When Julia Scher learned that the Musee de l'Art Moderne had mistakenly returned six borrowed works to Pat Hearn's Soho gallery instead of her studio, she made a mental note to pick them up. No big deal. The xerographic prints were part of last year's "Winter of Love" show and some portrayed the artist in S/M, uniform-drag. After she opened the crate containing the works, she found that all of the 11" by 14" prints were rumpled and dirty. Their leit-motif is bondage and one photo depicts Scher presiding over a nearly-nude woman, gagged and tied to a chair. "That's the one the guards refused to guard," Scher sighed, although she's unclear whether the prints were damaged during the show's run or in shipping. "The curators told me that the guards objected to the uniform," Sher said, "They apparently regarded it as an insult to their profession." Intended to challenge conventional ideas about authority, Scher's imagery frequently does more than just evoke ambivalence, it elicits highly visceral responses. But rarely that visceral.

Many writers also find Scher's work hard to resist. Her resumé lists 82 articles and reviews devoted to her artworks. Scher came to many New Yorkers' attention (including mine) with two prototypical installations that riveted viewers at a pair of 1989 group shows. For that year's Whitney Biennial, she installed a guard in a hot pink, Security-By-Julia uniform next to the ticket seller in the lobby, (Scher is a certified security specialist who operates a company called Safe & Secure Productions.) She also sited six surveillance cameras throughout the museum, and put their linked video monitors inside a phone booth by a restroom. Her contribution to the simultaneous "Dark Rooms" show at Manhattan's Artists Space comprised a narrow entryway featuring a uniformed guard at work, as well as banks of cameras and monitors. The monitors projected real-time images of the staff at work, or fictional footage of a threatening figure with a gun or the like.

Critics describe Scher's work as a Foucault-inflected evocation of postmodernist dystopia--that recently-arrived, post-1984 in which only money counts, nature is replaced by technology, the corporate state controls everything, image saturation is complete, and the unfragmented self and the unmediated consciousness are artifacts of a by-gone era. Although her work does embody these concerns (often brilliantly), this laundry list of contemporary malaise can replace--and obscure--its highly experiential quality. Such rote interpretations are often coupled with inventories of the installations' mechanical components. (The oddly literal effect is comparable to describing Rouen Cathedral as one of Monet's blurry paintings of a church.) Let me tell you about one of Scher's recent works.

Always There, shown at New York's Andrea Rosen gallery in November 1994, mainly comprised a bed. A surveillance camera and a black and white video monitor were attached to each of the bed's, four, steel posts allowing the consumer--viewer rarely seems apt in connection with Scher's voyeuristic universe--to survey his private domain or to see herself on the screen. For Scher reality exists primarily on television. "What other visible signs of life are there?" she asks. (Goodbye anachronistic distinctions between private and public.) A sort of techno soundtrack played in the background; occasionally one heard the artist faintly intoning futuristic sounding injunctions: "Please do not leave until the sensors have completely absorbed you," or "For the highest security, please enter now." Outside the gallery door, a sign announced that "this area is under video surveillance." Even from this thumbnail sketch, it should be clear that Scher's interests in the watched and watching body, the state of security and the security state, have not diminished over the past five years.

Always There both invited and repelled interaction. Its nuanced meaning derived from the visitor's experience of the surveillance equipment and the sensation of the bed dwarfed by the cavernous space and the prosthetic imaging devices. Its crisp, flowery sheets--which no bodily fluids would ever soil--exuded pathos. Are we to romp on Scher's bed? Not in this frigidly chic bastion of look-but-don't-touch retailing. (The artist tends to cleverly turn such institutional characteristics to expressive--rather than analytical--ends.)

Consider the positions of the camera(s). You could insert your hand into its stationery gaze, but all you got in return was a pedestrian, black and white image of your hand. The work seemed to proffer porno-star thrills, while it actually purveyed a crude mechanical responsiveness masquerading as interactivity: In other words, the same ol', cock-teasing dream of genuine (electronic) communication. Who cares whether or not your computer will be transformed into an in-home ATM when the real message is that YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL.

If my tone is a little jokey, the emotional tenor of Always There was despairing. A gaping absence occupies its core. It is induced by Scher's abstraction, her lack of specificity. While Scher's art is not philosophical per se, it is an ideologically motivated effort to expose the often invisible agents of social control. Her techno-nightmares never target specific governments, corporations, or cultural institutions. Instead her work mimics the actual, sublimely seductive onset of techno-social control that's washed over us like a warm bath. You could romanticize this absence at the heart of Scher's work as an Existential void, but that might say more about you than about the art. (It often seems to function as a blank screen on which to project.) Nor should her deadpan pose ever be mistaken for neutrality. As Scher told me, "Two hundred years ago I'd have been a trompe l'oeil painter." Sensing my incredulity, she added, "I'm talking about the perversity of it, not the realism."

