Oak-wood courtroom benches, a metal office desk, and aluminum manhole rings built by prison inmates in New York state have today come to occupy a prominent downtown art space. The show, “91020000” (through March 13), is not some feel-good celebration of art as redemption or therapy for the incarcerated. Far from it. In fact, these “found” objects — austere, almost funerary in their isolated arrangement across the spacious gallery — are carceral commodities: the result of a government scheme that pays prisoners $0.16 to $1.25 an hour to make a host of industrial and office wares, acquired and presented here by Artists Space at the behest of conceptual artist Cameron Rowland.As documented in the heavily footnoted accompanying essay, the arrangement stems from a clause in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution that, while outlawing slavery, legalized involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, along with 38 other states, relies on sub-minimum wage prison labor to churn out furniture, industrial parts, and various other products to government organizations across the US (courts, police departments, public schools and universities), as well as private nonprofit organizations. This last detail is what allowed Artists Space, the storied downtown nonprofit, to register with the state’s Department of Corrections, receive its registration number (serving as the title of the show), and facilitate Rowland in ordering pieces from a catalogue for its gallery on Greene Street.In one corner of the space, aluminum manhole leveler rings are stacked and intersecting, like a Carl Andre ground sculpture, in three low piles. Intended to adjust the height of manhole openings after a road has been repaved, the rings conjure images of convict labor on roads, Progressive-era chain gangs working on Southern infrastructure. Like the rings’ shape, history encircles itself, the cultural consequences of the present sprung from the belly of 19th-century American society and the racialization of law. History is not progress, nor triumphant fulfillment, but a closed circuit of racial and economic domination — like the courthouse’s tautological self-fulfillment, its benches made by prisoners to seat their successors. In simply putting forth this proposition, Rowland acts more like a historian than activist.Law and economics are also treated as sculptural objects here. This is made clear in one work of framed legal and financial records, “Disgorgement,” 2016, where Rowland has established something called a reparations purpose trust, essentially a perpetual trust holding about $10,000 in shares of the publicly-traded insurer Aetna. (As Rowland explains in his accompanying treatise, the company allegedly profited from the 18th-century slave trade.) If the federal government ever decides to issue reparations for slavery, the trust will be liquidated and its proceeds paid out to whichever agency is charged with issuing reparations. To satisfy the law’s demands, an attorney required Rowland to include a clause in the trust’s founding document defining the structure as “a statement emphasizing the continuing impact of slavery in the United States and encouraging federal and corporate programs of reparation.” But, according to curator Richard Birkett, Rowland disavows this tidy summation — Rowland doesn’t wish to play the high priest.Despite the esoteric legal theatrics, no definitive statements are being made. The show may be about the state’s operation as a corporatist cartel, but it’s not some chest-beating, politics-as-art gambit. In investing material — at times literally — with its structural violence, Rowland’s objects address the system on their own devastating terms.
↧