“Thank God! Civilisation!”

Essay from the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Panopticon. The Architecture and Theatre of Prison, ed. Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2005

It was not so much “pure” artistic and architectural styles that were supposed to be reflected in the architectural form of prisons as the social and moral laws corresponding to the spirit of the times in which the prison՚s buildings were designed. “A civil prison should have a sad and melancholy character, a criminal prison one of terror and disgust,” wrote the priest Sebastian Sierakowski, a “champion of progressive Polish urbanism,” in the early nineteenth century. The importance of communal space in prison institutions was also however quickly perceived as an area where mini-societies could be created and moulded, and be subjected to constant supervision. In this space, the distance between the governed and governors/managers (as every other distance) was minimised, and the laws governing life could be enforced almost instantaneously. A sign that once hung on the prison in Ptock announced, “This house is the means by which Friedrich Wilhelm III casts terror on the ignoble, but protects the good.” Prison was perceived as a rehabilitative apparatus used for re-education or mere isolation, in which ‒ as Professor Zimbardo՚s experiment showed ‒ the consciousness of supervisors is as likely to be changed as the consciousness of prisoners. Prison also appears within the context of Romantic myths of solitude (suffice it to mention The Count of Monte Christo), and as the contemporary reality of political oppression that makes itself known through television news. It is impossible for one exhibition to exhaust all of these references, but it is possible to portray some of these problems in artistic form, questioning to what extent this form of “solitude” remains relevant in these times in which supervision is increasingly absolute, even in so-called free, open societies. Will prisons in their eighteenth-century form disappear to be replaced by electronic supervision, or will they remain, in a slightly modernised version, the most reliable form of controlled isolation?

“From subhuman anarchistic institutions to subhuman mechanical institutions” was how Aldous Huxley described the development of prisons years before Michel Foucault, choosing as his starting point the fantastic Carceri of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and comparing these to the pseudo-rationalist and no less fantastic utopia of Jeremy Bentham՚s panopticon. Piranesi՚s Prisons ‒ a kind of architectural caprice, were from the outset never meant to be a depiction of an existing reality and it is therefore difficult to find any kind of structural-architectural logic in them. They are rather a metaphor of the human spirit trapped in the body, or reason wandering aimlessly in a sick, feverish body. There are no apparent cells in these prisons, only vast, spacious and never-ending corridors, vestibules and halls. Man can rarely be seen here, becoming almost invisible, as if his modest proportions are supposed only to emphasise the vast-ness and pointlessness of the system in which he finds himself. This absence of logic, and disruption of scale and proportion, can perhaps paradoxically bring to mind not so much prisons, as the descriptions of Soviet camps about two hundred years later, where the prisoner became just a cog in a pointless machine, building a never-completed canal or a railway line leading nowhere. Instead of walls or locks, cells and other systems of security, it was space, paralysing in its vastness, that fenced him off from society of the “normal” world. Has any kind of evolution from anarchy to mechanism really taken place in the time between Bentham and the Gulag?

It seems rather that Bentham՚s panopticon, the “ideal” subhuman mechanical institution, has never been realised, although it has often captivated the imagination of architects and prison reformers, and in more recent years that of critics and philosophers. The form of an imperfect panopticon, consisting of a semi-circular or circular building with a dome and central quarters for the guards, can be found in prison architecture in the United States, Australia, England or Holland. The majority of these structures no longer perform their original function or have been rebuilt, so as to transform spaces that are vast and uneconomical from our point of view (which contemporaries accused of having a “grandiose manner,” their appearance being encouraging rather than frightening) into more functional architecture, fulfilling contemporary economic requirements. OMA, headed by Rem Koolhaas, was invited to rebuild and modemise the panoptical prison in Arnhem (called the Koepel, or the Dome) as a peculiar consolation prize for losing the competition to design the seat of the Dutch parliament. The result of this commission was a series of documented visits by the members of the architectural studio, investors’ plans, budget calculations, a series of drawings, as well as three models (in various states of disrepair) which, together with the entire documentation of OMA, found shelter in the Netherlands’ Architecture Institut in Rotterdam. The last “material” trace of this modernistic dream was Koolhaas’ book S, M, L, XL, published ten years ago in New York, in which a separate chapter is dedicated to the Koepel.

