Type A:

Guarded

Type A: Guarded presented works from artists Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin, known collectively as Type A. The installation featured an armed security guard stationed in the gallery monitoring twenty-one objects deemed potentially dangerous by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). To highlight the theatrical nature of security procedures, the prohibited objects were only visible to museum visitors on a series of closed-circuit security monitors. While already a topic of much frustration and suspicion, the TSA’s “Prohibited Items” list and its screening processes have become a microcosm for the actions that contemporary Americans have either willingly or begrudgingly submitted themselves to in order to remain safe from terrorist acts.

Guarded probed the public’s view of these security measures, from outrage to ambivalence to helplessness, by bringing the prohibited items into a museum for the sole purpose of having them guarded. The installation asked visitors to explore their own feelings about fear and safety in America. Type A has repeatedly focused its attention on the boundaries that distinguish social and private spaces. This installation builds on the artists’ previous works, such as Barrier, 2009, in which the artists placed reinforced concrete traffic barricades, the kind commonly used to secure urban sites from terrorist attacks, in the galleries of the Tang Teaching Museum. Guarded similarly calls attention to the borders and boundaries that are ubiquitous in our post-9/11 world.

Adam Ames was born in 1969 and Andrew Bordwin was born in 1964. They have been working together as Type A since 1998.