Surveillance, Seduction, and Subversion: The Art of Julia Scher

By Marissa Friedman
August 22, 2025

“Watching.” That’s the word Visual Arts Program Fellow and Former Lecturer Julia Scher utters early in our conversation, and it echoes across her five-decade career in art. From her early experiments in landscape painting to her current sculptural and media installations, Scher has built an enduring body of work that interrogates surveillance, security, seduction, and power—often with equal doses of curiosity and discomfort.

Born out of painting but shaped by technology, Scher’s practice began in earnest in the mid-1980s. “Surveillance and security came out of landscape painting,” she says. “My MFA was in painting and sculpture. My thesis was ‘American Landscape,’ and in a way, you could still characterize my late work as an elderly woman artist as landscape—to see deeper into the body as a landscape, into identity, and further out into outer space.”

Her work fuses bodies, cameras, and architectures of control into immersive, often unsettling installations. In one early piece, which she calls her first painting with a camera, she installed a camera overlooking and then projecting the group of visitors, creating an unsettling landscape. “It looked like there were people trapped in television monitors. There was a giant needle controller. Like all my work, it’s a self-portrait, but it also lets viewers recognize a place or a sense of scale.” She continues, “the artwork can’t just be reduced to the optics of what you see out of the camera; it is also the encounter with the installation. I like this idea of this demanding presence, of a thing or a room in addition to the kind of mirror, the functioning reflector of a camera. So, it was looking, but also unseen.”

Julia Scher, Security By Julia XLV, 2002, fencing, ceiling fans, monitors, video switchers, speakers, light fixtures, amplifiers, DVD players, surveillance cameras, latex and signage, five-channel video, audio and lighting, 9 minutes, 22 seconds, dimensions variable. Photo by Dario Lasagni. Courtesy of the artist and Ortuzar Projects, New York City. © Julia Scher.

Julia Scher, ameratherm ultra cooking lab, 2024. Exhibition view, DREI, Cologne.

That camera work led her deeper into technology and eventually to an enterprise all her own: Safe and Secure Productions, a real-life security business where she cleaned gyms and installed locks for women in vulnerable situations. “The first lock jobs were changing the locks of women who were threatened or had problems. Word got around,” she recalls.

Scher began creating installations with multiple surveillance cameras, allowing viewers to freeze and take home their images. “There were diagrams for the connectors. You could press a button… it would automatically freeze, and you could take your image out.”

Tempo, for Scher, was always a critical element. “Why are you cutting every 6.8 seconds?” she asks, mischievously. “It’s the heartbeat during orgasm! That’s why disco is so alluring—it mimics that rhythm.”

Audio was a crucial part of the experience too. In one installation, entering the surveillance zone triggered a subsonic tone between 5 and 10 hertz. “You’d feel like shitting. There was no bathroom on the floor. It was supposed to play with: ‘Look what’s eating into your lifestyle? Surveillance.'”

Julia Scher, "Mama Bed" (left) and. "Papa Bed" (right), 2003. Exhibition view: Julia Scher, Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten, Esther Schipper, Berlin 2024. Photo © Andrea Rossetti.

Julia Scher, Planet Greyhound, 2022. Exhibition view, Kunsthalle Giessen. Photo: © Rolf K. Wegst.

Surveillance, Scher argues, is never neutral. It’s seductive. It flatters. It rewards. In works like Public Travel Area (1988), viewers could buy surveillance equipment, make recordings, and walk away with tapes. “You want to participate because you get pleasure,” she says. “You get a reward.”

This duality—of horror and benevolence, submission and agency—runs through her entire practice. Even as technology evolves, Scher sticks to what she calls “older tropes” while integrating new audio and media inputs. Her latest iteration of Danger Dirty Data will be exhibited in Berlin at the “Global Fascism” show in fall 2025.

“It’s still the same political sensibility,” she says. “This stuff is damaging, and it looks soft and harmless and carefree and good for you—at the same time, watch out.”

Julia Scher, Wonderland, 1998. Exhibition view, Julia Scher: Maximum Security Society, 2023, Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach. Courtesy of Julia Scher and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

Julia Scher, "Security By Julia II," Artist Space, New York, 1989. Photo copyright C. Erickson

Though much of Scher’s work is dark, it’s also suffused with irony and humor. She sees comedy as a survival tool. “They don’t like it,” she says of some institutional settings. “But for me, it’s a language. It’s how I express loss and fear—and still point to something amazing.”

More recently, Scher has turned her gaze skyward. Since 2022, she’s been producing tondos—circular portraits of figures in astronomy and astrophysics, including Vera Rubin and Ari Loeb. These works reflect on observation, presence, and absence. “In the mirror, you are reflected, but you’re absent from part of it. Present and absent, simultaneously.”

For Scher, surveillance isn’t just about optics. It’s about presence. It’s about being watched, being missed, and being implicated. “If expression is the principality of media arts,” she says, “then that’s why art is valuable. We can still express ourselves in it—and point to something bigger.”

Even in an era of AI, deepfakes, and ubiquitous cameras, Scher insists on the human scale of watching and being watched. “It’s a transaction,” she says. “A strategic alienation. But it’s also an invitation.”

Now in her 70s and living with chronic pain, Scher remains fiercely engaged, and deeply skeptical of the very tools she manipulates with such precision. Her work reminds us that we are not only subjects of surveillance, but participants, complicit and curious. She continues to mentor young artists, teach, and exhibit worldwide. Her installation Mothers Under Surveillance recently showed at the Walker Art Center, examining maternal authority through a critical lens.

“Art is valuable because we can still express ourselves in it,” she says. “And point to something bigger.”

Julia Scher, Mothers Under Surveillance, 1993. Courtesy of Julia Scher and Esther Schipper.

In a world increasingly mediated by screens, codes, and algorithms, Julia Scher’s work continues to ask the hardest questions: Who is watching? Why are they watching? And what happens when we start to enjoy it?

For Scher, the answer lies in ambiguity. “You are inside an apparatus whose hegemony you can’t escape,” she says. “You want to denounce it. But you don’t necessarily.”

With one eye on the mirror and another on the stars, Julia Scher shows us how the act of watching—and being watched—can be a site of resistance, reflection, and radical play.

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Julia Scher will be giving a lecture, A History of Surveillance and Security, on Monday, September 15 at 6pm in the ACT Cube.