It is not only the system of prison management which, finding some logical development in this madness, is seen through the prism of the panopticon, but also every office, government administration building, and factory, where supervision has become one of the most important elements of management. Today՚s epoch of industrial cameras, supervising everything and everyone (streets, banks, schools) has caused a certain blurring of the concept of supervision, and Orwell՚s Big Brother has found its caricature in a television reality show (whose format incidentally also originated in Holland). Farocki՚s film I Thought I was Seeing Convicts begins with a sequence from a CCTV camera, showing an image of “normal” people moving around a supermarket. This sequence moves smoothly into a presentation demonstrating the different equipment and systems for invigilation and supervision. Fragments of films from cameras installed in prisons, showing scenes such as a fight in a courtyard or visiting hours, are mixed in with fragments of old films from the silent film era, whose action takes place behind bars.

Langlands & Bell՚s picture-objects choose as their starting point the architectural plans of Stammheim (the place of imprisonment and death for RAF members/the Baader Meinhoff group) and the Millbank Penitentiary. This last penal institution, reminiscent of the panopticon only in its centralised plan, relates to a prison no longer in existence which functioned on the site where the Tate Britain now stands. The artists emphasise how institutions, differing in their functions (the gallery /museum and the prison), use similar manipulative and management techniques. The objects/exhibits ‒ just as are prisoners ‒ are subject to strict categorisation and separation in space, and the entirety ‒ together with those visiting, is subject to constant control by guards and cameras. In another object by the duo, British Museum from 1987, the museum in question (or to be accurate, a part of it: a semi-circular reading library with the librarian՚s desk placed in the centre) is compared with the interior of a panoptical prison in Breda, seen from the perspective of the “central eye.” This ironic parable has its true reflection in Bogota, Columbia, where one of the panoptical prison buildings is occupied today by the National Museum.

The satellite panopticon ‒ Jarostaw Kozakiewicz՚s satopticon, adds a futuristic dimension to the utopian idea of the pa­nopticon. Here the architecture, without ground plan or limiting walls, becomes something in the style of a multi-cellular organism ‒ a vast and expanding net whose eye ‒ “cells” are actually prison cells furnished with two windows. The upper window is meant to provide access to sunlight ‒ just as in the historical panopticon light from the window was supposed to illuminate the prisoner and render him constantly visible. The lower window is supposed to give the prisoner a view of the remote Earth, where someone rules by means of a complete electronic system, removing the need for a guard in the net itself, regulating matters of supervision, care and smooth functioning from afar. The Earth in the centre of this system duplicates the role of Bentham՚s eye, but itself also becomes the object of the observation of all the inhabitants/guests of the satopticon. But at the same time, this impossible architectural project remains in a certain sense true to Bentham՚s message ‒ to isolate and supervise, removing the motif of gratuitous violence from punishment.

Is this vision of a model mini-society, of an absolute system driven by implacable fairness and cleansed of superfluous hu­man emotion, possible to realise, even if the most sophisticated architecture and modern technology is used for the purpose? Or does the human factor, overlooked by Bentham (or considered in a very optimistic, almost fairytale-like manner) not transform every, even the best-functioning machine into an apparatus of oppression in which the most sadistic tendencies find expression?

The Stanford Prison Experiment, carried out by Professor Zimbardo in the early seventies (an experiment which added nothing new to our knowledge of human nature), confirms this thesis. Once more it showed ‒ this time within a group that was in a certain sense privileged as it consisted of psychology students ‒ how apparent and inevitable it is that certain mechanisms of violence will be created in a closed, isolated environment (even its mere simulation). In his film Repetition, made for the Venice Biennale, Żmijewski carries out this same experiment in an attempt to study if, in a different time and slightly different cultural circle, these mechanisms also appear. The making of the forty-minute film presenting the development of events in a “prison,” built according to the requirements of the production in a factory hall, is accompanied by a recorded commentary and the conversations of experts who indicate the mechanisms which give birth to conflict: the architect (who designed this “prison”), a prison psychologist, a sociologist and specialist in matters of rehabilitation, and a former prisoner. The link to Abu Ghraib seems inevitable although surely unintended. However, it is not completely clear in the final analysis to what extent uncontrolled emotions really found expression here.

