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‘Til We Have Faces
The Missing Peace at Butner
When a string is plucked it sounds its primary tone, which is the first thing you hear. This is the tonic note. At the same time, harmonic vibrations are set in motion, which are heard as harmonic intervals above the tonic. You have to listen closely until you hear them, ringing faintly over the tonic. The vibration made by exactly a third of the string length is the fifth note of the scale, called the dominant. This is the strongest harmonic interval, and the first one you typically hear.
Sometimes I think of The Missing Peace at Butner, North Carolina, as the dominant harmonic interval for The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama. The latter is a major exhibition that features works from 88 artists representing more than 25 countries. The works span a wide range of media, including photography, painting, textiles, animation, sculpture, video, and installation works. Sprawling in size and scope, The Missing Peace is a demanding exhibition to mount, and requires a large exhibition space. It opened in Los Angeles in 2006, and visited New York and Chicago in 2007. It travels to Tokyo in 2008, and continues its worldwide tour from there.
The Missing Peace at Butner brings this exhibition to life in a very different setting, within the walls of the federal prison complex at Butner, North Carolina. In it you can see all the elements of The Missing Peace, transposed and transformed. It is smaller, and not completely filled out, and changed: a reflection in a dimmer light. But that changed light, and the shadows it casts, reflects back onto the original, the first expression of The Missing Peace, and allows us to see into it more deeply.
Inside the walls of the prison there are many constraints and limitations. Limitations on materials: in producing the works and installing them, the curator and her assistants had to improvise with the materials to be found in the prison supply closets. Limitations on time: The exhibition lasted exactly 4 hours on the morning of May 27, 2008. Limitations of space: The entire exhibition, which typically occupies 6,000 sq. ft. of gallery space, had to be mounted in a 50 X 50 ft. square space, marked off from the prison hospital meeting room with red tape on the floor.
Constraints on the viewing experience: those inmates selected to be given access were given a fixed time period – about an hour – to view the exhibition.
This is the reality of a prison: limitations on every aspect of experience. So how could this rich, sprawling, subtle, sophisticated art exhibition be brought to life in a setting of such rigidly enforced meagerness?
The right person can do it. Someone who fully possesses and employs their own sovereign mind and vision and spirit, who deeply understands and loves art, and who is implacably committed to using those assets to bring a taste of beauty and expansion and peace to the men whose fate has brought them to live inside those walls. A magician can do it.
The magician’s name is Sue Etheridge – addressed with respect at Butner as Miss Etheridge by inmates and staff alike. She recruited her assistants from the inmate population. Together they worked for over six months to design and then to install the exhibition for that brief morning. What are some of the astonishing manifestations they conjured?
Even before entering the exhibition space, one of the first things you see are large rectangular sheets hanging around the edges of the square. The art itself hangs in front of the black sheets. This must be how they made a boundary, you think, walls to mark the space. Yes, it is that, but then when you come close you see on each one, in the lower left corner, the words
ACTUAL SIZE
in neat block letters. Then you look at the art pieces themselves: mostly they are color prints of modest dimensions. You get an intimation that the art you are focusing on has a much larger shadow – the original that you are not seeing, that is shrouded from your view.
Or put the other way, you are seeing a shadow of the original. And from the relative sizes of the two rectangles, you are made to understand the reduced dimension of that the piece you are permitted to see -- and by inference the reduced stature of the viewer.
In one corner you see a round pyramid of salt on the floor, with a depression at the top, where the water dripping from the glass beaker hanging above has dripped into the salt. You recognize the piece, Salt, Half Heard, by Dove Bradshaw. It is amazing – they have re-created it, not by showing a photograph, but by actually creating it, right there in three dimensions.
In another corner Miss Etheridge is showing a staff person how to draw out an arm’s length of golden thread for Kirsten Bahrs Janssen’s piece titled The Golden Thread. Who cares if in the original piece the thread winds around 17 spools, and really glows golden, and this piece before you has three spools and thin yellow thread. You draw close – you want to do it too!
