Legislative Art: Laurie Jo Reynolds and the Aesthetics of Punishment
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LEGISLATIVE ART: LAURIE JO REYNOLDS AND THE AESTHETICS OF PUNISHMENT BY ALBERT STABLER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art Education in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Jorge Lucero, Chair Associate Professor Terri Weissman Associate Professor Ryan Griffis Assistant Professor Jeffrey Martin ii Abstract In 2013, the lobbying group Tamms Year Ten was successful in closing the Tamms Correctional Center, a prison in which men lived in near-total and near-constant isolation. The group’s founder, Laurie Jo Reynolds, is an artist who describes her lobbying work as “legislative art,” an homage to the governmental interventions of activist Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal. Working backward from legislative art to legislative aesthetics, I postulate the potentially fruitful concepts of judicial aesthetics and executive aesthetics, borrowing the familiar American separation of powers as laid out by James Madison. I attempt to understand Reynolds’ work in a larger historical, aesthetic, and political framework by trying to describe the aestheticization of politics in America through the various mutations of racial concepts in the legal system, as well as in education, visual art, and literature. To do this I borrow ideas from the Continental political theory canon to shed light on how punishment is understood culturally in America in this moment of mass incarceration. In the end, I hope the essay yields a set of terms that allows artists and activists to have more meaningful conversations and debates, and through this dialogue to positively affect protest and policy. iii Your statutes are wonderful; therefore I obey them. The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple. I open my mouth and pant, longing for your commands. Turn to me and have mercy on me, as you always do to those who love your name. Direct my footsteps according to your word; let no sin rule over me. Redeem me from human oppression, that I may obey your precepts. Make your face shine on your servant and teach me your decrees. Streams of tears flow from my eyes, for your law is not obeyed. --Psalm 119:129-136 (New International Version) …For the beautiful is nothing but the onset of the terrifying, an onset we but barely endure; and it amazes us so, since with equanimity it disdains to destroy us. Every angel terrifies. --Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies (1923/1993, p. 3) The visitor to the installation space becomes an expatriate, who has to submit himself to a foreign law, to a law that is given to him by the artist. Here the artist acts as a legislator, as a sovereign of the installation space--even, and maybe especially so, if the law that is given by the artist to a community of visitors is a democratic one. --Boris Groys, “The Politics of Installation” (2009, para. 8) iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction-- Tragedy and farce ……………………………………… 1 1.1 Rhetoric, art, and law ………….……………………………………………… 1 1.2 An assortment of triads ……………………………………………………….. 10 1.3 Racial aesthetics, colorblind blind spots …………………………………….. 19 1.4 Methodological caveats ……………………………………………………… 24 Chapter 2: The judge and judicial aesthetics …………………………………….. 31 2.1 Judging, discerning, and interpreting ……………………………………….. 31 2.2 Ambiguity and silence ……………………………………………………….. 43 2.3 Judicial exceptions and conceptual critics ………………………………….. 53 2.4 Performance advocacy ………………………………………………………. 64 2.5 Litigation versus lobbying …………………………………………………… 70 Chapter 3: The jury and legislative aesthetics …………………………………… 85 3.1 The microcosm of democracy ………………………………………………... 85 3.2 Iconoclasm, sacrifice, and consensus ………………………………………... 95 3.3 Hearing the call …………………………………………………………….. 106 3.4 The fight to close Tamms …………………………………………………… 115 3.5 Art supports activism ……………………………………………………….. 119 3.6 Chaos, ambiguity, refusal ............................................................................... 129 v 3.7 The eager and willing confessor ……………………………………………. 140 3.8 An alignment of wills ……………………………………………………….. 154 Chapter 4: The executioner and administrative aesthetics ……………………… 159 4.1 Getting their hands dirty ……………………………………………………. 159 4.2 “The justice of administration”..……………………………………………. 174 4.3 Crowd control as mythic tragedy …………………………………………… 179 4.4 Mastery, mimicry and martyrdom …………………………………………… 189 4.5 The blunt and elusive object …………………………………………………. 199 4.6 Aesthetic pleasures of interrogation …………………………………………. 212 4.7 The positive veto ……………………………………………………………… 230 Chapter 5: Conclusion-- the fourth estate ………………………………………… 236 5.1 Campaign as brand …………………………………………………………… 236 5.2 Order and entropy …………………………………………………………….. 