The photographs by Behrouz Mehri in this exhibition, presented as large-format prints, allude to the events at Abu Ghraib. One could give them the title of Iraq Today, a slogan from the billboards visible in every photograph. A motorcyclist in a helmet with the motif of an American flag, and a woman in a black chador and charshaf, pass huge boards depicting scenes from Abu Ghraib, images known above all from the Internet and also from the fuzzy and often deliberately smudged prints in newspapers. What we initially take to be blown-up photographs, depicting the motifs of “Man on a Lead” or “Man in a Hood,” shown so often in the course of the last year, turn out to be huge paintings reprodu­cing these scenes. A digital photograph has been transformed into a painting of which a photograph has then been taken and printed. Several articles have already been dedicated to the photographs from Abu Ghraib, one of them published by Susan Sontag shortly before her death. What Have We Done? Appeared under this title in Britain՚s “The Guardian,” while it was printed in “The New York Times” as Regarding the Torture of Others, a reference to Sontag՚s previously published book Regarding the Pain of Others. Apart from considering the political and social aspects of Abu Ghraib, the author continues her reflection on the phenomenon of war photography which, ceasing to be the domain of photo-reporters and documentary-makers, becomes an instrument of torture and humiliation in the hands of the soldier/guard. “The horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken.” At the same time, the reach of such amateur digital photography, effortlessly transmitted over the Internet, is incomparably greater than that of the standard press photograph. Perhaps this is the reason why the decision was taken to show these photographs in September 2004 at the exhibition “Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Photographs from Abu Ghraib,” organised in New York by the International Center of Press Photography and in Pittsburgh by the Andy Warhol Museum. Small and unframed photographs/prints, hung in a single line, were juxtaposed with the front pages of international newspapers reporting on new wartime cruelties. They were not proclaimed works of art, although, as the director of the Andy Warhol Museum, Thomas Sokolowski, observed “The link between documentary expression and art was made long before this exhibition.” They remain a peculiar document of our times, and, shown within the space of the museum and the art centre, draw attention to the striking force of the influence of contemporary images, a force of which Warhol so often spoke.

Corporal oppression, documented in such a direct way by the digital photographs from Abu Ghraib, is perhaps best portrayed in metaphorical form by Mona Hatoum՚s crude objects and installations in which the image of the body is replaced by its suggestion. In the installation Quarters from 1996, the artist alludes to the space of a cell, dominated by multi-tiered bunk beds. In one of the catalogues dedicated to Hatoum՚s art, the reproduction of her work is accompanied by a small photograph taken in a run-down prison. These four identical objects, like multi-storied beds made from steel, squeezed into a small space, are smooth, almost minimalist, and at the same time the perception of them is accompanied by a feeling of physical discomfort, of the suffering of a body subjected to constant isolation and conditioning.

In the context of the work of Żmijewski and Hatoum, the photographs from Abu Ghraib, and above all in the context of both historic and current events, prison ‒ as a social space in which individuals are subject to processes of rehabilitation and supervision ‒ demonstrates itself to be completely ineffective and utopian. Do not supervise, but punish ‒ contem­porary practice and policy seem to declare in defiance of more humanistic tendencies in rehabilitation and psychology. The concept of supervision appears to have become devalued when people themselves started auditioning in crowds to get into the Big Brother house and “prominent” families began inviting the “eye” into their homes. Only violence and the oppression of the living body remain truly genuine. The attempt at creating a “humanitarian system” ends in disaster every time: a process of utopia transforming into an even more terrible reality. Markus Schinwald՚s Children՚s Crusade is such a symbol of utopia, an attempt at liberation and the evocation of the delusion of freedom. This was composed as a short film study whose running time is determined by a song from an opus by Benjamin Britten, sung by young boys. The story is quite simple, but its meanings multiply, opening up to numerous possibilities for interpretation. Children run out from Vienna՚s small side streets, dressed in clothes reminiscent of the style of the thirties or forties. They proceed behind a life-sized doll-puppet, controlled by an invisible animator. The puppet՚s facial expression changes every so often during the march: from sleeping to awake, and back again, all the time remaining frightening. With time, some of the children even overtake their leader, going further and further, always ahead. Behind their backs, in the background, the following landscapes change as if on a blue-box screen: small town streets change into forest paths, we see passing vineyards, creeks and hillocks, and in the final frame mountains appear, concealing perhaps the “promised city”: an illusion or a real trap? Who are these children: young inhabitants of Hamelin, Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, or orphans, who for most part made up the children՚s crusades of the Middle Ages? Who is the doll the children follow? A rat-catcher hungry for revenge? A metaphor of an unspecified ideology, a seductive religion or the Internet? Themes of the randomness of human nature, temptation and domination also appear, and simultaneously there is the motif of collective strategies of supervision and complicity, leading to total annihilation.

To return to the question posed at the end of Foucault vous parle… , it might be worth quoting a certain tale: “In the darkness of a wild night, a ship smashes against a rock and sinks. But one of its sailors desperately clutches on to a piece of the wreck and is thrown on to a deserted beach. In the morning, he gets up, and, rubbing his salty eyes, looks around to see where he is. The only human thing he sees are gallows. “Thank God” ‒ he shouts ‒ “civilisation!”¹

So perhaps it is the gallows, rather than the all-seeing eye, that should be the symbol of our civilisation?

¹ W. Berns, For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty (New York: Basic Books, 1991).