Hearing the call

tradition of artists’ manifestos (Federation of Artists, 1871/2016). Transgression is perhaps the most obvious link between art and law.

While her link to philistinism remains important, Laurie Jo Reynolds’ location of art in law and action does not remove it from the realm of aesthetics, but ties it to the history of modern art. Aesthetics “is by no means free from laws,” says Friedrich Schiller (1794/2004), even if “the mind in its aesthetic condition … acts freely and is in the highest degree free from all constraints.” While Todd Cronan dismisses the idea that “the production and articulation of new formats is the occasion of new social realities,” (2013, n.p.), his paraphrase of David Joselit’s central claim in the book After Art, Joselit (2013) is just updating the Romantic view that a thing’s “aesthetic character” can “relate to the totality of our various powers, without being a specific object for any one of them” (Schiller, p. 99). Hito Steyerl (2016) has observed that cell phone cameras use data-mining algorithims to construct a fictionally enhanced version of an otherwise low-resolution photograph, but this is obviously what portrait painters have done for centuries—creating an imaginary image that, like anyone campaigning or lobbying in the legislative process (such as Laurie Jo Reynolds and Tamms Year Ten), solicits the fantasmic engagement and consent of the subject.

3.3 Hearing the call

A moment of tragic awakening comes in Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre, when Jane encounters a hidden prisoner in her home. In the book’s climactic crisis, Jane discovers that her fiancé Edward Rochester has a “dark” secret—Bertha Mason, a Creole “Negress” he met and

married in the West Indies, who was declared mad and has been locked up in the attic for a decade. A victim of torture, Bertha is portrayed as a wild beast, devoid of humanity— less a person than an allegory of maimed imperialist conscience brought to agonized life. Jane flees, only to wind up in the arms of St. John, a missionary who seeks to marry her and take her off to India. Eventually, with the independence granted to her by an inheritance, Jane returns to

Rochester, now blind and incapacitated by Bertha’s desperate final attempt at liberation, to act as his nursemaid, much like Antigone with her blind father Oedipus in exile. While it is far from clear that Bronté sympathizes with Bertha, the stench of guilt, drifting in from the hinterland of Empire, seeps through the whole novel.

While there are reasons to critique the thoroughly dehumanized figure of Bertha, Jane may perhaps be understood to hear in Rochester’s appeals for her mercy the frustrated fury of the sadistic colonizer. In the other side of the colonizer-colonized dialectic, the Black Martiniquan psychoanalyst, critic, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon writes at length in his Black Skin, White Masks (1952/1986) of a traumatic experience of interpellation he experienced upon being called out in the street by a young white boy, who points Fanon out to his mother and says, “Look, a Negro!” (p. 84). In his last book The Wretched of the Earth (1961/1963) it could be said that the racialized self-estrangement Fanon describes in such excruciating detail in the earlier work finds its resolution and purpose when he rather reluctantly ends up working in Algeria, and then becoming a doctor supporting the militant Algerian resistance to the French. Throughout The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon refers to “we Algerians”, indicating the sense of solidarity in international anti-colonial struggle that he movingly articulates throughout that volume.

The sacrificial scapegoat that Bertha represents, and the individual case studies that Fanon relates at the end of The Wretched of the Earth, are relevant for the sense of vocation that

would dawn upon Laurie Jo Reynolds when reading letters from men incarcerated at Tamms. As expressed in Jane Eyre, the sublime, à la Kant and Burke, is an experience of virtual death, the euphoria of disappearing like a speck in the vastness of nature. Like a zealot making demands in the name of a higher law, contravening Thomas Hobbes’ assertion of law as strictly earthly and absolute, Reynolds apprehended her political and artistic mission in a flash of insight brought about by an apprehension of suffering. Jan Verwoert (2008) cites an anecdote Giorgio Agamben tells about the eminent Russian poet Anna Akhnatova:

Standing outside a Leningrad prison in 1930 where her son was a political prisoner, a woman whose son was also imprisoned, addressed Akhmatova with the question: “Can you speak of this?” She realised that she had to respond yes— indeed she could—and in this moment found herself both indebted and empowered. (p. 101)

A comparable moment of decision would occur for Reynolds in 2008, when a realization would make her reframe her work as an artist, and refuse to continue working as she had previously.

This revelation emerged from a newfound depth of empathy, directed toward action rather than, as with Wender’s (2008) contemplative appreciation of police encounters, moments of ineffable aesthetic poignancy.

Regardless of how one chooses to respond, the experience of long-term solitary confinement is movingly expressed in stories of unrelenting interiority. Interviewed about his day-to-day life, a former long-term segregation inmate at Pelican Bay in California describes it as a thoroughly uncanny environment.