242 5.3 Excessive commitment ………………………………………………………… 249 5.4 Checks and balances .......................................................................................... 260 References ………………………………………………………………………….. 266 1 Chapter 1: Introduction-- Tragedy and farce 1.1 Rhetoric, art, and law The state of Illinois had four penal facilities in 1899: two penitentiaries and two reformatories (Barton, 1899, pp. 87-88). While the overall state population has not quite tripled since that time, in March 2018 the Illinois Department of Corrections website listed 36 state prisons. But while many have opened, a few have shut down. In January 2013, the Tamms Correctional Center in southwest Illinois closed its doors. Opened in 1998 by Governor James Edgar, the facility was a “supermax” prison, in which people were kept in hermetic isolation in concrete bunker-like cells, deprived of human contact or much sensory input of any kind: 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. In Tamms, “(t)here is no dining hall; there is no chapel; there is no library; there are no classrooms; there is no yard” (Casella and Ridgeway 2013). Tamms was in part a repository for “jailhouse lawyers,” or incarcerated amateur legal experts, as well as alleged high-ranking gang members and the severely mentally ill. Inmates frequently languished there for years—some for the full 15 years of its operation. This pattern has been repeated at supermax prisons throughout the country (Reiter 2016). Some of the more mild psychiatric symptoms affecting prisoners in long-term solitary confinement include “(p)roblems with concentration; sleep disturbances; hallucinations; paranoid thinking; anxiety; hostility and rage; impulsive behaviour; hypersensitivity to light and sound, not unlike the photophobia and phonophobia of a migraine; headaches; and rapid heartbeat” (as cited in Burki, 2017). Extreme stress, self-harm, and mental breakdown has been documented for 2 decades in many contexts of punitive isolation (Arrigo and Bullock, 2008; Arrigo and Bersot, 2015). Resisting the conditions that engender these afflictions, men at Tamms held a hunger strike in the year 2000, and in that same year a statement condemning American supermax prisons was issued by the United Nations Committee Against Torture. This was elaborated upon by the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center (2000), a Chicago-based public-interest law firm that helped to bring attention to the conditions in the facility. But the primary advocacy group responsible for the prison’s eventual shutdown was an art project. This group, Tamms Year Ten (TY10), began its work in 2008, ten years after the 500-bed “C-MAX” prison opened at Tamms. The Tamms supermax had been intended to hold violent or disruptive inmates for brief periods, but the majority of those held at Tamms had been there over a year, and in 2008, 88 men had been there since it opened (MacArthur Justice Center, 2008). At the same time, the prison was never much more than half full, and was a massive financial drain on the state of Illinois. TY10 turned a mutual support system formed by family and friends of those incarcerated at Tamms, working with artists and prison reform and abolition advocates, into a sustained and strategic lobbying campaign that resulted in a highly visible victory for the human rights of incarcerated people worldwide. At the same time, the effort was led by an artist who insisted upon characterizing the project as a piece of art. In what follows, I will describe the remarkable lobbying work that the group did, but I especially want to talk about the implications of this equally remarkable claim. So I will largely be discussing the larger context that makes this project meaningful. TY10 has many precedents, but is a unique case. As a collective art project, its obvious precedents are other forms of “social practice” or “socially-engaged art” that have taken and are taking place largely outside of designated art spaces such as galleries and museums. While much 3 social practice work actually does exist in these conventional contexts, at least in part, many projects focus on public spaces, as did projects by Fluxus, Situationist, and Systems artists in the 1960s, not to mention innumerable pieces emerging from the iterations of international conceptualism, all of which elaborated upon earlier transgressive gestures by avant-gardes and the cultural products of revolutionary movements around the world. TY10 can also can be related to forms of popular protest theater—particularly the work of Augusto Boal, a Brazilian director and playwright, founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, who coined the term “legislative theater” when he was elected to the city council of