BORDERLINES

Jennie Hirsh, Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism Maryland Institute College of Art

The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection1

Patricia Gomez and Maria-Jesus Gonzalez figure amongst a growing number of contemporary artists whose work self-consciously attempts to resuscitate cultural sites and artifacts linked to histories that are at risk for being forgotten or overlooked. Indeed, this creative memorial impulse grew in popularity in the 1990s, perhaps as a cultural reflex to the impending turn of millennium that inspired nostalgia along with anxiety, and can be associated with artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Christian Boltanski, or Krzysztof Wodiczko and James Casebere, all of whose work has addressed, amongst other issues, fraught histories that, although now invisible, remain associated with specific places and structures.2 Likewise, over the past twenty years, a new genre of political monuments, or countermonuments, have taken shape in unexpected ways, physically incorporating voids into their designs as a means of making tangible crises and losses that marked the twentieth century, such as the AIDS crisis and the Holocaust.3 Natives of Spain, Gomez and Gonzalez belong to a younger generation of artists working in this commemorative vein, and their recent projects are notable not only for their aesthetic beauty but also for the ways in which they register on metaphorical levels. Through their a unique form of printmaking and related installation strategies for that practice, they point to social and political issues that, at once site-specific and universal, have become invisible and hence too easily ignored.4
1

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1982): 9.
2

Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2006).

3

In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), James E.

Young nominated such and At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). More recently, this tendency emerged in many of the proposals for a monument for the events of September 11, 2001, including Michael Arads winning proposal.
4

See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002) for a stimulating analysis of the

Gomez and Gonzalez make artwork by intervening in buildings that have been condemned and slated for demolition, literally printing from the walls, ceilings, and even floors of structures in anticipation of their disappearance. A signature form of creative practice that incorporates preservation, their resulting stripped surfaces transform architectural embellishments, together with trace human marks and decorations, as well as environmental decay, into dense, two-dimensional images that compress a range of histories and experiences into single prints.5 Gomez and Gonzalez, who trained as printmakers equipped with a knowledge of historic preservation, began using their trademark strappo process to in 2006 and have continued to build on its dramatic results ever since. They first employed this technique with a residential site of colorful modernist homes in the El Cabanyal district of Valencia, the city where they live and work, but their last three projects, have centered on prisons that have fallen into disuse, first at the Abandoned Prison Project executed at the Modelo prison in Valencia, then at another penitentiary on the verge of closing in Palma de Mallorca, and, most recently, at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia.6 According to the artists, of the three prison sites in which they have intervened thus far, Holmesburg, located at 8215 Torresdale Avenue, just off of I-95 in the northeast section of the city, is the most harsh, both in terms of its current state of advanced decay and the severity of the penitentiary system it housed.7 Designed by the Wilson Brothers and opened in 1896, the site features a wheel-and-spoke arrangement with long halls of prisoner cells radiating out from a central surveillance tower, echoing the arrangement of John Havilands better-known Eastern State Penitentiary (opened in 1829) located in the Fairmount section of the city. Like its local precedent, Holmesburg put into practice a version of the panopticon concept made famous by Jeffrey Bentham in the eighteenth century and later analyzed by Michel Foucault as a new means of controlling subservient beings via surveillance, in addition to confinement, within penitentiary complexes, thus adding a psychological factor to the physical constraints already in place.8 Working within claustrophobic cells behind closed doors, as well as rifling through files, photographs, notebooks, logbooks and photographs in local archives, the artists collected fragments of the time passed behind bars, as they entered into a part of the city that is normally cut off from the rest of the population. Their prints excavate indexical traces of hidden experiencessigns left behind by prisoners and guards alikeand hence expand the scope of
emergence of site-specific art as a genre.
5

See the essay by Pat Robertson, Printing the Past: Gmez and Gonzlez Monoprints, in the present publication. Footnote to publications on other prisons. Conversation with the artists in Philadelphia, October 2011. See also the interview of the artists conducted by Jos

Roca in this volume, in which they describe the advanced state of decay plaguing the walls as well as how that functions as a spectral metaphor for the harsh medical experiments conducted on the skin of prisoners.
8

See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), esp.

195-228.

our sense of Philadelphias urban history; in turning their attention to those individuals whose stories, and indeed bodies, were deemed unfit for circulation in mainstream society, they pursued a side of the urban landscape that remains, by design, invisible to the population living freely on the outside. Thus the works produced for Doing Time: Depth of Surface expand our notion of the urban landscape by pushing its matrix in a new direction, as they break out and hence through solid and heretofore impenetrable barriers erected to keep sight of undesirable individuals, as well as the difficult and distasteful treatment of them, at bay. The tapestry-like prints on textile supports pulled from the interior of Holmesburg manipulate a print medium as a metaphor for re-suturing the fragmented fabric of the citys history as they transfer invisible faces and unspeakable experiences from the penitentiary complex to the spectacular space of the gallery. In order to understand better both the function and the value of the Holmesburg prints and installations, as well as the research that informs them, it is useful to think about the concept of abjection as described by philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. In her touchstone work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva explains that what is abjectis radically excluded, including, amongst other marginalized groups such as women and minorities, criminals members of society: the traitor, the liar, the criminalthe shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior.9 Whether between society and its rejected members (or as part of the process of individuation of a single subject), the healthy body sets up borders to separate out the abject, or that which disturbs identity, system, order[and] does not respect borders, positions, rules. Bodily fluids, such as excrement or sweat, and cadavers are examples of the kinds of things that represent undesirable aspects of (or outcomes for) our physical selves, hence things that we instinctively tend to want to push away and out of site. On a broader scale, society seeks to exile to the margins its abject members, i.e., those deemed non-normativehistorically these have been minorities or the poor, relegated to the periphery and kept out of sight; criminals are pushed one step further and removed from circulation (and view) altogether. In what can be considered a reconciliatory gesture, Gomez and Gonzalez preserve the indexical marks left by prisoners on the walls of the sites of their incarceration, whether in the form of figurative drawings, verbal testaments, or the torn sheets of precious newspapers or books that represent inmates attempts to connect to the outside world; as such, the artists excavate and expose the erased lives of an abject sector of individuals removed from public space and taken out of time, a dual cancellation process that forms the subject of the artists artistic inquiry here.10 During their encounter at Holmesburg, the artists encountered extreme conditions that required them to don special suits to protect them from the poor air quality as well as lead embedded in the painted walls.11 To return to Kristeva, if abject individuals are those deemed
9

