Author Description

"Subversion belongs to no one. It can come from artists who outwit the state, or from secret services who infiltrate the art scene on behalf of the state. But what happens when both sides meet? Since the gradual opening of the secret service archives in Eastern Europe and the fiches in Switzerland, as well as increasing access to individual files in the USA, we know how art and artists have become the target of observation and disinformation. In Eastern Europe, the secret police were particularly afraid of happenings, perfomance art, and action art, and therefore documented them particularly intensively while also trying to manipulate them with counteractions. In Artists & Agents, we show the 'disruptive' creativity of secret police work, the interaction between artistic and secret service actions, as well as the relevance of research in secret service archives for art and cultural history. However, we will also show how artists work with the potential observation of the informers, and how they deal critically with secret service documents and missions today." -- table of contents.