Last episode I left you with Cornel West. He was speaking about the blues as part of the exhibition Blues for Smoke, which was on show here in Columbus at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2013 at the same time as Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai, with its concluding poetic call for the abolition of prisons (As long as poverty exists, you’re not rich, as long as despair exists, you’re not happy; as long as prisons exist you are not free) was being screened in the Film/Video Theater of the same museum. In case you didn’t have a chance to watch it, here is a rough transcript of what West says early on in the video:
We have catastrophes. The black problem in America is not a problem its a catastrophe visited on black people; the women’s problem ain’t a problem of sisters of all colors, it is a catastrophe visited on women; and so forth. Or indigenous people, they didn’t have a problem called red people, they had catastrophes visited upon red folk. But it was black people who got genius, not all of of us, but the blues men and women who had the courage to love and tell the truth, and bear witness. They didn’t necessarily triumph, black people ain’t triumphant. All the folk in the prison industrial complex, all the folk dealing with new Jim Crow, all the folk dealing with dilapidated housing, disgraceful education levels, depression, unemployment, underemployment…There ain’t no black triumph, there’s black smiles, black styles, black resistance…
Reading this now, I keep thinking of Pope. L’s Skin Set Project (1997-), not the ones I first encountered in the Blues for Smoke exhibition, but one of the series I saw in Documenta Halle in Kassel during last year’s documenta 14 exhibition called Red People Are My Mother When She Sick and Visiting Me in the Hospital (2010):
West’s reference to the prison industrial complex and the new Jim Crow in the same breath leads us directly to Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, to which he contributed a preface for the revised 2011 edition.
Many of us in Columbus will recall either attending or streaming the panel at the Wexner, “Black Studies and the Fight Against Mass Incarceration”, which included Alexander speaking with professors, students and activists of the Ohio State University and Columbus community. The panel was planned to coincide with the release and screening of Ava DuVernay‘s 2016 documentary 13th, which builds on Alexander’s book and in which she appears.
One way to gauge the extent of the problem…sorry, catastrophe of racist mass incarceration, is by returning to the Ohio Pen in the below annotated graph from the Prison Policy Initiative.
According data from the 2010 Census in the 14 years between the closing and the demolition of the Ohio Pen (1984-1998), the ratio of people incarcerated in prisons in the state increased from around 180 per 100,000 people to over 400 per every 100,000 people.
When broken down into racial and ethnic groups, the ratio of the black prison population was nearly quadruple the number (per 100,000) than that of the white population. Comparing Ohio to the nation as a whole (in the two graphs below), we may not be able to show that, as with the country as a whole, in Ohio the black prison population is higher than white (given the 9% difference).
However, while the Latino and native rates seem to represent the rest of the country, in Ohio where there are 15% more white people compared to the country as a whole (81% vs. 64%), black people still make up 3% more of the prison population compared to the rest of the country (43% vs. 40%). Seen another way, the black prison population is 31% more than the black population in Ohio (compared to 27% countrywide), while the white prison population is 29% less than the state population (compared to 25% countrywide).
This data is nothing new to readers of Alexander’s book and viewers of 13th, but the sheer scale of the catastrophe needs to find some place within my ostensible focus across these four episodes, this four day show, that came about as part of an invitation to write something about the 20 year anniversary of the demolition of the Ohio Pen for the exhibition, curated by artist Jason Simon, To What Red Hell at the Angela Meleca Gallery in downtown Columbus, which opens on September 8 and runs until October 27. (For more information about the exhibition, you can click the below image, a detail of a work by Leni D. Anderson included in the show).
But what has an exhibition about a prison ruin have to do with the catastrophe of racist mass incarceration? And, closer to home, what has this privileged white ex-Classicist-turned-art-educator doing writing about this in the first place? On the one hand, what can someone who is trained in a discipline that trades on the art of the ruin with its lush draw of traces, instead of real violence, present and live, tell us about such living Hells, other than how they are tamed by decay into irresistible sites for artists? (I am grateful to my friend, artist sair goetz for introducing me to the idea of ‘ruin porn’, which I hadn’t heard of before they told me about it, specifically in relation to a trend in photography). On the other hand, unlike so many other people here in Columbus, many of the artists in the exhibition included, I have no first hand experience of either the Ohio Pen (as functioning prison, ruin or demolition site), and have barely give it a thought while walking along Nationwide Boulevard from Nationwide Arena to Huntington Park.
