2 November/3 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 15
Arts
W
hen you have no power,
no rights, no privacy,
and no control — when
your humanity is denied
and your liberty revoked
— creativity can still save you. That is
the radical message ofThe Pencil is a Key,
a potent and timely exhibition at the
Drawing Center in New York. The show
gathers 200 years’ worth of images by
penal and political prisoners, as well as
people incarcerated because of their
race, religion ormental state. As Milton
declared,“the mind is its own place, and
in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a
Hell of Heaven”. The pencil can be a tool
in this act of self-creation. Drawing
unlocks the brain’s shackles, empower-
ing the passive prisoner with private
forms of dignity and escape.
The show opens with Hubert Robert’s
self-portrait in the Saint-Lazare prison,
which enchants despite the dire circum-
stances of its creation. Before his arrest
in 1793, Robert had conjured fantastical
landscapeswith fairy-like represent-
atives of ancient civilisations. Louis XVI
found pleasure inthem, showering him
with honours that latergot him in trou-
ble with the architects of revolution.The mind unlocked
Prison art A New York exhibition|
celebrates the power of the pencil —
and creativity in even the bleakest
of circumstances. ByAriella Budick
Main picture:
untitled drawing
of a golf course
by Valentino
Dixon
Courtesy the artist and
Andrew Edlin Gallery
Below: Hubert
Robert’s self-
portrait as an
inmate at Saint-
Lazare prison
(1794)
that combination of overload and
deprivation, blotting reality out with
squares of luminous beauty. Mahmoud
Mohame d Abd El Aziz (Yassin
Mohamed) reproduced the bleakness of
an Egyptian prison, but also festooned it
with lush tangles of vegetation.
Detained at 18 in2013 for attending a
protest, he spent five yearsdemonstrat-
ing, getting arrested and waiting to be
releasedto start the cycle again. He
injected life into his bleak surroundings.
A slender green vine sprouting purple
blossoms climbs up the wall of a black-
and-white cell; flowers spring from pris-
oners’ necks where their heads should
be. Nature offers solace, resilience and a
bracing lack of sentimentality.
Every authoritarian regime breeds its
own form of artistic resistance, and in
this sense the regime of Chile’s AugustoPinochet was especially fertile. After the
1973 coup, the military commandeered
Santiago’s main stadium as a torture
centre; among its inmates was Adam
Policzer, a Hungarian Jew who had sur-
vived the Holocaust as a child. In this
new nightmare, Policzer sustained him-
self with memories of ordinary life,
summoning a neighbour’s friendly mutt
for a poignant portrait.
Miguel Lawner Steiman, too, used art
to stay connected to his world while con-
fined to a prison camp on Dawson Island
off thecoast of Chile. “Nothing Can Sep-
arate Us”, a pictorial love letter to his
wife, depicts a faceless couple in a thick
wood, hemmed in bybranches. “Many
Augusts will come and we will always be
together,” he writes. “Life will triumph. I
love you. Miguel.” Even as he kept one
eye on the past, with its echoes of beauty
and hope, Lawner Steiman was reserv-p
ing his experiences for a future he was
sure would arrive. Turning art into evi-
dence, he kept a meticulous ecord of r
the camp’s layout and its various struc-
turesthat hememorised and destroyed.Many captives are driven y the urgeb
to reveal what their oppressors try to
hide. Halina Olomucki, who was
trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto and later
sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, transcribed
the pain around her. She smuggled her
pictures out of the ghetto, andhid others
in thebarracks’ wooden planks. Both
Olomucki and her images survived, tes-
tifying to all that she and her fellow Jews
endured. Alexander Bogen, imprisoned
in the Vilna Ghetto,created a Goya-
esque sketch of a heavyset soldier bear-
ing down on hisquarrythat captures
sadism in a few spare strokes.
Not everyone here is a blameless vic-
tim ofauthoritarian caprice, but the
curators are not especially interested in
their transgressions. This is not a show
about the creative spark that lies within
the most monstrous among us. Instead,
it celebrates art’s steeliness, its ability to
resist the harshest circumstances, enno-
blesoul-crushing environments and
crack open a space for freedom.To January 5, drawingcenter.orgDrawing unlocks the brain’s
shackles, empowering the
prisoner with private formsof dignity and escape
he didn’t commit, it became a tool of jus-
tice. He took up drawing as a way to
cope with the tedium of captivity in the
notorious Attica Correctional Facility,
where the superintendent requested a
picture of the 12th hole at the Augusta
National Golf Club. Dixon had never set
foot on a golf course but, staring at a
photograph, he found a kind of salv-
ation in the manicured landscape and
seas of incandescent green.
“Something about the grass and sky
was rejuvenating,” Dixon told Golf Digest
magazine. “After 19 years in Attica, the
look of a golf hole spoke to me. It seemed
peaceful. I imagine playing it would be a
lot like fishing.” The publicity led eor-G
getown undergrads to take up his case.In
2018 his conviction was overturned.
Prison is ugly, aggressive and loud.
Some inmates use art as a shield againstRobert depicts himself hunched over
a desk, filling his time with work. Day-
light cascades through a large window,
haloing his silvery head and giving the
room a sublime glow, like the revelatory
beam in an annunciation. The cell is
austere but cosy: a pallet with a blue
counterpane and a few unfilled shelves.
A black three-cornered hat with the tri-
colour cockade hangson the bare stone
wall. Was Robert trying to claimpoliti-
cal purity? In 1794 he sent a letter to the
National Convention, offering two
sketches of revolutionary scenesfor his
freedom. The gambit suggests that with
this self-portrait, too, he hopedto ingra-
tiate himself with his jailers.
Art in confinement has always oper-
ated as a form of currency or an instru-
ment of persuasion. For Valentino
Dixon, who served 27 years for a murderNOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201931/ - 17:05 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD15, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 15, 1