Monday 03.05.07 – Ashley Hunt - Representations Of The Erased
1. about this Monday 3.05.07
2. about Ashley Hunt
3. essay I -- A Fortification of Race -- Ashley
4. essay II -- Temporary Public Spaces -- Ashley
5. interview -- Representations Of The Erased -- Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Ashley
6. links
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1. about this Monday 3.05.07
What: Talk / Discussion / Screening
When: Monday 3.05.07
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:30 pm
Who: Free and open to all
We are happy to have Ashley back in New York for a few weeks, and have been talking for a while about organizing an evening together.
It seems the time has come since he has just finished writing three essays which together, made his head spin, and he'd like to think across them while screening recent video work, in conversation with everyone.
The conversation will include: New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the cultural translation of prisons, and the visibility/invisibility of punishment in the popular imagination.
We hope you can make it.
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2. about Ashley Hunt
Ashley Hunt is an artist and activist who uses video, photography, mapping
and writing to engage social movements, modes of learning and public
discourse. Among his interests are structures that allow people to
accumulate power and those which keep others from getting power, while
learning from the ways people come to know, respond to and conceive of
themselves within these structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as
two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as intertwined,
drawing upon the ideas of organizing and cultural theory alike — the
theorizing and practices of one informing the other.
This has included investigations into the prison, the demise of welfare
state institutions, war and disaster capitalism, documentary practices and
political activism as a mode of representation. His primary work of the past
eight years is organized under the umbrella of “The Corrections Documentary
Project” (www.correctionsproject.com), which centers around the contemporary
growth of prisons and their foundational role in today’s economic
restructuring and the politics of race.
Hunt’s work has been screened and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the
Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in
Atlanta, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, as well as
numerous grassroots and community based venues throughout the U.S. His
writings have been published in Rethinking Marxism (‘06), the Journal of
Aesthetics and Protest (‘07 & ‘05), Sandbox Magazine (‘02) and at
Artwurl.org (‘03–present). He is currently a fellow at the Vera List Center
for Art and Politics.
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3. essay I -- A Fortification of Race -- Ashley
To read the full version, with footnotes and images please visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/ashley/ahunt_1.pdf
This morning I woke up in a curfew,
O God, I was a prisoner, too,
Could not recognize the faces standing over me,
They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality.
How many rivers do we have to cross,
Before we can talk to the boss?
All that we got, it seems we have lost
We must have really paid the cost.
(And that’s why we’ll be)
Burning and looting tonight,
Burning and looting tonight (to survive),
Burning all illusion tonight,
Burning all illusion tonight.
*/Bob Marley, ‘‘Burnin’ and Lootin’’’ (1973)
Rumor had it that prisoners had been left to drown in their cells. More stories flowed out of New Orleans in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, about the subsequent relocation of thousands of prisoners (many of whom had been simply awaiting trial) to prisons throughout Louisiana, where they were being held incommunicado. As an artist and activist who has worked in New Orleans a good deal, I was invited to join a delegation to the city, along with organizers, service providers, and human rights lawyers. This essay is part of a body of work that draws upon my days there, media coverage of the storm, and previous experiences within activism and politics in New Orleans.
Upon my arrival in New Orleans, I spoke with the woman I’d be staying with to ask if she might need anything. She said we’d need water in the house; could I find some? This was my first introduction to the necessity now governing the city, but also made me think years back to an interview I’d conducted with a former New Orleans Black Panther. When I’d asked why she was an activist, she recalled long months of having the water cut off in her house, images of scraping change together with her daughter and hauling empty jugs to the water dispenser at a local store.
As I recalled this driving into a deserted city, it would be only the first similarity to strike me between social destruction of poverty and racism, and the destruction brought by Hurricane Katrina. Considering the processes brought on by the storm, accelerated by the storm, and enacted by the state in response to the storm, I soon began to see their collected effects as analogous to ghettoization: the manifold processes that go into transforming a community into a ghetto.
To read further please go to…
http://www.16beavergroup.org/ashley/ahunt_1.pdf
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4. essay II -- Temporary Public Spaces -- Ashley
Published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, issue 4, vol 1, 2005
To read the full version, with footnotes and images please visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/ashley/ahunt_2.pdf
I.
Intersection
The project I’m describing here began in 1998, with research into prison privatization. This subject came as an intersection of two lines within my previous work: exploring the relationship of political economy and identity formation on the one hand, and teaching art and media literacy to young people on the other, wherein I was witnessing a rapid criminalization of my students by local police and school administrators. The private prison had recently re-emerged from its historical prohibition, converting the repressive state apparatus of the prison—which functions in relation to capital accumulation—into a space of capital accumulation in itself,1 and it seemed to link these two lines concretely. It illustrated a political economy that produces oppress-able subjects (through the desire it produces for more and more prisoners), which manifest in less abstract, juridical, spatial and interpersonal effects of racial and class domination.
