Content area
Full Text
OPENINGS
ON DECEMBER 21, 2015, Artists Space sent out an e-mail announcing an exhibition by Cameron Rowland, which included a photograph of a municipal office building with two black cars parked in front. Below this image was printed the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution:
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
With little other information it was difficult, for me, at least, to make sense of the e-mail: What did this slightly shabby building in Albany have to do with the abolition of slavery some 150 years ago? But then, on January 7, Artists Space sent out a second e-mail, this one featuring a long essay by Rowland that helped connect the dots between image and text. The depicted offices, it turns out, were those of Corcraft-a state-run company staffed by prisoners that produces office furniture and other sundries for nonprofits and government-affiliated businesses. Corcraft, I was now able to see, is a portmanteau of corrections and craft, a dissembling piece of corporatese signaling the redemptive promise of hard work (idle hands are the devil's playthings, as they say). Rowland argues that Corcraft perpetuates and preserves property relations that originated with slavery. After emancipation, ex-slaves were not so much free as subjected to a kind of indentured servitude. Due to laws making it all but impossible for black bodies to appear in public, especially in the South, the prison eventually took over the role of the plantation, and there, too, incarcerated subjects were put to work. Such a regime continues to this day: Many convicts are forced to labor while in prison in order to pay off the cost of their incarceration. Not insignificantly, this arrangement provides savings to state agencies as well.
Rowland's text ends by making a connection between the state prison industry and nonprofit institutions, but there was an air of mystery as to what would actually constitute his exhibition at Artists Space when the show opened on January 16....