Always there

Julia Scher, Always There is the first monograph on the artist's video and installation work, published by Lukas & Sternberg in 2002 and edited by Caroline Schneider. It gathers essays by Brian Wallis, Bill Horrigan, Andrew Hultkrans, Avital Ronell, Andrew Ross, Giovanni Intra and Lynne Tillman across 128 pages.

Scher has worked since the mid-1980s with the hardware of institutional surveillance: security cameras, monitor walls, guard uniforms and control-room furniture, restaged as gallery installations that put viewers under the same watch the equipment was built to perform. Pieces such as Predictive Engineering and Security by Julia turned museums into monitored spaces, pairing the cold authority of camera feeds with scripted, often flirtatious voiceover that undercuts it.

The essays collected here approach that work from film theory, feminist criticism and museum history. Read now, they show how early Scher's surveillance pieces anticipated the datafied, camera-saturated public space of the years since. She remains one of the few artists to have built a sustained body of work from surveillance technology itself rather than from images of it.