When the art histories of the nineties are written, Scher is likely to be regarded as one of the first artistic chroniclers of the electronic age: an artist for whom current technology is both subject matter and medium. (The former is, of course, virtually all that matters, although in 1991 Scher did help design an electronic bulletin board-cum-artwork for The Thing called The Dungeon.) Despite the originality of her vision, the 40-year-old artist operates squarely within the conceptual art mainstream.

Scher came of artistic age in the mid-seventies' heyday of information-oriented, video- and media- art. (She recenty compiled a glossary of security industry neologisms ranging from access mode to zoning.) As a painting student at UCLA, she couldn't take the film production classes she wanted to. She was, however, exposed to performance, installation, and video art by the likes of the Kipper Kids, Paul McCarthy, Vito Acconci, and video subject-object-manipulator Bruce Nauman, with whom she would later be compared. At the time she was doing "these kind of mutilated landscape-feminist fantasy, performance-paintings with titles like Busted Cherry Candy series," the garrulous artist laughingly recalled."I got in touch with my exhibitionism, but I had to stop using candy because I ate so much of it."

The one-time political science major also credits the countercultural distrust of authority as a definer of her sensibility, although it took until the mid-eighties for Scher to find her form. After receiving an MFA from the University of Minnesota in 1984, she started a cleaning service that prompted Hardly Feel It Going In (1985), her first surveillance camera piece, which was surreptitiously shot while she cleaned a gym. A year later she produced Softly Tapping the Wires (1986), a riff on the fetishization of tools and hardware. That year she also moved to New York and began to offer security services for women. While she was far from the first artist to merge her art and business into an often invisible entity (Les Levine, Iain Baxter, and Bonnie Sherk offer precedents from the seventies), Safe & Secure Productions seems less precious than many such enterprises: it is an actual business that sprang first from economic necessity. Although Scher takes on only a few jobs now, she keeps her company on the tax rolls. "Occasionally if friends are having trouble with someone pissing in their elevator I'll do the job, but basically I just like the tradeshows," she quips.

A product of seventies'-style pluralism, Scher's love of words and hybrid, conceptualist modes remain a constant in her work. A 1990 "event" for the Walker Art Center is typical. Participants in a cocktail-hour, bus tour of Minneapolis surveillance sites, not only visited Honeywell House and the local convention center's security control areas, but were transported to them in a bus equipped with surveillance and imaging systems. The printed itinerary invited participants to "Feel free to help yourself to your own image."

Within her installations, Scher's droll language may be read or heard. Texts often appear on screens and monitors that provide real-sounding options: Step right up for urine detection whips, regression chemistry, or the interrogation and bio-merge center. Sometimes these phrases are audible, as in Always There. Whether seen or heard, their distancing irony and ersatz user-friendliness cut across the impersonality of the mechanically-articulated environments. Equally important, this strangely compelling newspeak synthesizeses psychoanalytic and biomedical lingo with technologies designed to monitor space. You are where you are, Scher's work proclaims. Put another way, YOU ARE COMPLETELY OBJECTIFIED.

Watch for this stand-uppish shtick--Scher's term--to be released on audiotape or compact disk. (She is currently working with Canadian musician Mark Bell.) But don't wait to see Scher in performance; she's no longer (formally) doing it. "I loved performing [at UCLA]," she recalled, "and I quickly learned that you could get lots of people to look at photographs, but not many to come to a performance." It's too bad because she's magnetic: her open face and genuine solicitousness are no preparation for her very smart, very fast talk. Cast Debora Winger in the movie version her life.

Scher galvanized an October 1994 audience at a New Museum panel called "The Submissive Moment: Pleasure and the Politics of Pain," held in conjunction with Bob Flanagan's and Sheree Rose's "Visiting Hours" exhibition. Her energetic, 15-minute presentation opened with a ritualistic tying up of the moderator's hands, generously paid homage to Flanagan and Rose, considered S/M as a fact of (teenage) life, and closed with a witty photo-meditation on American Home Products' annual report and its imagery of medical products shot from an incomprehensibly low-angled, downright submissive position. "I speak in non-sequitors," she breathlessly told her audience. But it's not really true. When Scher talks her talk, she reminds me of essayist Susan Sontag surrounding her subject Sontag surrounds her subject in a virtuoso, intellectual dance. Scher's work demands the same sort of enveloping, simultaneous approach.

"I can't handle straightforwardness," Scher ruefully tells me. "I value it, but I don't really try to overcome [my lack of it] because my technique points to that problematic. If duplicity is your subject matter shouldn't you be oblique?" We are talking about art institutions and the support Scher has received from so many of them. Her first museum encounter as a teenager with a Warhol Brillo box "disrupted and destabilized everything," she says, and her love/hate relationship with the art-institutional powers-that-be continues unabated.