contemporary art, when I found the lush catalogue for Kiefer's The High Priestess on a visit to Rizzoli in NYC. [NY was then still in the wake of a big Kiefer retrospective, which I'd missed.] It was like the guidebook to the historically saturated, emotionally fraught world Wim Wenders had just captured in his 1987 angels documentary, Wings of Desire.

The High Priestess, 1989, photos by the artist, image of a signed copy available from bythebooklc in Phoenix

After a few years, I cooled a bit on Kiefer, got a bit more context, began to recognize and be [a bit] skeptical of my own susceptibility to the allure of superlative materialism. So the show at Marian Goodman in 1993, which consisted of the contents of the vanished artist's abandoned studio in Germany--a teetering stack of once-valuable, ruined, dirt-encrusted paintings, and a long table strewn with semen-splattered ledger books--didn't hit me as hard as it did some folks.

20 Jahre Einsamkeit/20 Years of Loneliness, 1971-1991, image via schjeldahl/artnet

[Re-reading it now for the first time in 20+ years, I realize that Jack Flam's 1992 NYRB essay on Kiefer's work and the euphoric literature it spawned was the source of my unconscious reboot. I basically internalized Flam's argument in its entirety; I must have been a hit at parties, parroting that thing.]

Anyway, the point is, I guess, is I have a long and conflicted relationship with artist books, especially the most physically luxurious and sublime ones. I know this. I live this. I make books myself with as little aestheticizing consciousness as possible because of this.

And yet, here I am, swooning like an undergrad at the amazing video of Olafur Eliasson's A View Becomes A Window, an edition of nine handblown glass-and-leather books produced for Ivorypress, which is on view in Madrid through this week:

Seeing the colored glass samples stacked up around his studio for the last several years, AVBAW seems like the most normal, logical extension of Olafur's recent work. Which is just the cool, analytical inevitability it needed to get past my sublime defenses.

Vergne has interesting things to say about Dia, too, and how a seemingly temporary project like Gramsci fits into its core tradition of commissioning and exhibiting ambitious artist projects.

The Momentary Monument | Philippe Vergne on Thomas Hirschhorn's Ode to Gramsci [walkerart.org]

This fieldstone house-metastasized-into-a-horrible-building in Chevy Chase, MD always bums me the hell right out whenever I pass by.

I think it's just a random office building, not even an Elks Lodge or anything. Anyone know who or what happened here? Is there a sad story, or does this count for a preservationist victory in these parts?

4533 Stanford St, I believe [google maps]

I had not wanted to write about the WTC attacks [or "September 11th"] on September 11th, and though it was the day I actually started thinking about this post, I didn't want to write about Gerhard Richter's September on September 11th, either. And I'm glad I've waited; my reflex was to be a bit cynical, and that has largely dissipated. So.

Richter was in the air on September 11th, traveling to New York and grounded/diverted to Nova Scotia. His eventual artistic engagement with the attacks was a small painting, September [CR: 891-5], above, which he made in 2005. Joe Hage, the collector who is also the instigator behind the artist's ambitious website, acquired a half interest in the painting in order, the story goes, to prevent Richter from deciding to destroy it.

The aura of ambivalence surrounding the painting's existence is of a piece with the painting itself, which is based on a FAZ photo of the hijacked UA175 hitting the South Tower. [A newspaper image the artist didn't see at the time, because he was stuck in Canada. Which means he hunted it down at some point.] Richter knifed and scraped the canvas, deploying abstraction to obscure or even erase the representational image.

As far as I can tell, the small painting, just 52x72cm, dimensions Rob Storr compared to a TV screen, but which I'd say is more computer monitor-size, has never been shown in New York.

It wasn't in Richter's solo show at Marian Goodman in 2005-6, even though squeegee paintings listed before and after it in the artist's roughly chronological CR were. MoMA acquired a dozen of them, a series of abstracts, CR 892-1 through 12, titled Wald/Forest.

When Goodman showed Richter's paintings again in 2009-10, September the painting was not among them. That's when the artist and Hage donated it to The Modern, and when Storr made a video about it. His take on the painting and its context were expanded into a book-length essay published in 2011.

But wait, wasn't it--no. That 2009 show did include a September. But it was a print. As the gallery checklist describes it, a "print between glass". September 2009 turns out to be an enlarged [66x90cm] inkjet on vinyl mounted between two sheets of glass, and published in an edition of 40.

