November 22–28: Screening of Jonathan Borofsky and Gary Glassman, Prisoners, 1985
Stream the one-hour documentary exploring the lives of inmates in San Quentin State Prison for men and the California Institution for Women
Prisoners is a one-hour documentary exploring the lives of 32 inmates from San Quentin State Prison, the California Institution for Women, and the California Rehabilitation Center. The documentary was co-directed and produced by Jonathan Borofsky and Gary Glassman in 1985. Based on 48 hours of interviews, the work focuses on the personal lives of each prisoner before they were incarcerated, while incorporating Borofsky's dream imagery and music alongside relevant facts and statistics. The documentary was screened at the American Film Institute's 1985 National Video Festival in Los Angeles and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Centre Georges Pompidou. In April 1988, the documentary was screened at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. More than thirty years later, we are pleased to again present this continually resonant film.
Announcement card for Prisoners at Paula Cooper Gallery, 155 Wooster Street, New York, NY (April 9 – 11, 1988).
The following text about Prisoners was written by James Cuno, and was included in Gemini GEL's catalogue for Borofsky's traveling print exhibition 1986. (Cuno, then director/curator of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, currently serves as President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust.)
"Why am I doing this? Why am I going to talk to prisoners? Well, we are all learning to be free. But these are people who make our lives a lot less free. They make us lock our doors and put bars on our windows, and worry about our own safety as well as the people we love. They create fear in our lives. But I know these people are human beings - not that different than myself, and I feel for them. They have to live their lives locked up in cement boxes. What a waste of life! They couldn't have been born this way. Something has happened in their lives, in their minds. What can I learn from these people? What does it mean to be free?"
These are Borofsky’s words from a moment in Prisoners when the artist is musing to himself while driving to San Quentin State Prison. The film is the result of 48 hours of interviews conducted by Borofsky with thirty-two male and female prisoners at San Quentin State Prison, the California Institution for Women, and the California Rehabilitation Center. It is a frank and highly emotional documentary, driven by the language and expressions of its subjects who, in the style of the filmmaker, are presented without sympathy or false respect. They are simply recorded on film, and all of their complex emotions, their posturing, their fears, their sense of humor, even their pride, are presented with little apparent cinematic manipulation.
Borofsky is the interviewer in the film and is often heard and seen on camera, sitting and talking one-on-one with the prisoners in a private space, or driving to and from the prisons in his car, reflecting on what he has heard and expects to hear. In March 1988, a portion of Borofsky's interview with James Pettaway was reproduced in Artforum as part of the magazine's "artists' projects" series (AF, 1988, pp. 94-97). It represents well the character of the film: the banality of it, the way the prisoners seem so ordinary, so similar to people we all know, the way their stories are so unexceptional, their histories so common, the way they got through their days, the way they relate to each other, all so familiar to our own lives and our own conversations with our friends.
But these people are locked inside and are frequently kept separate from each other. They live in a structure that's made to inhibit and control their actions: the architecture is designed for that purpose, the daily routine reinforces it, and the authority of the system polices it. They are free only in their imagination, in the way they imagine themselves free to think. Their thoughts are their only real possessions, the things most personally theirs. And these are shared with others through the delicate and often highly nuanced medium of conversation. That the interviews on this film are so frank and honest is a testament to the trust that developed between artist and prisoner, one born from the artist's obvious sympathy with an understanding of the plights of the prisoners he interviewed.
But there is an aesthetic dimension to the film as well. It fits with Borofsky's ongoing meditation on the spirit and its relation to the material world which imprisons it. The "talking heads" nature of the film, in which we see nothing much but people's heads telling stories and contriving images in loose fitting patterns of associations, is quite like the artist's installation works. In the latter, as has often been said, one feels as if one has walked into the artist's head. And the seemingly random distribution of objects, images, and sound appear to relate to each other as they probably do in the artist's imagination: surprisingly and spontaneously, with more or less authority or presence. It is here, then, not only in the individual images that comprise the installations but in the installations themselves, that one engages the primary theme of Borofsky's art: the role of the spirit in our lives and what we do to control, imprison, and displace its positive and life-affirming effects.
These effects are expressed through alternatives. And, when it comes down to it, as the prisoner James Pettaway says during his interview, "Give me an alternative! That's the one message I would like to get across. Present some alternatives, because you're gonna pay either way it goes. You're gonna pay for either constructive things or you're gonna pay for the destructive acts - which may be directed at you." In this respect, Prisoners is a cinematic metaphor for the artist's larger aesthetic project, which explores and offers up alternatives for releasing into life the creative powers of the spirit.