Contemplating a future from a prison cell

October 19, 2015 6:28 AM

"From a certain angle, the premise seems almost cruel: invite prisoners on death row to design their own memorials — ways for them to be remembered after they’ve been executed. This means asking them to confront not just their own mortality, but the state’s hand in ensuring it; to imagine not only the reality of their deaths, but a time beyond it. Yet, if Life After Death and Elsewhere suggests anything, it’s that this process may offer a release. These men are already thinking about death, after all — two paintings that feature the grim reaper assure us of that. Now at least they have somewhere to channel their thoughts."
posted by Brandon Blatcher (5 comments total)

The state doesn't kill people for their violence. It kills people who challenge its own monopoly on violence. This is why murderers are executed while "war heroes" are celebrated. The first commit horrific acts of violence for their own reasons, while the second do the dirty work that the state requires.

I think that some murderers deserve to die, but the state should not be granted the power to make that decision.
posted by crazylegs at 7:42 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ok, but what do you think of the art pieces?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:25 AM on October 19, 2015

I think the one that made me really sad was the book spiral by Gary Cone. That it was called "Reading Has Been my Way to Exit", and his other piece was called "I Am A Reader of Books", and then this:

Gary Cone, on the other hand, is still alive, but after an infection in his back went untreated in prison, it spread to his spine and left him paraplegic. Cone, who served as the librarian for the death row unit at Riverbend for many years, had envisioned a tower of books as his memorial; the curators built it, and its spiral form evokes a strand of DNA, suggesting that in prison, even on death row, books can give life. (Cone now lives in a special-needs facility with no access to visitors or educational programs, and little access to books, according to the exhibition materials.)

Just tragic.

I think it's a beautifully humane thing to do for people who face certain death, to give them some way of processing that fact and turning it into something personal and meaningful. Prison strips as much personhood away as it can and giving people the opportunity to take some of that back is really powerful. Thank you for posting this, it really moved me.
posted by billiebee at 9:53 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The work is very moving in person. I was at a panel discussion this weekend at the gallery on arts/education in prison settings since that's something I'm involved in. All three panelists made a pretty good point that education for the incarcerated works both ways- and is reciprocal. Pupils learn things from faculty, but faculty immediately begin to learn more from the students. Things like how inhumane, unjust, dehumanizing, and often arbitrary our "correctional system" is.

Two art classes in I'd already transformed from thinking the system as it is could be reformed to thinking the whole thing needs to be dismantled fwiw
posted by stagewhisper at 11:05 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's ART if it makes you itch in places you can't scratch.

How awkward, to remember that prisoners are humans. Like us, but not the same as us. Having granted the state the right to kill, we are left with the messy process of creating a non-ambiguous definition that fits only the individuals in question--the dead and those who make them dead. But, you see, by the time you get this far the system has been completed and you are just working out the trivial details. Argue over rehab or warehousing all you want, but keep those goddam doors locked. Quibble over the humane way to kill. I favor a bullet to the head, myself, but I won't volunteer to pull the trigger. Maybe you could let the victim's family do it. Or get the Hell's Angels to do it. I'm sure the machine wont get gummed up by a lack of volunteers.

Our prisons are us. By "us" I mean the aggregate "us," of course, not you personally. You may rest in peace. It's not your fault. It's not anybody's fault. It's just the way it is. By "is" of course, I meant "is." I shall explain. Art is the process by which an artist can tell you things you never, ever want to know. Not about the artist, you understand. Well, it's a bit or two about the artist--not what he said, but what he meant. By "meant" I don't mean what he intended to say, but what he meant. Before you saw what he created, he didn't mean anything. Now you are stuck with his connection to you, via the place you go when you are drowsing in between awake and asleep. Since you bothered to look at his art, it becomes clear why we are willing to box them in and lock them down: It's painful to know something besides his name, and worse to know that there is maybe a 40% chance that he's where he is because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that he earned his death sentence off a totally bogus coincidence a few years upstream. Even worse, though, is that a sublime work of art came from a monster who would eat your liver in front of your children. Gets you to thinking, eh? The rabbit causes the dog. I've seen the opinions of the outraged: soldiers and sociopaths, we lock the latter in cages and send the former to Hell in our sacred hand-baskets.

Anyhow, Prisons are Us, so keep them fuckers away from me. Draw the line where you must, but keep the goddam door locked. I can turn away. So I will.
posted by mule98J at 8:27 AM on October 20, 2015 [1 favorite]