“The arts in prison” has become a genre, or perhaps more accurately a discipline, in its own right.
It has also become a field of academic study and critical enquiry. This includes the tension between, on the one hand, narratives of individual liberation and even redemption through arts practice, and on the other hand, claims that the enterprise fails to challenge (or even reinforces) the systemic injustices that are often perpetuated by incarceration.
To put it another way: there is no doubt that giving people who are imprisoned opportunities both to encounter and to produce various art forms is not only a good idea but should actually be a crucial component of rehabilitation — whether this is approached within a therapeutic framework or simply because access to the arts is a human right. Yet when such an undertaking becomes public-facing, there is a risk that it ceases to benefit the prisoner and serves, instead, to promote others.
Accounts about Shakespeare in prison, for example, all too often become about the Bard’s brand: the ennobling value of “universal” Shakespeare. When a work of art is produced in prison, whether it is poetry or pottery, there is typically an underlying sentimentality to its reception. The exalted feeling of the reader or viewer in this instance depends on the deprivation of the artist-prisoner — on the fact of their imprisonment, and by implication on the inconsistencies and iniquities of the wider criminal justice system.
It could be argued that such a critique actually undermines the agency, desires and ambitions of incarcerated people. Few artists indeed, whether they are inside or outside prison walls, would choose to keep their work private for fear that audiences would be overly sympathetic. There again, it may be that the mawkishness induced by the image of a prisoner-artist leaves audiences too ready to overlook their transgressions and thus to become indifferent to the victims of their crimes.
All these caveats are important but they should not predetermine our responses to art-in-prison programmes or inhibit our engagement with the work that such initiatives produce. As with all works of art, an awareness of the circumstances of their creation enriches the encounter — but so does an openness to the possibility that they will transcend, subvert or exceed these circumstances.
Visitors to The Firestation in Rosebank are able to test this balance thanks to a group exhibition presented by Lizamore & Associates. Insiders vs Outsiders — Thoughts and Dreams comprises the work of Marieke Kruger and a number of artists who have participated in the Outsider/Insider Prison Art Project: an NPO that operates at the Drakenstein, Allandale and Havequa prisons in the Western Cape and also offers printmaking workshops to former convicts at the Breytenbach Centre in Wellington.
The lino prints and drypoint etchings displayed are all portraits (mostly self-portraits), experimenting with varying degrees of realism and distortion. In a number of cases, the effect is of a close-up face “in your face” — an assertion, perhaps, of the selfhood of the subject but simultaneously of his resistance to representation or explanation. Kruger’s collaboration with ex-prisoner Joseph Buys sets the tone here; the wrinkled face is depicted from a low angle, all nose and eyes and forehead, insisting on its proximity to the viewer but also on a certain inscrutability.
In some portraits, the subject’s face (and perhaps, by implication, his voice) is partially covered by a hand or a balaclava, or has few discernible features. Identity is obscured rather than revealed in works by Andile Nokweni, Weezo de Mornay, Imraan Palmer and Benson Ndlovu. Others give hints at the artist-subject’s inner life and aspirations through prominent symbols: a treble cleft (Curtis Isele), a spiderweb (Sangelo Kutuka) or sporting icons (John-Paul Paris).
Paired with these prints are Sandro Trapani’s sculptures in bronze, resin and marble dust. Though Trapani alludes to a “carceral genealogy” in his work, I find this vague conceptual link less cogent than the usefully open-ended “thoughts and dreams” of the exhibition subtitle. His pensive, mournful, feminine faces are beautiful stand-alone works, though they effectively contrast (and occasionally echo) the faces in the Outsider/Insider portraits.
Insiders vs Outsiders — Thoughts and Dreams is at The Firestation, 16 Baker Street, Rosebank until July 13.
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