As an art historian, it's hard not to relate what you see in everyday life to history — not in the sense that every lily pad recalls Monet or snowballs bring David Hammons to mind, but in the sense that sometimes art really does imitate life. This happened to me recently, maybe 10 minutes into Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything. I watched Fielder hold painful, prolonged eye contact with Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster whose eerily large blue eyes seem to enact their own kind of performance. Naturally, I thought of Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present” (2010). Perhaps it’s an obvious, pretentious comparison. But hear me out: Is Fielder a documentarian, or is he a performance artist playing one?
Artist Martha Wilson recently defined performance art as an intervention that unfolds in real time, often placing the artist’s body at the center of the action. The genre has long tested the limits of what an artist’s body can do, and what an audience will tolerate: Chris Burden had himself shot with a .22-caliber gun in “Shoot” (1971); Yoko Ono invited audience members to cut away her clothing in “Cut Piece” (1964); and Carolee Schneemann pulled a scroll from her vagina in “Interior Scroll” (1975). These works differ considerably, but each makes the artist’s actions and the responses they provoke central to the work.
Fielder, too, puts himself in the middle of things. In You Can See Everything, he spends 34 days filming and questioning Holmes, her partner Billy Evans, and their two children. Eventually, he moves into the guesthouse of their California beachfront rental, just before Holmes begins her 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors and patients of Theranos, whose blood-testing technology falsely claimed it could run a wide range of tests on a few drops of blood. The couple frames their participation as an act of “radical transparency,” hoping to persuade the public that Holmes is innocent. They chose Fielder as their documentarian, they explain, because he “thinks outside the box” just like they do. Game recognizes game.
Fielder’s move turns observation into participation. His proximity to the family becomes part of the experiment, shaping the behavior he records. In one scene, he films himself lurking at a distance as Billy and Holmes embrace. In another, he sits close to Holmes on a couch; a hand strokes her shoulder, and for a moment it seems to belong to Fielder, until the camera reveals Billy on the other side. But the film invites us to imagine a silent intimacy growing between Holmes and Fielder that it never confirms. Elsewhere, Holmes texts flirtatiously, “fyi you can totally see everything.” The title begins to feel less like a promise of transparency and more like provocation: Who is watching who? What does each person want seen?