September, 2009, CR 139, digital print between two panes of glass, image: gerhard-richter.com

The gallery's own reproduction of the print leaves out the glass mount; and smooth, sealed surface; and the reflection it inevitably creates. Even though these have to be considered as central elements of this work, as different as can be from the scarred, textured surface of the painting it reproduces.

Here's an installation shot from We Heart New York that shows the gallery and other work reflected in the print's mirror-like surface:

And here's a shot of it installed last year at a retrospective of Richter's editions at Collectors Room, Berlin. It's big and glass and framed, and looks and feels completely different than a painting. Because it's a blown up, face-mounted photo of a painting.

Yet even here, in a show about editions, curator Hubertus Butin mostly talks about September as a painting. And so did Storr. And I confess, I'd seen the Goodman show, and read Storr's book, and seen his interview, but it wasn't until I saw this shot that it even registered with me that there was an edition. And that's what I'd seen, not the painting I thought I'd seen.

When I realized this last week, on September 11th, I felt a rush of cynicism, reading Richter's production of an edition as a sell-out. Just as he donated his Important Historical Image to the Modern, he'd quietly sold 40 copies of it to lesser [sic] museums and collectors. Dallas got one. But then I saw one in Beirut, and it occurred to me that an edition circulates the image in ways that transcend the painting itself. It puts September in more, wider, and more varied contexts than MoMA's loan policy could ever accommodate. [UPDATE: John from BR&S adds that a print was in this 2011 exhibition at Montserrat College of Art. Indeed, it's on the catalogue cover. Storr also spoke.]

In that video tour, Butin talked about Betty, calling Richter's painted portrait of his daughter the "most famous and probably the most successful picture that he has ever created." Successful, Butin continued, because "No other subject of his has been as frequently reproduced in books, catalogues, postcards and posters." The Betty in his show is, of course, an edition, not the original. It's a print of a photo of the painting [of a photo.] And as an image, at least one metric of its success, is its rate of reproduction.

September the print has exactly the same relationship to September the painting. And even more than a painting, a glassy digital print ends up capturing September's electronic screen essence that Storr originally identified. Which makes me wonder how, why, New York, of all places--of all places--has only seen the print, and not the painting. Not the visceral, physical experience of the original, but the distanced, reflective, mediated simulation. Or maybe it's all incidental to September achieving historic, Betty-scale "success".

September, CR| 891-5, 2005 [gerhard-richter.com]
September, CR 139, 2009 gerhard-richter.com]
September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter, by Robert Storr [amazon]

In an extensive profile of the NSA Director, Foreign Policy reports that when Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander was head of Army Intelligence, he built out his "Information Dominance Center" to look like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise:

It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer...complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather 'captain's chair' in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

"Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard," says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits.

The Information Dominance Center at Fort Belvoir, VA is featured in the portfolio of DBI Architects, a leading DC commercial architecture firm. The firm has done buildouts for absolutely everyone, but in the 1980s, they created a "Stealth Design" practice, focusing on computer rooms and "technology-oriented spaces, including network operation centers, switch sites, data centers, advanced concept laboratories, and video teleconferencing centers."

With several top-level command centers under their belt, DBI turns out to be one of the go-to architects for the post-9/11 Intelligence Industrial Complex. Their regional clients include Geo-Eye, the satellite imaging company which powers Google Maps; Lockheed Martin, for whom they build a 50,000-sf control center; various Army intelligence divisions; and even the White House itself. DBI remodeled the WH Situation Room in 2007. They also built the grand, cinematic nerve center of the Department of Homeland Security's National Counter-Terrorism Center, which was in an undisclosed suburban office park location until George Bush used it as a press corps backdrop in 2006.

The DBI look is part NASA, part Dr. Strangelove, to NORAD to War Games and on and on, back and forth. The big screened control center is part of the security theatrical tradition now. And in an era of Federation-inspired flip phones and iPads, where the fictional CIA of 24 enabled and rationalized torture at the actual CIA's hands, we probably shouldn't be surprised that politicians--of all people--are susceptible to intelligence industry set pieces that look and feel just like a movie.

Previously: But He'll-- He'll See The Big Board!