Inmate intimacy.

FIONA TAN: CORRECTION

UCLA Hammer Museum

Los Angeles, California

June 25-October 16, 2005

New Museum of Contemporary Art 

New York, New York

April 9-June 4, 2005

Making art in a prison, with inmate involvement, can be a profound proposition. Since the 1970s community-based and socially active artists have worked in prison programs teaching writing, art, music and theater, with hopes of rehabilitating inmates and humanizing the prison environment. In 1978, I attended a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1949) at the Santa Fe, New Mexico Penitentiary directed by a friend who had been working for months with a group of inmates who were not trained actors. Sitting in the drab gymnasium before the show with the assembled prison population including the guards, I was aware of the tension created by mixing the various inmate populations together in the antiquated facility.

However, as the performance progressed, the rowdy crowd quieted to an abnormal silence. The performers went to emotional places that seemed deeply authentic--possibly due to the inmates' understanding of the isolation inherent in Beckett's work. At the end, the despair in the room was palpable, and the inmates filed out back to their cells. One week later the prison exploded with deadly violence, and scores of inmates were killed by each other in the deadliest prison riot in the United States in 40 years. Among the burned corpses in the gymnasium were some of the actors from the Beckett play. It is impossible to say if these events were connected, but art as a trigger for powerful emotions is an undeniable phenomena.

Fiona Tan's current video installation "Correction" at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles was made in a like manner, with the cooperation of prison administration and inmates. "Correction" is also the result of an unusual collaboration between the Hammer Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. The three institutions have developed the "Three M Project," a collaboration in which each venue selected a lesser known artist in the U.S. for a specially-commissioned work of art to be presented at each site. The catch was that the museums would not know in advance what they were getting, so there was an inherent element of risk. Obviously the participating museum directors and curators are more adventuresome than most. In the case of Tan, the trust paid off.

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In 2004 Tan was selected to be one of the Three Martists. Her previous film and video work shows a distinct concern for documentary visual practices and a fascination with ethnographic films, exampled in her 1999 film Facing Forward. She has previously created video installations, notably "Saint Sebastian" (2001), and continues these formal explorations in "Correction." As a starting point, Tan read about the dramatic increase in the U.S. prison population. Now the largest per capita in the world, its skewed racial demographics weigh heavily toward people of color, especially African American males. This knowledge stimulated further research, and ultimately the "Correction" piece developed as Tan's Three M commission.

Tan sought and received permission from correctional facilities in Illinois and California to record video portraits of male and female inmates and correctional officers. She filmed hundreds of inmates, giving them straightforward instructions; to stand still and look into the lens. They were shot from the waist up in a vertical, portrait format. They posed in hallways, foyers, in front of doors, in generally nondescript spaces.

The result is a carefully staged installation. In a large gallery darkened to a dim light, six 5 X 3 1/2 foot double-sided screens are suspended from the ceiling. They hang 3 1/2 feet from the floor and are regularly spaced, forming a hexagon with a generous circumference. Video projectors are pointed at each screen from the outside of the circle. A speaker is hung directly above each projector. Each projector plays a sequence of video clips and recorded sound, with each image lasting from 20 to 50 seconds. The screens are not synchronized, and none of the projected images appears on any of the other screens. Viewers can either sit in a circle of benches in the center of the "surround" staging, or stand and view it from outside the circle of screens. It takes about three hours to view every image in the installation.

Viewing this project with the knowledge that it is named "Correction" and knowing the subjects are part of the U.S. penal system posits that Tan's project is a conscious "political" art work or action. The word "correction" takes on a number of meanings, literal to symbolic, suggesting a judgment by the artist that the U.S. penal system is what is in need of correction. The setting, with the viewer inside the circle, is based on an eighteenth-century architectural device called the Panopticon, a spherical design that Utopian planners devised as a method to centralize the surveillance of prisoners. So the intention becomes the physical placement of the viewer to be both the watcher and the watched. Possibly this would add a sense of discomfort, and possibly an identification with imprisonment.

If this were the main point, the calculation could be more effective with a different scale. The screens are too small to really create a sense of physical oppression and could have been much larger, creating a closed circle of entrapment. The recorded sounds of prison facilities coming from the speakers (muffled voices, doors clanging shut, occasional indistinguishable outbursts) are not enough to evoke the claustrophobia of incarceration and over time became ambient noise. Perhaps the volume should have been increased to an almost hysterical din. The presentation, seen through a politicized prism, can telegraph a narrow first response, in which the viewer is wondering about the "bad people." Some inmates glare at the camera, assessing the artist, wondering what she (or we) are doing slumming on their turf. And then what of their jailers, posing in uniforms? Viewing the work becomes something of a spectator sport, and actually creates distance from the real humanistic intention of Tan's project. Instead, the human scale of the presentation is correctly restrained, and the subtlety of the lighting and sound creates a private and intimate space that opens up the work to a wider reading.

From a distance, it appears that the images might be still photographs moving through a slide show, but it becomes apparent the portraits are "live," as the subjects occasionally move, shift their weight or slightly change expressions. In many of the images, there are no obvious identifying markers such as signage or prison bars that would place them in a correctional facility. Some of the inmates are in generic work clothes, and they could be postal workers or janitors posing in their work place. The guards in uniform could just be police in a station. Enough of the portraits are without obvious prison identifiers that it becomes clear the focus is meant to be on each individual human being, giving us a chance to see them as an individual first, and not as an "other" stigmatized by incarceration. The Panopticon setting becomes a "surround" environment that promotes a meditative way of experiencing an intense set of imagery. "Correction" challenges the audience's attention span by its length and pace. Yet in this way a great range of emotions and responses are triggered in the viewer, and the experience of being with the installation for a long time becomes memorable.

Tan entered the prisons with perhaps some preconceptions but no experience, and ended up focusing on the people. This became her honest and true response. Tan doesn't draw any conclusion about guilt or innocence; it is impossible to do this from the point of engagement she chose, which was finite and did not include an association with the inmates beyond the brief filming of each. It is the viewer who may approach the work with programmed conclusions, their own social and political assumptions. It is possible to be disarmed over the course of the presentation and to penetrate the outer layer of "Correction" and enter into the piece. It is a journey worth taking and a significant work by a promising artist.

CLAYTON CAMPBELL is the Los Angeles correspondent for Flash Art magazine, and Santa Monica editor for Contemporary magazine.