Antioch Focuses on Prisons
By Julia Dzwonkoski
"There has been an alarming lack of public discussion
acknowledging the new realities of incarceration in the United
States." So opens a recent essay by Associate Professor
of Literature Jean Gregorek
examining the current logic and broad cultural implications
of the "tough-on-crime' turn of the American criminal
justice system. Building on the research of sociologists Zygmaunt
Bauman and David Garland, among others, Gregorek connects
the late twentieth-century policy of mass incarceration and
the decline of the rehabilative ideal to global economic trends.
She notes: "In a globalized economy characterized by
chronic, long-term unemployment in the 'first world' and a
seemingly endless reserve army of labor in the 'third,' there
is literally no workplace awaiting prisoners upon release."
Prisons, Gregorek argues, no longer function as sites of rehabilitation
or even primarily as sources of exploitable labor. Instead
they have come to serve as "factories of exclusion...
oblivion machines, designed to cordon off non-productive groups
from the social body and to erase them from the national consciousness."
Welmon Sharlhorne,
Untitled, n.d., pen and marker on board, 22" x 28"
Prison architecture, dragons, birds and clocks are recurring
images in the work of Welmon Sharlhorne, who uses these
symbols to represent his experiences as an inmate in the
Louisiana prison system. The fantastic-geometric style and
radial patterns that distinguish Sharlhorne's drawings are
made using jar lids and bottle tops of various sizes.
Gregorek's essay, "Factories of Exclusion: The Politics
of Prisons in the Era of Globalization," appears in the
catalog for Made in Prison: Art by
Incarcerated Americans, an exhibition presented earlier
this year at the Herndon Gallery in South Hall. The show,
which I co-curated with Kye Potter '04,
featured paintings, drawings and sculpture produced by inmates
throughout the United States and surveyed a range of artistic
practices - realist depictions of daily life; labor intensive
studies that mark the passage of time; inventive uses of available
materials; appropriations of pop culture, works that reflect
idiosyncratic or visionary perspectives, works that meet erotic
and self-therapeutic needs, as well as art commissioned by
guards and fellow inmates. In presenting this exhibition,
we hoped to bring attention and recognition to the many men
and women who are making art inside America's prisons and,
in doing so, to stimulate the kind of public discussion about
"the new realities of incarceration" that Jean Gregorek
refers to at the start of her essay. She concludes by noting
the capacity of inmate art and writing to "bring prisons
and prisoners back into our visual field," as well as
to "interrupt the scaremongering political rhetoric and
reductive media representations which currently dominate the
airwaves. Clearly other voices desperately need to be heard
amidst the proliferation of messages which engender a culture
of fear and which directly and indirectly assume a permanent
place for the modern prison."
Gregorek is one of several Antioch College faculty working
to engage students and the community with issues surrounding
the history and current politics of the US prison system.
In 2001, Antioch Communications faculty Chris Hill and Anne
Bohlen organized Inside Out: Witnessing
Prison in America, a two-week intensive Summer Documentary
Institute that featured award-winning documentaries, activist
media and radio projects, and presentations by national and
regional artists and prison activists.
Several of the media projects featured at the Institute
were screened as part of Chris Hill's recent presentation,
"Accessing Images of Incarceration/ Images of Inaccessibility,"
at the Herndon Gallery. Hill, an Associate Professor of Communications,
is known for her writing and curatorial work on artist and
independent video from the late 60s and early 70s. Juxtaposing
media from this period (including the 1972 cinema verité
investigation, The Jail) with
contemporary work by artists and independent producers (like
Harun Farocki's 2000 video installation, I
Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, constructed from prison
surveillance footage), Hill emphasized the increasing barriers
that separate prisoners and the public. Not only has recent
legislation limited prisoners' access to the press and vice
versa, she argued, the 1994 elimination of federal Pell grants
supporting inmate education has served to further isolate
the prison population. Barbara Zahm's 1997 documentary, The
Last Graduation, addressed the termination of a long-standing
higher education program at Greenhaven prison in New York.
As Hill pointed out, Zahm's ability to videotape inside the
prison was linked to the long-term relationships she had established
as one of several Marist College professors who taught in
the program. As public support for such programs is discontinued,
so are opportunities for the public to gain access to accurate
representations of prisons, prisoners and policies that shape
our criminal justice system. Hill's presentation was punctuated
by the fact that, like the artists featured in the
Made in Prison exhibition, many of the inmates captured
30 years ago on film and video are still in prison today.
The Made in Prison exhibition catalog that includes Gregorek's
essay is available through the Herndon Gallery, Antioch College,
795 Livermore Street, Yellow Springs, OH, 45387, (937) 769-1149,
www.antioch-college.edu/herndon. 
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