As French historian and social theorist Michel Foucault wrote famously in Discipline and Punish, “Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.” Despite that phrase’s enduring wisdom, one evokes Foucault’s writing with a cringing hesitation, given what have become almost parodic associations with certain superficial academic pretentions and bongo-circle radicalisms spawned in the decades following its publication. That said, his knowing spirit seems to hover above Sable Elyse Smith’s current exhibition, “Ordinary Violence” at the Haggerty Museum of Art, as both a scholar of punishment control and surveillance and, less obviously, as a symbol of how our perceptions might tend to consolidate around stereotypes in general.
Smith’s work emerges from her own uneasy relationship to the American penal system, which absorbed her father, her community and her country as a whole. The works at the Haggerty merge multi-disciplinary contemporary art forms and raw personal psychology into complex and contradictory results. One of the more subtle and evocative moments in the show comes from a seemingly unassuming, untitled block of dimensional wall text. It’s purposefully difficult to read, with irregular letter spacing applied to fit into a tight rectangle. The unpunctuated text provides a fragmented and impressionistic account of Sable Smith’s frustratingly regulated visits to see her father in prison. “…HARSH AND FRIGID…YOU CAN ONLY CARRY A SEE THROUGH POUCH…” The illegibility stands as a metaphor for the physical act of institutionalized and tightly regulated personal engagement with tedious bureaucracy. It also leans on our expectations as viewers in a museum, as we hope for an elegant esthetic exchange, but are instead offered a challenging interpretive struggle. A struggle that must barely approximate the depths of Smith’s own experiences.
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Smith ingeniously inverts the metaphor of confinement in a separate gallery with a 15-foot high-arched passageway constructed of end-to-end prison commissary tables, titled “Swear it closed, closes it.” The soaring sculpture encourages a free and casual physical passage only before the inevitably toxic reminder of its components’ function sets in. The piece is handsome enough to escape the gravity of its suggestive narrative for a moment, but ultimately remains grounded in her story. This is especially true as one considers the other visual takes on her relationship with the penitentiary, including a haunting video and a series of deceptively naïve works on paper based on pages from a book designed to help children like Smith cope with the grief and struggle of dealing with incarcerated loved ones.
Smith’s show was mentioned to me weeks ago as an example of “identity politics,” a lazy term that has coagulated into meaninglessness, but as a result has somehow become more meaningful. In the way terms like “bully” or “fascist” have; the less meaning, the more power it has, as if by natural law. And more power means more division. Not nearly as divisive, “conceptual art” too has congealed into cliché. If you’re at a polite dinner party and you say you like conceptual art, few would assume you simply mean that you like art about concepts, instead they’d probably assume you were identifying yourself as a sophisticate. This is a constraint on the term, not on the truth. Good art is always conceptual, in that it’s about something. And this is art’s great promise; to provide some kind of otherness and strangeness to help us reexamine labels yearning to be simplified.
America has the most sprawling and bloated penal system in the history of mankind, and it has become simply acceptable. Sable Elyse Smith’s personal tragedy along with the immeasurable social traumas brought on by the system have become so diffused in a sea of statistics, legal nonsense and complacency we don’t even see it as strange anymore. Smith’s work tries to remind us of how brutally surreal it is, but that system will fight perpetually to neutralize its strangeness. Foucault, who assiduously studied 400 years of the history of the modern penal system, told us that “multiple forms of constraint” were not merely physical, but linguistic, psychological and creepingly subtle. It’s like he wrote about the American penal system from the future, knowing how easy and natural it would be to create consent around social deviancy. Which is why it’s so ironic, and should be a lesson, that Foucault’s own legacy has become somewhat obscured and squeezed by the same constraining forces.
