Political art is a rare commodity in American culture today. Despite the post-9/11 proclamations that irony had died, most contemporary art produced in the U.S. still has a bemused quality, pointedly disengaged from the political realm. That’s why, as a reporter who has been covering the international art market for the last five years, I found it refreshing to encounter artist Fiona Tan’s “Correction” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
The installation is composed of six hanging flat-panel screens encircling a handful of wooden benches. At first glance, the images on the display panels appear to be still photographs: portraits of inmates and guards in the U.S. correctional system, dressed either in their guard uniforms, their prison blues, denim and blue-armed baseball shirts, or white T-shirts and sweatpants. Some of the people appear to be kitchen workers or office clerks, some appear to be prison officials. It’s hard to tell who they are in some cases, because there are no words to identify them and they don’t speak.
After a few minutes of watching the panels, it becomes clear that these are not photographs but video images, in which the subject has been asked to stand as still as possible for about one minute at a time. But no one is able to stay perfectly still; their eyes blink, their fingers twitch, their bodies sway back and forth just a little, their chests rise and fall. Some of them purse their lips; some glare at the camera defiantly; some attempt to look tough and fail to hold the posture after a few seconds; some look completely carved out and blank, some allow their lips to curl in a forbidden smile. Those who do not have their arms behind their backs can’t seem to figure out what to do with their hands.
These attempts to hold still, to be inexpressive, to just be in front of the camera, convey a potent sense of humanity–the vague sense of unease every human has when he or she attempts to look the world in the eye.
One young white man with an arm tattooed with the words “Dead Man” looks kind, gentle, forlorn. He tips his head to one side. An elderly black woman wears her hair up in a bun; she wears sweatpants and a sweatshirt, and looks like someone’s grandmother just returned from a trip to the coin laundry. The people are white, black, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native American; they are youthful, elderly, thuggish and aristocratic. They look like the guy who sells you cigarettes, your business partner, the woman who does your dry cleaning, the driver of your bus, your travel agent and your lawyer.
At last count, 2.1 million people were incarcerated in U.S. federal or state prisons and local jails, according to the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Another way of looking at that is, for every 100,000 U.S. residents, 482 were inmates last year. The statistics are much more dire for minorities. For every 100,000 black males in the U.S., 3,400 were incarcerated, and for every 100,000 Hispanic males, 1,200 were locked up.
America is a visual culture. And such statistics don’t offer a very vivid picture, in large part because it’s difficult for most people to conjure the image of a crowd of 2.1 million people. Contemplate the population of Nevada, instead–it’s the same number.
Another difficulty people have with imagining prison life comes from the fact that such a small minority of Americans have ever had an opportunity to look inside a prison facility, unless they were inmates. Family and friends of inmates only get a limited view of life inside, as they are shuffled through a series of locked gates and steel doors into visiting areas of the prisons, where they can sit at cafeteria-style tables and buy snacks from vending machines.
America’s correctional systems aren’t fond of offering themselves up for scrutiny. The vast majority of U.S. states place some restriction on cameras that are allowed into prisons, and many states, such as Texas, Arkansas and Virginia, ban cameras outright. Michigan, which spends $1.7 billion a year on its prison system, prohibits cameras and recording devices and recently denied PBS Frontline crews who were filming a documentary on inmates serving life sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles, according to the Detroit Free Press. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation that would have allowed cameras back into that state’s $5.7 billion-a-year prison complex, reinforcing a media ban that was instituted in the 1990s.
The result is that you don’t hear too much about the American prison system on the news anymore, even as the U.S. prison population has risen an average of 3.5 percent each year since 1995. But prisons haven’t gone away. In fact, the U.S. incarcerates its citizens at a faster rate than any other nation in the world. Prisons make up an increasingly significant portion of our national spending. The Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed this year that state and federal spending on prisons and jails has increased more than 350 percent in the last 20 years. That fact becomes chilling when you consider that U.S. crime rates have dropped dramatically during that period.
What’s changed is our nation’s willingness to incarcerate people for lesser crimes and to keep them incarcerated for longer periods of time. That is, to lock people up and forget about them. And the public has effectively forgotten.
Perhaps it is fitting that the job of portraying this terrible American secret has fallen into the hands of Tan, who was born in Indonesia, grew up in Australia and now lives in Amsterdam. She somehow was able to gain access to two men’s prisons and two women’s facilities in Illinois and California, shooting about 300 inmates and guards who all volunteered to be filmed.
The brochure that goes along with the exhibition says, “Tan is interested not in making political proclamations or judgments with this work but in making visible a distinct segment of society that becomes invisible.” But Tan’s visual confrontation does exactly what good political art should do: it holds the viewer accountable to his or her own humanity. There’s no shame in that.
These moving portraits seem to ask, “Why have you forgotten me? Do I look too much like your neighbor? Do I look like you? And what if I do look like you? Does that mean there’s something criminal about you too?”
What makes these images particularly riveting at this moment in history is that they come from a world we’re not supposed to see. The question they pose is: What might we see that makes us afraid to look?
