Pain or Humiliation
In the darkest part of the night footsteps inside your bedroom. The next moment a hand grabs you and throws a sack over your head. The muffled sound of voices and the crackle of handsets as your arms are pinned behind your back. A pin prick and you are gone. You awake bruised and drained in a small empty cell. You stare at the blank wall, suddenly it is winter. The orange jumpsuit is starched and scratchy. The lights go out.
Where am I you ask ? Your reply, a silent stare. A small plate of mashed food is passed through a slot in the door. The lights come on again. You are ordered outside, you smell the sea and something else, something that you cannot quite put your finger on but it makes your stomach turn. A voiceless crowd of fellow inmates kneels in the gravel courtyard. Time stands still. Where I am I you ask. The man closest to you shakes his head imperceptibly but remains mute. After a time you are moved back to your cell.
According to Smith’s biography, Cropenberger also had to wait four years, until the Second World War ended, to return to the ancestral home. This, and a number of other uncannily similar events that parallel his fathers experiences, led him to conclude that progress, in a human sense, is profoundly cyclical rather than linear.
The works that follow are fueled by materialisations in everyday life, in history and in media narratives, of signs that suggest a cyclical system. One of the symptoms that allude to this kind of system is extreme human violence. The works in some way attempt to inhabit the psychodynamic states that author these violent actions. This is an effort to occupy the space where these, often violent, acts are seeded, and to peer into the mechanism of this cycle.
She Smiled, Neck and the video piece Adrift reflect a violence associated with intimacy. This kind of violence is perpetrated by people that you know, and that are close to you. This can be a manifestation of a violent or oppressive society, or a crime of passion, but it is also part of the total picture of what being human is all about.
Shouldn't we also include within the scope of 'human' - or for that matter the 'intimate' - the inhuman itself, the darkness to be found in the innermost recesses of the self, a force which drives the utmost cruelty and the deepest degradation of others. What if, ultimately, intimacy was the unconstrained explosion of the very core of our being human ? (Mbembe & Nuttall 2007 : 129)
The Ron T Beck performance, Guard#1, Inmate#1-#4, Larynx, and Ram reflect on the other hand, a globalised impersonal state sanctioned, violence typical in a military and/or industrial system. This kind of violence tends to occur when the mechanics of control, are made to serve the ends of commerce, or they are outsourced. This kind of violence is sometimes accidental to the system that it serves.
These recurring acts of violence contrast sharply with the polite mechanisms of democratic capitalism, with it's smiling hand shakes and acts of diplomacy. These gestures are the foils for the acts of extreme violence enacted against people who have been taken to exclusion zones and systematically stripped of their basic human rights.
In his book 'Discipline and Punish' Foucault introduces the topic of torture by describing in graphic detail the 'amende honourable' of the regicide Robert-François Damiens who had attempted to kill Louis XV in 1757. Damiens had the flesh torn from his body, was doused in acid and then drawn and quartered. His torso was burned and his ashes were scattered in the wind. (Foucault 1991:7) Later on Foucault writes:
(Foucault 1991:14)
This move away from the public spectacle of the body as the site of revenge is part of our progression towards modernity. The torture images that were made public from the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay talk to this cyclical form of human progress. They suggest a resurrection of public retribution. They can also be seen as aspects of a broader, contemporary syndrome, that we can label Abu-Bay syndrome.
Abu-Bay syndrome is not confined to these two prisons, but rather it infects both physical and virtual places in the contemporary paradigm by its connections to particular kinds of spaces in our society.
The locus of the Abu-Bay sites is significant because they are sovereign spaces but are distinctly and geographically separate from the state they exist to serve. Abu Ghraib prison, now know as Baghdad Central is located in the Iraqi city of Abu Ghraib, (32 km from Baghdad), while Guantanamo Bay is located in south-eastern Cuba and has been occupied by the US Navy since the late nineteenth century.
Particular to Abu-Bay syndrome are the ideological factors at play and absent in the locus where it is active. Abu-Bay syndrome is present in zones where some or all of the ideological conditions that govern the state they serve have been suspended either temporarily or permanently. They are thus suspension zones, meticulously constructed for a particular military or other purpose.
These sites display temporary/ permanent characteristics which connect them to the dialogue of modernity. They continue the conversation initiated by temporary permanent structures such as Eiffel tower and the Crystal Palace. Their role is dictated by logistics and they are planned around efficiency. They are places ‘apart’ because of their geographic separation from the nation they serve and constitutional suspensions that have been formally or informally enacted in-order for them to operate.
To understand these zones and their functional relationship to contemporary urban living, it is necessary to look at other examples of zones governed by suspensive conditions. The first significant example is the 'outsourcing zone' that gets used to manufacture goods cheaply for multinational corporations.
The second example from an urban context is the local retail mall, also example a suspension zone. The retail mall and the outsourcing zone have a unique relationship because they both exist to serve the functional requirements of commerce. While they have apparently different purposes from military suspension zones the common aspects of these three suspension zones is that some of the ideology that governs the countries they exist within needs to be suspended in order for them to function.
The Abu-Bay suspensions relate to prisoners rights generally and the Geneva Convention specifically. In the retail mall, people are excluded by material filters. These material filters are highly developed yet very subtle particularly in countries where there exists a vast difference in the material wealth of its citizens. In outsourcing zones the suspensions operate on workers rights broadly speaking.
Temporary permanence, in the case of the outsourcing zone is evident in the kinds of jobs available in these places and their ever shifting nature, never consistent, never assured and without benefits. This is also revealed in the kinds of materials that the structures in these zones are constructed from, suggesting that they could be unbolted and changed or moved as required. This is an aesthetic of control that consolidates power in the hands of the employer and normalises the tenuous nature of the work.
The retail mall, like a stage set for acts of consumption, is also in a constant state of flux. At the end of each act (or season) the scene changes to encourage consumers to acquire artifacts that are applicable to the current act. Once the production has been through sufficient cycles the very buildings themselves are changed to represent a new kind of story bringing with it a whole new set of artifacts.
In medieval times, the location of the spectacle of revenge was also a significant public space or square in the town. A multi purpose space or inclusion zone was the location of the spectacle of power, the site of social networking and public commerce. The bodies of the Abu-Bay victims become the site for revenge for the citizens of the global media-sphere. These actions generate a conversation between these three kinds of exclusion zones, the retail zone, the manufacturing zone and the military exclusion zone, and their common strategy of selective application.
Because the torture was done in this kind of exclusion zone once these images were made public those zones become a surrogate town square for our mediated 'global village'. In this context our public spaces have become inaccessible fractured, disbursed and colonized by violence and suppression. This is protected by layers of opacity in order to prevent the citizens from gazing at its various mechanisms, lest they begin to learn their true purpose and start to use them on their masters.
The lights go out. There is a faint yet persistent beeping sound coming from a direction you cannot identify. Time stands still. The lights come on again. You have consider emptiness. Your only choices are pain or humiliation, nothing else. You are certainly not getting your phone call.
The feverish confinement grips you. Hot and cold sweats, non-specific symptoms and flattened emotions. The lights go out. You are everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. As soon as you begin to notice a pattern, everything changes. Like a mirage any tangible understanding of your context vanishes the moment you approach it. The lights go on. You remain shivering and confused.
Bibliography.
Achille Mbembe & Sarah Nuttall The Human Face in Intimate Relations, Marlene Dumas. Roma/Jacana Media Johannesburg 2007.
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish The Birth of The Prison. Penguin London 1991.
Smith, A. Cropenbergers Legacy London: Penguin 1993.
