Mikhael Subotzky at the Goodman Gallery
by Michael Smith
French theorist Michel Foucault highlighted the danger of regarding prisons as deterrents to crime, and as mechanisms for rehabilitation. In his groundbreaking work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Foucault stated that 'Prisons do not diminish the crime rate: they can be extended, multiplied or transformed, the quantity of crime remains stable or, worse, increases�' (Foucault, 1975: 265). It was with suitably Foucauldian suspicion of our own prison system that I approached Mikhael Subotzky's show at Goodman Gallery, 'Die Vier Hoeke and Umjiegwana'.
It would be easy for South Africa to rest on its social transformation laurels, in light of the radical restructuring of our society that has taken place in the last 10 or so years. Yet certain human rights issues persist as blots on our record: poverty and the HIV/Aids pandemic rightly seem to be the areas on which most critics of our new dispensation focus as the greatest obstacles to a free and fair society. The value of Subotzky's 'Die Vier Hoeke and Umjiegwana' is that it highlights incarceration as an issue that requires greater and more urgent attention.
Representations of criminality in contemporary culture tend to fall into two major types: the ubiquitous courtroom drama, with all of its fanfare about rights and justice, calculated, it seems, to placate a worried public into a sedated sense that truth and justice do ultimately prevail; and the uber-violent 'edgy' prison drama, like OZ and more recently Prison Break, which seems calculated to show prisoners' rapacity and remorselessness as justifications for the prison system. More equitable representations of criminals and prisoners often elude us because of the contentious nature of crime and punishment, especially since 9/11. In SA, a country positively wracked by crime at all levels, where most families have been affected in some way, level-headed approaches tend to give way to village-mob-with-pitchforks-type sentiments when people discuss crime.
Against this backdrop, representations of prisoners are valuable and illuminating. In the way Guy Tillim often avoids the central 'action' of his subjects and focuses instead on peripheral, incidental moments, Subotzky shies away from the kinds of scenes that feed our predictable obsessions with prison inmates: violence, rape, escape attempts. Instead, he trains his lens on moments of community, of human tenderness, and of course on the ubiquity of human presence in an unnatural, overcrowded system.
The show goes beyond this artist's previous focus on incarcerated men and includes images and stories of former inmates whose lives remain inextricably linked to the prison system. These men are shown in a variety of situations, most involving desperate bids for survival in an unwelcoming world umjiegwana - outside die vier hoeke. Here Foucault is again useful: 'Detention causes recidivism; those leaving prison have more chance than before of going back to it: convicts are, in very high proportion, former inmates' (Foucault, 1975: 265). Photographs of men engaged in back-breaking manual labour, or rifling through beachfront bins for scraps, are positively heartbreaking in their bleakness. An 'honest' life outside the prison seems all but impossible for the 'rehabilitated' ex-convict, as he shifts to the very bottom of a job market already hugely oversubscribed.
The images and story of Hermanus, a veteran of Allandale, Victor Verster and Pollsmoor prisons are particularly telling here. A man whose close family all died while he spent 23 years in the system, Hermanus now works and lives on the Icon property development in Cape Town. 'Surrounded by fine hotels, top level brokerages and legal firms', Hermanus finds himself in '� the heart of the economic evolution' (or so the Icon website and billboard read). Here Subotzky uses text and image in a multi-layered indictment of our new boomtown economics. The peripheral position of a man whose life passed him by while he was 'binne die Vier Hoeke', now working to build a better life for others, is not the stuff you'll hear about at election time.
This show is also interesting as it sees the Goodman Gallery's veritable labyrinth of available partitions used to full effect: the works are arranged in concentric rings radiating from the centre. The centre, a kind of inner sanctum, contains photos of incarcerated men. Sound, the recorded voices of prisoners, filters down from the rafters of the gallery, and reinforces a sense of the ubiquity of human presence experienced by prisoners. As Jonny Steinberg's text at the gallery entrance states: in 2004 '184 000 people were behind bars in a system designed to hold 114 000.' The ease with which one's body passes out of this central space reminds one of the difficulties these men have in escaping their terrible birthright of cyclic movement between the prison and the outside world.
Around this central area are the images of ex-convicts, as if moving in a tenuous orbit, subject to the fierce gravitational pull exerted by the prison. The interchangeability of these two areas within the gallery reinforces the complex spatial interchange between the two areas of the show's title. These men are forever caught in a cycle between completing periods of incarceration and beginning them again, till the spaces and the social codes and language which distinguish 'inside' from 'outside' become one.
Space functions as a pivotal metaphor in this project: a companion show was up concurrently at the old Women's Prison on Braamfontein's Constitution Hill, transforming a space of subjugation and humiliation into one of instruction and understanding. Ultimately however, it is Subotzky's effective 're-humanising' of inmates that functions as the most subversive aspect of this project. What justification could we have for the barbarism of the prison system if we allow these men to become human again?
Opened: February 18
Closed: March 11
Goodman Gallery
163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Tel: (011) 788 1113
Fax: (011) 788 9887
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