Jon Kessler's The Palace at 4 A.M., shown in 2006 at New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, is a dizzying array of hundreds of monitors, surveillance cameras and miles of electric and video cable that simultaneously turn the viewer into voyeur, exhibitionist, spectator and surveilled subject. Mechanical sculptures rigged with cameras create live video feeds that the viewers experience in real time. Magazine images, toys and other found objects recombine to mimic, expose and subvert the horrors and hypocrisies of the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, as well as life in a culture addicted to an overly saturated media experience. This volume documents the critically acclaimed project and includes essays by Alanna Heiss, Hal Foster and others.
Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers, New York in 1957. He has exhibited widely in galleries and museums around the world and he is the recipient many major awards, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to being represented in many of the country's most important museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he has been highly influential in his role at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where he has taught graduate level courses for many years.