Let me see if I can do some justice to these questions in the remaining time left in this episode (even if it sets me up to fail in the manner predicted by Donald Judd in his 1964 essay “Local History” about the messy shifts of style in the New York Art scene in the early-mid 1960s, where: At any time there is always someone trying to organize the current situation). Well, here goes.
In 1988 museum historian and theorist Tony Bennett, taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Douglas Crimp in his essay “On the Museum’s Ruins,” wrote “The Exhibitionary Complex” as a direct extension to the museum of Michel Foucault’s studies of institutions of confinement (the most extreme example being that of the prison in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison).
Bennett starts his analysis by taking up the two most prominent players in the prison as an institution: objects and bodies. Before the mid-nineteenth century, modes of punishment were public, with the gallows and the body of the condemned representing the spectacle of punishment. Yet the rise of carceral institutions enabled an inward-looking network of power relations. The scaffold was, as a result, replaced, as Foucault argues (and quote by Bennett):
by a great enclosed complex and hierarchised structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.
At the end of Bennett’s essay, he follows Foucault again in articulating the shared symbolic power of both prison and museum buildings within the city. Both nineteenth century institutions would be placed at the center of a city and both would incorporate the people into the process of the state, whether through ‘show and tell’ education or hidden punishment. (Note the foundation of the Ohio Pen downtown (1834), predated the Ohio State University (1870) and the Columbus Museum of Art (1878), as the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts).
Bennett concludes:
If the museum and the penitentiary thus represented the Janus face of power, there was nonetheless – at least symbolically – an economy of effort between them. For those who failed to adopt the tutelary relation to the self-promoted by popular schooling or whose hearts and minds failed to be won in the new pedagogic relations between state and people symbolized by the open doors of the museum, the closed walls of the penitentiary threatened a sterner instruction in the lessons of power. Where instruction and rhetoric failed, punishment began.
And here we are. On the cusp of the opening of an exhibition about the 20 years since the demolition of the Ohio Pen, and the threat remains, especially for the people living in this city who are disproportionately disenfranchised on account of their race (and let me at least mention the growing power and oppression of ICE, fully emboldened by the current racist regime). It is no wonder that Bennett’s essay was reprinted, with an updated response by the author, in The documenta 14 Reader given this exhibition’s attention to – if I may paraphrase the director Adam Szymczyk – ideas of displacement and dispossession, silence and masks, language or hunger, violence and offering as part of contemporary decolonial critique, Indigenous knowledge, feminism, minor traditions within and outside the mainframe of modernism, postqueer politics, and a plethora of other voices that scream for attention and should be listened to).
But, back to the Ohio Pen, what if an exhibition commemorating the 20 years since the demolition of this prison in downtown Columbus amid the rapidly worsening catastrophe of the prison industrial complex bring us to form a new argument for the abolition of prisons? Here is where we need to turn to Jackie Wang in the last chapter of her incredible 2018 book Carceral Capitalism. After six dense and disturbing chapters on racialized dispossession, plundering police, juvenile delinquency’s biopower, PredPol, RoboCop and the politics of safety, interspersed with personal testimony of her brother’s trial and incarceration called “Ripples in Time: An Update”, we arrive at the last chapter called, somewhat hopefully: “The Prison Abolitionist Imagination: A Conversation”.
A few paragraphs in, we hit the following impasse (which might describe the mindset of any of us visitors to the upcoming exhibition To What Red Hell exhibition):
At this historical juncture prisons have become thoroughly naturalized. Imagining and working towards a world without prisons – which is the project of prison abolition – would not only require us to fundamentally rethink the role of the state in society, but it would also require us to work toward the total transformation of all social relations. A project as lofty and ambitious as this is easy to dismiss as unrealistic, utopian, impractical, naive – an unrealizable dream. But what if –
And here is the crucial moment, not only of this episode, but in our whole show, so lean in and listen closely.
But what if – instead of reacting to these charges with counter-arguments that persuasively demonstrate that the abolitionist position is the only sensible option – we instead strategically use these charges themselves as a point of departure to show how the prison itself is a problem
Here Cornel West would offer the correction – a catastrophe:
to show how the prison itself is a catastrophe for thought that can only be unthought using
And here Wang moves into italics, which I’ll replicate here with all-caps:
that can only be unthought using A MODE OF THINKING THAT DOES NOT CAPITULATE TO THE REALISM OF THE PRESENT.