…And it’s quiet. Very quiet. And when you walk inside the unit, it’s so quiet, you can’t imagine that there’s anybody there. And when you walk in the unit, you don’t see bars.

All you can see is doors, like that. And you can’t even imagine there’s people back there.

… And what’s even more creepy, when you go into the little SHU yard they have for us… Someone described it to me once… “Imagine yourself walking into a ten-feet empty pool, in the bottom… and you stand up, and that’s all you see in the all around, the

walls.” (as cited in Reiter, 2016, p. 176)

Falsely charged Black Panther Albert Woodfox, who spent forty years in solitary in Louisiana, once told a psychologist: “It takes so much out of you just to try to make these walls, you know, go back to the normal place they belong,” “Someday,” he went on, “I’m not going to be able to deal with it. I’m not going to be able to pull those walls apart” (Aviv 2017, para. 65). Kalief Browder, arrested at age 16 on charges of theft he steadfastly denied, refusing to accept a plea deal, ended up spending two of his three years at New York’s Rikers Island jail in solitary confinement. The charges were dismissed (likely because of national press coverage), but Browder committed suicide at age 22.

The capacity of long-term solitary confinement to cause permanent mental damage can be seen as a deepening and magnification of this immediately unnerving quality. Lisa Guenther (2013) reflects at length on the capacity that such an experience has to dissolve boundaries between self and world, and any grounding in space and time. Such spaces fail to rehabilitate prisoners or deter recidivism (Gordon, 2014; Frost and Monteiro, 2016), results that render it meaningless in the terms of social engineering, and so addressing these spaces at the level of aesthetics seems necessary, if insufficient.

Prolonged segregation is a brutally simple policy--minimalist, if you will-- that operates at the aesthetic level of a gesture, a wordless message that traps and immobilizes its subject like an image in a photograph. The utilitarian clarity of purpose that appeared in early prison designs based on Bentham’s panopticon seemed to be a presentiment of modernist architecture, and this

functional austerity has continued, up through the cutting-edge, largely automated supermax facilities of today. The solitary cell is an embodiment of this austerity as a test of psychological endurance that clearly surpasses mere functionalism. The stern, bleak rectilinearity of Minimalist art and Brutalist architecture resonate aesthetically with the prison—Robert Morris’ “steel cage-like constructions of 1967” (Chave, 1990, p. 55) provide a straightforward example. The Minimalism-influenced installation artist James Turrell has capitalized on the “fugue state”

typical of isolated sensory deprivation (Rodney, 2016, para. 4), evoked in the immersive

experiences offered in his 1990s “Soft Cell” series, as well as his “Perceptual Cell” series in the 2010s. These works, for all of their sublime power, simply represent the bliss of submission. An aesthetic gesture of resistance, like that of the (lowercase) brutalism it opposes, must perhaps manifest in the medium of law to be realized.

Borrowed from observations of Chinese political detention, as well as inherited from early American penitentiaries, solitary confinement as a technique of interrogation and re-education was studied and implemented experimentally in the early 1960s by the CIA as a tactic to be used against politically radical prisoners. One of these experimental programs was based in Illinois at the Federal facility in Marion, which hosted the first modern isolation unit in 1972, before effectively becoming the nation’s first supermax with the 23-year lockdown that began in 1983 (Guenther, 2013). In 1997 Reynolds began working with the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, opposing the solitary confinement of Puerto Rican political prisoners at this prison¹²,

12 The solitary confinement of political prisoners at Marion continues today, as with the case of Earth Liberation Front member Daniel McGowan, who in 2008 was placed in the segregated Communications Management Units (CMU) there without due process, apparently in response to his online writing (Slade, 2014).

which has come to be associated with the inauguration of widespread segregated detention practices to punish and intimidate prisoners in the U.S. (Jeffreys, 2014). Although solitary confinement in the U.S. dates back to 1790 with Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, this modern iteration of long-term isolation became institutionalized in Illinois in 1998 with the Tamms supermax, initially intended to house only inmates with severe disciplinary violations for no longer than one year. Neither restriction was observed.

Men who transferred into Tamms were locked in a solitary windowless cell for at least 23 hours per day, and denied nearly all human contact, an experience shown to cause severe mental anguish. The use of terror by correctional officers should not be overlooked either, as TY10 members told me. Johnnie Walton, who spent five years in Tamms and over forty behind bars, told me that guards in Tamms would physically torment inmates without provocation. Brenda Smith, whose son spent 14 years in Tamms, told me of a nearly fatal beating one prisoner received just before the closure of the facility. Walton spoke in particular about the SWAT team training that correctional officers started receiving in the late 1990s, in which swarming armored guards would not merely restrain but brutalize and intimidate unruly inmates. Walton reports:

Eighty percent or ninety percent of these guards don’t want no trouble. They just want to do their eight hours and get out of here. But you got ten percent that’s gonna try to hurt you, they’re gonna try to drive you, they’re gonna try to break you. (personal

communication, July 16, 2014)

But the usual fate of men in Tamms was a slow, wasting mental and physical collapse that Walton characterized as “death by deterioration.”

