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Virtual Art Exhibits: A Virtual Art Exhibit for Carceral Reflections Locked in. Trapped. In a relationship. In a job, a dorm room, a degree program. In a marriage. In a penitentiary. In bed. Welcome to the space zoned carceral. Jean-Paul Sartre once recounted this haunting parable from Kafka: “A merchant goes to plead his case at the castle. A terrible guard blocks his entry. The merchant does not dare go past him, he waits, and dies waiting. At the hour of his death, he asks the guard: ‘How come I was the only one waiting?’ And the guard responds: ‘This door was only made for you.’” What does that door look like? Cell 43? A wedding gown? Black leather? And when exactly was it built? Michel Foucault, in the final chapter of Discipline and Punish, the one titled Le carcéral, locates the date of completion of the carceral: January 22, 1840. The official opening of Mettray, a juvenile prison qua home, school, military compound, courthouse, and factory—what Foucault brilliantly referred to as “the first training college in pure discipline” or “the carceral archipelago.” Why Mettray? Because it combined a range of disciplinary clusters, replicating authority, the big brother, inspection, the military, supervision, the factory foreman, examination, the school teacher, punishment, the judge. Because it deployed all the coercive technologies on behavior. The modern carceral system is premised on the idea that subjects need to be trained in order to be improved. That they need to be “normalized”—to be made more like the norm society aspires to. Volume 1 of the Carceral Notebooks explores this space zoned carceral—this extended sphere of normalization, these tentacles of social control, this ideal of discipline. It explores our strong desire—and our uncanny abilityùto shape the other, to normalize her, to exploit her, but also our powerful resistance to that very exploitation. The artwork that accompanies Volume 1 is both ode and eulogy to the carceral and our resistance to it.
Are they suspended in time? Are they in pain? Are they longing? Or trapped in a relationship? Locked in? Powerful – or powerless? Slavoj Zizek suggests that if we define the rules of ‘proper’ sexual rapport in which partners should indulge in sex only on account of their mutual, purely sexual, attraction—excluding any ‘pathological’ factors (power, financial coercion, etc.)—we may lose the sexual attraction itself. If we subtract from sexual rapport the element of ‘asexual’ coercion—financial? physical?—which only distorts ‘pure’ sexual attraction, we may lose the charge. “The very element which seems to bias and corrupt pure sexual rapport,” Zizec suggests, “may function as the very phantasmic support of sexual attraction—in a way, sex as such is pathological.” The lovers performing this about-to-happen moment are experiencing bliss and anguish. Or pain. We, the spectators, have a different experience. Our pleasure comes from watching, from thinking. From the empathetic experience. We experience the bliss or anguish or pain vicariously, an experience that is dull in comparison to theirs. The representation depends on this remove from actual experience. In Shaudy Danaye-Elmi’s provocative article, Pornography as Action, Pornography as Interaction, she emphasizes “how central sexuality is to human flourishing.” She writes: “If there is any subject that should be interacted with, affected, changed, made, re-made, and re-invented, it is sex.” The artworks of Sara Black, Virgil Marti, and Mia Ruyter do just that. They provoke us to rethink sexuality and its regulation. “What does it mean,” Virgil Marti asks, “to have an intense aesthetic experience in such an awful place?” — Bernard E. Harcourt |