Corrections
After experimentation with this research in gallery-based installations, the project came to partial fruition with the completion of a feature length documentary, Corrections, in 2001. Forged out of three years of conversations with grassroots communities and activists, with academic and policy “experts” and representatives of prison corporations and businesses, the documentary takes prison privatization as a starting point to analyze today’s awesome prison growth as it relates both literally and figuratively to contemporary racism and class domination. Because of this, it quickly found an audience among a range of anti-prison activism and community development work throughout the U.S., within which critical, less traditional propaganda tools were sorely needed.
Audience
One strategy in constructing the video had been to multiply its voice by alternating its modes of address, its language and arguments as they might speak to (or shape) a specific “audience,” so that different sections would appeal to different communities. This was intended to bring varied positions into the common space of its audience, wherein they might identify with one another. Within racially and economically diverse audiences, this strategy allowed for a negotiation of differing ideas about “crime” and imprisonment, while also provoking insight into the structures of privilege and subjection which separate these communities to begin with.
To further read this essay please go to
http://www.16beavergroup.org/ashley/ahunt_2.pdf
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5. Interview -- REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ERASED
by NATASCHA SADR HAGHIGHIAN and ASHLEY HUNT
To read the full version, with footnotes and images please visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/ashley/ahunt_3.pdf
NATASCHA SADR HAGHIGHIAN | Foucault says that visibility is a scheme that defines what can be seen. Avery F. Gordon describes in her book Ghostly Matters how visibility is a complex system of permissions and prohibitions punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness.
How do we confront the scheme or system when talking from an invisible position like the one of the undocumented or the imprisoned?
ASHLEY HUNT | Both of these descriptions of visibility refer to a social optics, which of course does not correspond to what can be seen by the physical eye but to what can be “seen” by a subject, or recognized by discourses such as history or politics. Foucault in this sense theorizes a prescriptive system that regulates the visible — what can be visible and how, conditioning the subject to see or not see, to recognize and misrecognize — classifying objects as legible or illegible to the institutions and discourses. Similarly, Gordon’s framework theorizes sociological manifestations, subjectivities and imaginations that emerge from such a schematic, and its manifestation as a blindness which is ultimately haunted by what it disavows, or what appears too discrete or small to be touched by power.
When we talk about positions like the undocumented or imprisoned and theorize how one should act or speak, I find it necessary to make it clear that I am not personally speaking from such a position, and think it important to not collapse the precarious positions of artists and cultural workers in with “the invisible,” as much as they may be in solidarity.
That said, included in your question is the assumption that it is important to “have a voice” (where “voice” is a metaphor and mode of inclusion/exclusion similar to “visibility”), and some people mistrust this goal, thinking it better to remain invisible: to find power in the undetectable, flying below the radar, refusing to engage the language or visual scheme used by a given regime to structure our spaces and interactions. From this perspective I would say that one shouldn’t worry about such schemes — you’re not invisible to yourself, to your family or community, and you can strengthen these spheres, organize and live your life, all without waiting for other people who “don’t see you” to give you permission.
But if confronted with violence and abuse or driving toward a collective goal of empowerment, what can one do to confront such a scheme or system? First, it should be understood that this scheme is not an end in itself, but is a mode of exclusion, domination or exploitation; and it is dynamic, always adjusting and disguising itself. As important is as it is for all people to be visualized on their own terms and heard in their own words, it is equally important that what is produced in response be dynamic as well. This struggle should not be an end in itself, but should be a tactic. We have to produce our own images, ones that do not fit into the scheme the current regime has prepared for us, but should also distinguish between the images we create for ourselves and those we transmit to others: one is nurturing and social, producing the collective identity required for mutuality and cooperation; the other is responsive and political. Both are important.
Ultimately we’re talking about representations, though, and we are not theorizing a pure or truthful representation as opposed to a false one (this would misunderstand the nature of representations); we are countering one set of representations claiming truth with another claim to truth (inevitably, equally a representation). And is this a struggle for visibility? Or is it a struggle for power — in which case, visibility is a strategy that can serve or betray you, regardless of intentions and ownership.
To read further please go to…
http://www.16beavergroup.org/ashley/ahunt_3.pdf
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6. links
http://ashleyhuntwork.net
http://correctionsproject.com
http://iwontdrown.com
