The Trinocular: Winter in America (American Spring)

If we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, it is perhaps in part because, as Pete Brooks points out in his essay “Prison Obscura”, capitalism is hard to see. Yet, we are also challenged to imagine the end of things we do see all of the time. In Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis finds that the commonality of prison in our “image environment” contributes to our inability to “question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives, that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison.” Prison is normalized, taken for granted, and “one of the most important features of our image environment”:

Even those who do not consciously decide to watch a documentary or dramatic program on the topic of prisons inevitably consume prison images, whether they choose to or not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV. It is virtually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison… this has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us.

The other day I was reading this passage at a shelter where I volunteer, the only family shelter in my county. The need far outpaces the resource. The shelter is full of children who have been living unsheltered sometimes for years. The shelter has an open-ended stay policy which means families who get space there can stay as long as they need to and they get help finding permanent housing. The shelter has a common room with a large television, which was on. At the moment I happened to glance up from my reading, there was a prison scene playing on the screen. What are the odds? The odds are good, is her point.

So how should prison be represented, if we need to represent it differently, in such a way that we don’t “take the existence of prisons for granted”? Brett Story’s film, The Prison in 12 Landscapes is one answer. Story represents prison without ever bringing her camera inside of one, showing, instead, how American prisons are produced by everything around them.

In his “Provisional Theory of Nonsites” the earth artist Robert Smithson wrote about his concept of the ‘Nonsite’ in which “one site can represent another site which does not resemble it.” One site becomes a metaphor for another. The space between sites, too, can be “one vast metaphor” making evident the non-local, non-perceptible conditions of possibility for locally perceptible phenomena. Whether...