Kristeva, 2. Ibid. Although it was dangerous for the artists to work directly with these materials, the post-production fixant that they use

10

11

something in between a subject and an object, then the prisoner deemed thusthey are, after all, literally catalogued and contained as if they are things and not individualscould work to reestablish an identity as a subject, i.e., to renunciate and reject his state of abjection by markmaking. In short, enunciating words and images on the surfaces that surrounded them was a means of re-articulating their subjectivity, hence fulfilling Kristevas notion that it is through art and religion that one can overcome abjection.12 The fact that these skin-like surfaces are twodimensional translations of three-dimensional spaces thematizes aspects of the state of abjection as well. For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogenous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic.13 Gomez and Gonzalez preserve the complexity of the multiple lives and moments layered one on top of the other and compressed into the linings of these cells, carefully presenting them as such. In other words, they recognize that there is no single layer, no single moment that can encompass the entire history of a single cellin this case in use for a centuryor even of a single occupants extended experience of that cell. Rather, the surfaces that they encounter, peppered with a mixture of intact and incomplete (at times illegible) icons and graffiti, consistently obscure and expose fragment of history. In other words, what they find (and preserve) from one layer has already buried another; moreover, each layer itself is imperfect, containing marks left at different times. While the artists can see some similarities between traces, linking more than one mark or inscription to a single individual, for the most part, the signs they find remain anonymous. But rather than trying to resolve the unspoken mysteries that they uncover, the artists are faithful to that predicament and in fact underscore this historical flattening by foregrounding this condition in their installations. When exhibiting In Memory of a Place, they sewed together prints pulled from different walls and even different houses, erasing the original divisions between these spaces and reconfiguring them into a large, sculptural roll that made visible only a miniscule fraction of what it contained. And when they showed their works pulled from the site in Valencia, they installed many of the fragments in piles locked inside boxes fabricated from cell doors, allowing the viewer visual access to only the top layer, which in turn obfuscated those below it. Such a strategy reinforced the fact that even the most adept surveillance cameras generate only a glimpse of an inmate whose real story is buried far below the surface. When they displayed their works taken from Palma, they carefully folded up the resulting tapestries into nearly flat crates, again providing only a scant sampling of what was stored beneath. The connected fragments of different walls and different cells expose the compromised textures of their original cells and hallways but abstract them into quilt-like patches. For Doing Time: Depth of Surface, the artists have crumpled up a print of a single cell and thus thematized the ways in which passing time in a dark and gloomy space, behind bars and under watch is a warped experience insofar as time and space are distorted by monotony, inactivity, and solitude.
neutralizes any dangerous chemicals and hence renders the works safe for viewers. 12 Ibid., 17.
13

Ibid., 8.

But what is most striking for the viewer of works by Gomez and Gonzalez is the artists ability to translate and transport an utterly distant location into proximate and palpable objects of contemplation. They convert the impenetrable borders that formerly enveloped inmates into delicate, fragile objects to be surveyed by the viewer. The walls that witnessed and documented the objectified inmates and their activities are themselves recast as objects to be regarded, heightening the visitors sense of her own subjectivity and the privileges that affords. Moreover, their installation that combines photos of a guard seated before a logbook with a sound recording lasting several hours gives voice to the log books that recorded non-events and whose recorded words would, in most cases, never be seen are suddenly slated to be heard. With each artistic gesture, whether visual or sonic, the artists conscribes theirs viewers to bear witness to the past and the formerly invisible, echoing and underscoring earlier acts of witnessing and surveillance, transferring to the viewer the predicament of the walls and the guards. Gomez and Gonzalez re-negotiate subject-object relations through their installation practices: mural membranes go awry and the frames of surveillance are overturned as it is now the gallery that contains the traces of activities engaged to pass time and eschew boredom along with the poor conditions under which these expressions of hope, fear, and frustration were expressed. They successfully transfigure the rotting walls and abysmally dark spaces in which toilets, sinks, and beds, arguably signifiers of excrement, purification, and dreams were merely inches apart into lyrical impressions and theatrical photographs (see the process shots featuring the cells cloaked in black drapery). As Kristeva writes, [t]he abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the south-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightening an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two opposite terms.14 In bringing viewers to the edge of this oblivion through poignant prints and poetic photographic gestures, Gomez and Gonzalez deliver not only a sense of the past buried at Holmesburg but also heightened awareness of the shameful and prejudiced attitudes all too often enacted in the process of incarceration. Their elegant Works are truly a form of transubstantiation, converting prison cells into a sort of holy chapels, reminding us, as did Kristeva, that [t]he various means of purifying the abjectthe various catharsesmake up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion.15
14 15

Ibid., 8-9. Ibid., 17.