Fiona Tan
Fiona Tan
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Correction and Correctional Institutions
October 2, 2004 to January 23, 2005
Fiona Tan’s current project on view at the MCA consists of six double sided projection screens arranged in a circle around a group of benches. Entering the space, you encounter these screens projecting video portraits of prison guards and inmates both outwards into the gallery and into the inner circle. The portraits are shot from the knees up, a pose typically found in cinema, and the approximately three hundred images loop in a montage, not connected by any narrative.
The portraits are silent, and Tan leaves the idea of prison to sound and signs. Only the various symbols arranged by the prison institution separate the inmates from their guards. Clothes, badges, security wrist bands, and an assortment of guard weaponry demarcate the kept from the keepers. Other than these signs of power and control or submission and passivity, the images are equivalent, and all difference is erased by the reduction of humans to one dimensional flat screens. The idea is for the viewer of these images to accept the equality and recognize the humanity of the unknown, unseen people behind the walls, those shut, for whatever reason, from society. Tan is “not interested,” according to the Curator Julie Rodigues Widholm, “in making political proclamations or judgments with this work.”
We are asked simply to dwell on people in an institution, people who are arranged and coded by an institution. This is confirmed by the layout of the exhibition, recalling Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptican and the rhetoric of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The Panoptican was the prototype for societal control and became a symbol for the inescapable fact that humans are bound and subjected to power. Tan, in using this allusion along with intentionally supplanting narrative, places her work in a postmodern context which places humans in a discourse of power relations.
Of course, postmodernism and institutional critique is at its best when it simply looks at structures and describes the relations of power. However, the idea of “human beings,” which Tan is trying to expose, becomes defined only in relation to power, and in retreating into the realm of “not making political proclamations or judgments,” the human is powerless and without any intrinsic dignity. The concept of dignity, according to the highly politicized means of display Tan chooses, is socially constructed, and Tan’s reliance on montage and video to equalize the images of humans simply shows humans as empty husks ready for their next institutional command. This prohibits a viewer from showing any empathy or concern for these inmates and guards.
It is true that these inmates and guards are part of a system. It did not take postmodernism to tell us that. So what is Fiona Tan really trying to do? I think that what Tan is trying to do is allow a viewer access to human beings which are usually forgotten once they are locked away or humans that are often viewed as brutal parts of institutional discipline, i.e. the guards. If this is the case, why does Tan use an eclectic postmodern presentation that does not allow such sentimentality and love of humanity?
A little narrative would go a long way. Tan would accomplish her objective in a proper way if we were allowed to know these prisoners and guards, allowed to take a stand for or against them according to real evidence and stories by which people of reason could make, heaven help us, judgments. I do not think that Tan denies the necessity of prisons or of correction, but she does suggest that these institutions are constructed and are open to injustice. If this were not the case, then why would we need to “confront our own prejudices and assumptions?” Tan is being political but does not take a stand or offer solutions. For this reason, this exhibition is not provocative, and I tend to think that many people will just pass through it, paying little heed to prisons or even human beings.
Instead of entities bound by a system, couldn’t these flat, one dimensional “cinematic” images be humans with names and stories? I waited a long time in the gallery, but eventually, one fellow, a prisoner, smiled and seemed to restrain his laughter. This was a human moment, the best moment of the entire display. Just knowing that this prisoner was tempted to laugh or acknowledge the absurdity of the project in which he was involved led me to see myself in him. This is of course heresy to a postmodernist, but if one wants to know power or oppose power, one has to at least acknowledge that power contains people of resistance or subjection, action or passivity. Only a system controlled by people, real subjects with real dignity, is subject to change.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Correction and Correctional Institutions
October 2, 2004 to January 23, 2005
Fiona Tan’s current project on view at the MCA consists of six double sided projection screens arranged in a circle around a group of benches. Entering the space, you encounter these screens projecting video portraits of prison guards and inmates both outwards into the gallery and into the inner circle. The portraits are shot from the knees up, a pose typically found in cinema, and the approximately three hundred images loop in a montage, not connected by any narrative.
The portraits are silent, and Tan leaves the idea of prison to sound and signs. Only the various symbols arranged by the prison institution separate the inmates from their guards. Clothes, badges, security wrist bands, and an assortment of guard weaponry demarcate the kept from the keepers. Other than these signs of power and control or submission and passivity, the images are equivalent, and all difference is erased by the reduction of humans to one dimensional flat screens. The idea is for the viewer of these images to accept the equality and recognize the humanity of the unknown, unseen people behind the walls, those shut, for whatever reason, from society. Tan is “not interested,” according to the Curator Julie Rodigues Widholm, “in making political proclamations or judgments with this work.”
We are asked simply to dwell on people in an institution, people who are arranged and coded by an institution. This is confirmed by the layout of the exhibition, recalling Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptican and the rhetoric of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The Panoptican was the prototype for societal control and became a symbol for the inescapable fact that humans are bound and subjected to power. Tan, in using this allusion along with intentionally supplanting narrative, places her work in a postmodern context which places humans in a discourse of power relations.
Of course, postmodernism and institutional critique is at its best when it simply looks at structures and describes the relations of power. However, the idea of “human beings,” which Tan is trying to expose, becomes defined only in relation to power, and in retreating into the realm of “not making political proclamations or judgments,” the human is powerless and without any intrinsic dignity. The concept of dignity, according to the highly politicized means of display Tan chooses, is socially constructed, and Tan’s reliance on montage and video to equalize the images of humans simply shows humans as empty husks ready for their next institutional command. This prohibits a viewer from showing any empathy or concern for these inmates and guards.
It is true that these inmates and guards are part of a system. It did not take postmodernism to tell us that. So what is Fiona Tan really trying to do? I think that what Tan is trying to do is allow a viewer access to human beings which are usually forgotten once they are locked away or humans that are often viewed as brutal parts of institutional discipline, i.e. the guards. If this is the case, why does Tan use an eclectic postmodern presentation that does not allow such sentimentality and love of humanity?
A little narrative would go a long way. Tan would accomplish her objective in a proper way if we were allowed to know these prisoners and guards, allowed to take a stand for or against them according to real evidence and stories by which people of reason could make, heaven help us, judgments. I do not think that Tan denies the necessity of prisons or of correction, but she does suggest that these institutions are constructed and are open to injustice. If this were not the case, then why would we need to “confront our own prejudices and assumptions?” Tan is being political but does not take a stand or offer solutions. For this reason, this exhibition is not provocative, and I tend to think that many people will just pass through it, paying little heed to prisons or even human beings.
Instead of entities bound by a system, couldn’t these flat, one dimensional “cinematic” images be humans with names and stories? I waited a long time in the gallery, but eventually, one fellow, a prisoner, smiled and seemed to restrain his laughter. This was a human moment, the best moment of the entire display. Just knowing that this prisoner was tempted to laugh or acknowledge the absurdity of the project in which he was involved led me to see myself in him. This is of course heresy to a postmodernist, but if one wants to know power or oppose power, one has to at least acknowledge that power contains people of resistance or subjection, action or passivity. Only a system controlled by people, real subjects with real dignity, is subject to change.
posted by Ed | 1:38 PM
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