The political origin of Tamms was in the response to an era in which gang authority structures were used to control prison populations, which promoted peace at the expense of state

authority, leading to a harsh crackdown. One factor was certainly the 1996 Richard Speck tape, which spurred public punitive outrage.¹³ But changes brought about by the media-fueled backlash against gang authority in prison hardly resulted in success. Both within and outside prison walls, the dismantling of gang hierarchy led to more of a dispersal than a reduction of violence. At the whim of wardens, Illinois prisoners were transferred to Tamms without due process, although this transfer was widely claimed to only apply to persistent violators of prison safety rules. The brother of pseudonymized TY10 volunteer Carol Wilcox (personal

communication, July 17, 2014) was taken out of his cell at the state’s Menard prison in the middle of the night with no warning or recourse and transferred to Tamms, despite his clean disciplinary record. Brenda Smith (personal communication, July 15, 2014) believes that filing grievances was what put her son in Tamms, and kept him there.

The three main groups of Tamms prisoners ended up being highly litigious inmates like Smith’s son, powerful gang members (most without serious prison disciplinary reports), and the severely mentally ill. Johnnie Walton brought up in his interview the use of Tamms to house the mentally ill, and also said that the existence of Tamms served officials in other Illinois prisons as a potent threat for prisoners who assaulted staff; Reynolds said that only six prisoners ever sent to Tamms had committed serious acts of violence while incarcerated. One of these was Joseph Dole (2016), who recounts a brutal and prolonged beating he received from staff at the state prison at Menard after punching a warden, resulting in his subsequently being transferred to

13 A contemporaneous crackdown was the increased harshness of juvenile sentencing after the high-profile 1989 “Central Park Five” case, in which five teenage boys of color, convicted based on coerced confessions and plea bargains amid a media frenzy of lurid paranoid provocation, were exonerated after spending over a decade behind bars.

Tamms, and being denied due process or adequate legal recourse. More to the point, Wilcox related a quote from her brother that served as her call to action: “They’re sending me there to die.”

In 2006, the Tamms Poetry Committee began to hold public events in order to share prisoners’ letters, events that began building interest in the issues raised by the project. In early 2007, the group participated in the aforementioned exhibit “Captive Audience” at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gallery 400 space, a prison-themed show curated by artist Marc Fischer, affiliated with the collective Temporary Services. They displayed poems and responses from inmates, there was artwork by men at Tamms, and Reynolds installed her video “Space Ghost,”

which juxtaposed audio of prisoners’ phone calls describing the effects of solitary confinement over footage of astronauts in space. They had a public event to write letters, and lawyers for and family members of Tamms inmates attended and shared information. This helped to build the group’s mailing list, and raised the level of public interest around issues at Tamms. At the end of that year the video was screened at the Hyde Park Art Center, and there was another

informational event, which drew in a crowd less exclusively comprised of art enthusiasts. A former Tamms inmate was there, as well as a lawyer, and many more people who had signed up to receive updates from the Poetry Committee. They read from postcards and composed

responses. Here Reynolds would hear her call.

In analyzing the rhetorical structure of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, Roland Barthes (1971/1976) describes “mantic art,” a “language of interpellation” in which a “question addressed by man to the Divinity” receives "a “response sent by the Divinity to man” (p. 46).

“The function,” he says, “… is to determine a choice, a decision” (p. 47). It was in this manner Reynolds had her breakthrough—appropriately expressed in parable form:

Okay, the story is now a parable. There’s an artist, and there’s a man in the bottom of the well. The artist has the urge to tell people about him and to make art about him, and she does. At what point does the artist, who knows all about this man, try to get him out?...

We sent letters and poetry to every prisoner in Tamms, to try to provide them with some social contact… But at a certain point, this ‘man in the well’ question came up from the prisoners themselves. One prisoner wrote, “Hey, this poetry is great, but can you please tell the governor what they’re doing to us down here?” This prisoner was saying, “Take some political responsibility.” (Reynolds, 2011)

Johnnie Walton, who was a committed member of Tamms Year Ten until his death in 2015, wrote the postcard to which Reynolds attributes her decision to change the direction of her activism. For her, as for Latin American artists in the early 1970s, according to Luis Camnitzer (2007), “making art, at least in its formalist version, stopped being the real issue. The aim became to organize a receptive community, which is a political issue” (p. 20). So it was at the origin of the “legislative art” project Tamms Year Ten: the creation of artworks turned into an effort to organize resistance to the prison.