Book Review: Corrections & collections: Architectures for art and crime

In this intriguing exploration of prisons and museums, architect Joe Day delivers rare commentary on the tandem impulse to contain unprecedented numbers of convicts and assemble massive collections of art. Their obvious common denominator is the construction of buildings designed to accommodate both ambitions. Correspondingly, the expansion of architectural projects attracts a wide assortment of visionaries and artists as well as insiders and hustlers. Together, they orchestrate spectacles and discipline while pushing the extremes between freedom and constraint, or according to Day, new architectures for the beautiful and the damned. As Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear) fittingly points out in the foreword, the tendency to warehouse surplus people and overvalued objects is the expression of a single social logic—one that is propelled by a hybrid of aesthetic minimalism, traffic management, and neo-Benthamism. “Thus jaded correctional officers,” Davis writes,

sit in front of monitors watching stored human objects masturbating, screaming or simply vegetating, while self-conscious museum visitors feign sophisticated appreciation of more and more contrived art installations while a voice inside their head asks, “This piece of shit is worth $15 million dollars.” (p. vii)

Day’s introduction begs the question: To seduce or subdue? And, to “find the future, listen for acronyms. Abbreviations are economic bellwethers, and where there is spending, proper names often must pay” (p. 1). In California, the Department of Corrections has redesignated all 33 of its prisons with a brief sequence of letters, such as AD-SEG, SHU, LWOP, and J-CAT, becoming (seemingly mechanistic) nodes in the state’s punitive archipelago. Erasing the names of artists and connoisseurs, major art museums have followed suit: MoMAs, MOCAs, ICAs, and so on. The built environment has clearly adopted an impersonal persona while offering spaces that are utopian or dystopian or somewhere in between. Correctional leaders and curators alike reside in highly exclusive cultures charged with roles that border on secular mysticism. “One seeks to transform people—criminals—into mute and manageable objects, the other to make objects—art—into living statements” (p. 7).

Consumption and containment figure prominently in Day’s critique of museums and prisons. Museums have shed their reputation as musty galleries of stale cultural relics while marketing multimedia spaces, gift shops, and cafés. By contrast, penal sites remain repositories for the dispossessed. When Day toured a correctional work camp, an officer sarcastically replied: “We are not paid to fix these people. We are paid to store them” (p. 11). Expanding on themes of consumption and containment (as well as institutional cynicism), the volume is organized around a series of conceptual practices carried out by curators and custodial staff: reduce (deprivation), repeat (redundancy), rotate (panopticism), proliferate (reproduce), privatize (profit), and collide (prisons as museums). Day has done his homework by remaining faithful to the scholarship on prison architecture (Robin Evans, Norman Johnston, and Leslie Fairweather) and museum studies (Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Tony Bennett, and Alan Wallach), bridging both paradigms via Anthony Vidler. As expected, Foucault, Barthes, and Baudrillard echo throughout.

Given the visual trajectory of the book, the author complements the (well-written) text with numerous illustrations, diagrams, blueprints, and (well-chosen) photographs. Still, the comfortable narrative often challenges readers, demanding that they seriously reconsider the cultural and political forces that contribute to a booming art industry and mass incarceration. Each in their own way, both crusades are subject to social exclusion. Quoting Robert Smithson on “Cultural Confinement,” Day reminds us:

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells—in other words, neutral rooms called “galleries”…the function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. (p. 34)

However, while the world of museums is perpetuated by a sense of self-appointed elitism, prisons perpetuate the socioeconomic and racial divide—and Day does not stray from that reality.

The twinned thesis allows readers to appreciate the dynamics of architecture in the sphere of museums as well as in prisons. Toward that end, Day should be commended for providing convincing arguments on social control. His elaborate discussion on the panopticon vis-à-vis the Guggenheim (art museum in New York City) pairs renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright with Jeremy Bentham as they “re-conjugated relationships of viewing and viewed” (p. 117). Their respective circular designs have taken different paths to fame. Wright’s Guggenheim enjoys critical and popular acclaim while Bentham “is now remembered principally for inventing spatial persecution” (p. 99). A similar juxtaposition is formed between “two larger than life figures” who (in the 1980s) recasted the “basic mathematics of incarceration and exhibition,” namely, Don Novey and Thomas Krens. Novey’s leadership of the California prison officers union is credited (blamed) for the acceleration of prison construction while Krens successfully promoted the Guggenheim brand into an international trademark. Clearly, careerism and drive are among the chief determinants in corrections and collections alongside hefty tax breaks (for cultural investors) and budgetary restructuring (from higher education to prison spending).

In sum, this sophisticated survey of “institutions of display and discipline” (p. 219) deserves high praise for instructing readers on the subtle undercurrents and overt statements on architectures for art and punishment. A mild caveat, however, is in order. Corrections & Collections has a steep learning curve. Members of the audience who do not share the author’s enthusiasm for design, cultural expression, and social control might wonder what all the fuss is about. For those with initiative, the book produces a huge payoff. Any serious scholar on architecture, museums, and prisons is likely to keep this volume within reaching distance of one’s personal library.