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Within
Walls and Memories: Dimensions of Detention
June 10, 2002
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
When
Jenny Polak began working on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan in
1996, she was unaware that the nondescript building across the street
from her new job was a detention center for the United States Immigration
and Naturalization Service. She soon noticed that this was no ordinary
office. For instance, when going out for lunch, she said, "you would
sometimes bump into a shackled guy being pulled along."
Ms.
Polak, a British artist living in New York, became so curious about
what lay behind those walls that, through contacts at immigrant-rights
groups, she solicited drawings of that building, the Varick Service
Processing Center, and other I.N.S. detention sites. Because these
centers often prohibit the taking of photographs, their interiors
are rarely glimpsed by the public.
The
rough sketches of floor plans she received, made by detained immigrants
and their visitors, were the starting point for "Hard Place," an
unsettling new digital-art project created by Ms. Polak during an
artist residency at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The artwork
can be viewed on the museum's Internet site, at tenement.org/HardPlace.
Disturbed
by what she perceived as harsh conditions, Ms. Polak set out to
share her discoveries on the Internet. But rather than make a Web-based
documentary project like 360degrees.org, which realistically depicts
prison cells and other environments in the criminal-justice system,
she decided to develop an online artwork that would better advance
her political agenda.
The
first drawing of the inside of a detention center arrived anonymously
by fax in 2000. Others were delivered personally, on crumpled scraps
of paper that had been passed from hand to hand. Working from these
crude blueprints, Ms. Polak used an architectural software program
to create virtual versions of 10 detention centers, including three
in the New York region.
As
depicted, they are windowless warrens of cramped cells, claustrophobic
corridors and drab common areas. For the most part they are shown
without human figures.
In
an interview Ms. Polak was quick to note that, given her source
material and the restricted access to the detention centers, she
cannot verify the authenticity of her 3-D renderings. Nor is accuracy
necessarily her aim. Instead, she said, she is straddling "a fine
line between actually presenting plans of these places for everyone
to see and saying it's people's memories, it's a reconstruction
of a nightmare."
Yet
the renderings are accompanied by documentary materials that are
clearly meant to convey why detention sites have raised concerns
among human-rights groups. They complain that detained immigrants
are deprived of their civil rights and subjected to unpleasant conditions.
(Immigration officials in New York and Washington did not return
calls for comment, and the man who answered the phone at the Varick
Street center would not say if it was still being used for detainment.)
At
"Hard Place," clicking on a keyhole icon, for instance, gives access
to pages of detention-center rules and other prisonlike procedures.
One detainee sent a sketch of handcuffed wrists raised in prayer.
There are poignant audio clips, one from another detainee who said:
"I'm not a criminal. I didn't do anything wrong. Why am I here?
For what?"
Although
Ms. Polak acquired drawings of only 10 sites, it took her more than
a year to collect them. One of her methods was to ask immigrant-rights
groups to send e-mail solicitations to the families of detainees.
The mother of a detainee in Louisiana passed the message to her
son, who then mailed a package of drawings and documents to Ms.
Polak. In other cases detainees' lawyers would slip sketches to
Ms. Polak after a court hearing. But, she said, "mostly I was told
that people wouldn't be able to make these kinds of drawings with
impunity."
As
one peers through successive keyholes, a grim reality emerges. Nina
Felshin, a curator at Wesleyan University, said, "The layered way
in which her Web site reveals information operates as a kind of
structural metaphor for the layers of secrecy that prevail within
the executive branch of the U.S. government."
Ms.
Polak, 44, is a London native who came to the United States in 1990
to study at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. She campaigned
against 1996 immigration laws that led to the detention of hundreds
of foreigners. "Hard Place" was conceived in part as a reaction
against that. "People should know what it will mean for their neighbors
if they are picked up by the I.N.S.," she said, "It should not be
sugared."
But
the points that "Hard Place" was intended to make were not as likely
to be accepted after Sept. 11 and the adoption of broader government
powers to detain foreigners in the interest of national security.
Ms. Polak's four-month Tenement Museum residency began in October,
when public opinion had become decidedly more defensive about foreigners.
She
remained undeterred. She said: "People got more scared. I got a
bit more scared myself. But it became even more pressing to get
information out as people were being herded away at such a rate."
She and her Web designer, Lauren Gill, plunged ahead.
Jeff
Tancil, who runs the museum's artist-residency program, acknowledged
that the artwork was critical of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service and its treatment of foreigners. But so far the work "hasn't
generated any controversy," he said. While that lack of controversy
isn't disappointing, he said, "given the reactions to Sept. 11,
it's a little surprising."
Regardless
of how one responds to the work's politics, Ms. Polak has cleverly
appropriated computer-aided design software for her own ends. Typically,
such programs are used to design glittering new buildings, and much
has been made of how these software tools have liberated architects
from rectilinear shapes. Historians also use the programs to reconstruct
virtual versions of ancient cities. For "Hard Place" Ms. Polak,
who was trained as an architect and now works as a graphic artist,
did nothing more than use the software to put her bleak houses in
order.
Her
approach is reminiscent of another online art site dealing with
detainment. In March the Library of Congress put 200 Ansel Adams
photographs on the American Memory section of its Web site: memory.loc
.gov/ammem/aamhtml. The images were taken in 1943 at the Manzanar
War Relocation Center for Japanese-Americans.
Unlike
Adams's landscape photographs, which are imbued with a divine light,
these images are closer to snapshots. Verna Curtis, the library's
curator of photography, said Adams donated the photographs in 1963
without restrictions as to how they could be used, to make sure
that the internment camps were not forgotten. "This was a matter
of conscience," she said.
With
"Hard Place" Ms. Polak seems to have a similar motive. She said:
"It makes a lot of difference if the ordinary person, whose neighbor
is of Muslim or Arab origin, can see the netherworld that those
people might be threatened with. The whole business of `we're so
frightened of everybody' just has to be laid to rest."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/arts/design/10ARTS.html?ex=1024814879&ei=1&en=50387458a091c4d8
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