Wang proceeds and here I feel a comparable sensation as that created by the closing words of the voiceover of Le Joli Mai – imagine you are hearing these words spoken by Simone Signoret:
Can the re-enchantment of the world be an instrument that we use to shatter the realism of the prison? What follows is a series of questions – conversations with revolutionaries, dead and alive, on death, dreams, the struggle, and the phenomenological experience of freedom. There are moments I want to enter. Will you follow me there, to the place where the breathing walls quietly exhale a low freedom song?
Could we imagine such a place? And what if we made the exhibition To What Red Hell such a place? What would it look like? What would it feel like? We would have to juxtapose the photographs of the ruins (by Moyra Davey and Masumi Hayashi) of the Ohio Pen, with our memory of seeing Deana Lawson’s sequence of prison studio portraits Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin & Family, 2012–14, at the Family Pictures exhibition of February 16-May 20 this year in the nearby Columbus Museum of Art.
We would have to mix together the ghostly piano from Chester Himes’ story, Chris Marker’s piano of Jason Simon’s film, the soundtrack to Le Joli Mai, the synth of Love on the Run and all the music playing through the galleries of Staring Back as well as playing at To What Red Hell (Hard Luck Soul by the 511 Jazz Ensemble), and fuse it with that fleeting moment in Sable Elyse Smith’s 2017 video Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors when Al Green’s song Love and Happiness suddenly starts, stops and then repeats across the video diary of the artist’s incarcerated father, filmed as he is shaving his head, which many of you may have seen during the artist’s talk at the Beeler Gallery on on March 23rd this year (a talk I missed, but thanks to Jo-ey Tang and Marla Roddy I can watch again and again).
For this ex-Classicist, to break from realism to enchantment, from the prison as ruin and local historical curiosity to a living experience in black artists’ lives, from the demolition of Ohio Pen to the abolition of the racist foundations of the prison as institution, is part of the process of breaking with the hallucinatory nostalgia of Western Classical culture, as artistic and educational foundation, in the name of some whitewashed and whitewashing civilization, to the real work that is needed now to prepare for the day – 2043 according to the Native American collective Postcommodity – when the USA is a majority non-white country.
To end this episode – that has turned into a rant or, at best, a sermon – I want to read to you some lines written by Kay Boyle, who wrote both essays and fiction about her experiences as in prison for her activism in 1968 fighting against the Vietnam War. In her poem “A Poem for February First 1975” about the Attica prison riot of September 1971, Boyle acknowledges that other Attica, of the enduring ancient Greek imaginary, yet turns to the American prison and its brutal retaking has having an equally lasting effect on our world. (As Wikipedia tells us at this during the rising black power movement and many black prisoners had transferred to Attica, increasing population from its designed 1,200 prisoners to 2,243, 54% of these were Black American, 9% Puerto Rican, and 37% white; however, most of the 383 correctional officers were white). Here is Boyle:
Hear the far clang of the syllables: Attica. Do not let them
Slip through the crevices of history, geography, be effaced from
The miraculous ledger of the stars. Say that a civilization was lost here.
But let us leave the last words to Jackie Wang, who also turns to Attica in a moving section of her final chapter, her call for re-enchantment as a way to break through the naturalized state of prisons in this country, called “The Stars Seen From Prison”:
In September 1971 the prisoners of Attica rose up, took the prison, and carved out a small space of freedom: a temporary liberated zone from which they could observe the stars [Wang then quotes a testimony by Heather Ann Thompson]. In the cracks of the prison, something bloomed. A field of wildflowers, imposed on a night sky. Blood was coming. Joy and dread mingled there, infusing the air with a powerful sense of rapture and uncertainty. What exalted frequency was discovered that night, then lost, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the police to put down the uprising? Blood was coming. The new world never arrived. How terrible it must have been for W. E. B. Du Bois to realize he had mistaken dusk for dawn, that darkness would follow and not the radiance of a new day – his people’s strivings rendered crepuscular. The dream of liberation collapsed in a heap of bloodstained rubble. Blood was coming. the drumming would not last. The prisoners would be punished for daring to glimpse the stars. Will those who have constructed this Hell ever wonder – What was it all for? The subordination of all life to these systems that hem us in. Why cover the sky?
Amen.
