- Venue
- Nottingham Contemporary
- Location
- East Midlands
I submit as my review a letter Nottingham Contemporary received that I managed to photocopy while I was volunteering at the ‘Impossible Prison’ exhibition in November 2008. To fit within the University’s regulations I have typed it out, making only minor alterations to the content. I have omitted the authors name and address for obvious reasons. To my knowledge there has been no response to the letter that follows at this present time, and no further action is planned by the gallery or the artist.
To whom it may concern,
I felt compelled to write and tell you of my thoughts on your exhibition ‘The Impossible Prison’, or more particularly Artur Zmijewski’s ‘Repetitions’ video, that I had the misfortune to experience while I was visiting friends in this country. How unaware was I that when we left that day to experience some cultural sights of the city that I would be catapulted back into the memories of a period in my life that I have tried so hard to repress!
So Artur Zmijewski decided to recreate Dr. Zimbardo’s ‘classic’ social psychology ‘Stanford Experiment’ from 1971 which placed young impressionable volunteers into a mock prison, half prisoners, the other half guards. Why? What for? What was he hoping to achieve that wasn’t found out back then? It was stopped after 6 days due to the human rights being breached. ETHICAL ISSUES. What qualifications does this man have to illicit the repeat of such a proven ethically unsound experiment. Experiment? I mean scientifically speaking can it be called that coming from an artist, regardless of any help he may have had?
My friends who accompanied me saw my outrage and tried to tell me that the spectacle and ideas within the video validated its worth,
“As e-flux tells us, the artist ‘…confronts dysfunctions of human body, historical traumas, the disintegration of the will and memory’ You need to try and put it within a contextual framework.”
They told me. Really. Do I? What about the ‘participants’ who were paid a mere $50 a day to endure such degradation? What about their framework?
“But by using tv cameras and two-way mirrors it references reality shows like Big Brother and highlights the limits and possibilities of social reform within the modern spectral sphere of media consumption.”
They continued to try and convince me. Editing is violence. It’s destructive in what it creates. At one point in the video the guards laughing over a meal is intersected with prisoners vomiting there’s up.
I had to tell them what I now tell you. I was one of the volunteers in the original experiment in Stanford under Dr. Zimbardo. Frieze magazine tells us that the artist, “make[s] no pretence to refined artistic form…only to direct attention to the events they record and the bodily experiences evoked by those events.” By exploiting unemployed Polish workers who, as they say on camera, need the money! I had no real concept of how it would affect me, I was just an interested student in 1971. But the pressure of power I had as a guard which led to my despicable actions, led to counselling for years in order to come to terms with what I did. How can someone subject others to this? Can we not learn from our past?
Signed
M.
