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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019 | 15
culture
Two men sit across the table in a barren
visiting room. One is straight-backed
and impassive, the other slumped and
absent. A third man comes in, raises the
slouching one up, places the pair’s
hands into a clasp and angles their
heads so they look at each other. Then he
gently moves away.
Elsewhere, a group watches, from a
short distance, someone sleeping on a
narrow cot. People stare into peeling
walls or out grimy windows. Figures
come together tableau-like, as in silent
chorus, and hold their pose.
Gestures do the talking in “Mirror/
Echo/Tilt,” the video installation that
the filmmaker Melanie Crean, the visual
artist Sable Elyse Smith and the per-
formance artist Shaun Leonardo have
on view through Oct. 6 at the New Mu-
seum in New York — an unusually inti-
mate meeting of art, education and so-
cial action.
Majestic and eerie, the 18-minute vid-
eo features 22 participants in white
Tyvek jumpsuits and, for some, carni-
val-like masks adorned with mirrored
tiles. They enact scenes derived from
their experiences with the police, courts
or jail, conveyed in a silent theatrical
language in which emotions hold sway.
Smaller screens around the gallery
confront visitors with outtakes of this
material. A resource room has a semi-
nar table and a small library of books —
mostly on incarceration, as well as
Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Joseph
Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand
Faces,” and “Don Quixote.”
And beyond the museum, the artists
have used the methods honed in the per-
formance project to design a diversion
program — an alternative to jail time
that young people facing misdemeanor
charges in Brooklyn Criminal Court can
complete to have their record sealed.
“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” joins a wave of art
contending with the 2.2 million adults in
America’s prisons and jails. In 2016, An-
drea Fraser wired the empty fifth floor
of the Whitney Museum with speakers
that played ambient sound recorded at
prisons. In recent months, Cameron
Rowland’s project “D37,” at MOCA Los
Angeles, laid out objects in a room that
connected chattel slavery with today’s
police practice of asset forfeiture; “The
Pencil Is the Key,” this fall at the Draw-
ing Center in New York, will gather
works by artists around the world who
were once prisoners.
“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” has its roots in a
literary epiphany. In the summer of
2014, when Michael Brown died at the
hands of a police officer in Ferguson,
Mo. — three weeks after Eric Garner
met a similar fate on Staten Island in
New York — Ms. Crean was reading
“Don Quixote.”
In the furor over Mr. Brown’s depic-
tion in the news media — including a
New York Times profile that labeled the
unarmed teenager “no angel” — Ms.
Crean, who teaches at Parsons School of
Design in New York, heard a resonance
of Cervantes’s classic novel and its ab-
surdist plot. In the second half of the
two-part epic, the characters Quixote
encounters have read the first volume,
along with a bogus “sequel,” and they
judge him on that basis.
“The character was defamed as being
crazy,” Ms. Crean said. “Don Quixote
would show up in a town, his reputation
would precede him, and he would have
to confront it.”
The lesson: Society describes us in
roles that can overwhelm us even when
we struggle to break free. The stakes are
especially high for people in the grip of
the justice system, and areas subject to
surveillance and overpolicing.
“Mass incarceration is a type of per-
formance,” Ms. Smith said. “There’s
posturing, there’s labeling, all this the-
atricality, in the way that people either
label demographics or play out the the-
ater of oppression.”
The three artists in “Mirror/Echo/
Tilt” brought together deep, if unortho-
dox, expertise. Ms. Crean’s past projects
have built on social practice work with
various groups in the city, for instance
with spoken-word artists in the borough
of the Bronx or young Muslim women in
the area of Queens.
The fast-rising Ms. Smith — she was a
2018-19 artist in residence at the Studio
Museum in Harlem — mixes film, text
and sculptural installation in her art, but
has kept her focus on incarceration.
Mr. Leonardo explores race, gender
and power through performance. In
2015, he developed “I Can’t Breathe,” a
hybrid performance and self-defense
class where participants learned the
chokehold used on Eric Garner — and
how hard it is to defend against.
“I was interested in the principles of
embodied performance,” Mr. Leonardo
said of taking part in “Mirror/Echo/
Tilt.” “How we can take information that
would otherwise simply live in our
minds and dislodge it and move it some-
where else.”
Creating “Mirror/Echo/Tilt” was a
gradual process. For several months in
2015, the three held weekly sessions
with young people at a Bronx nonprofit,
the Point. The next year, assisted by one
of the Bronx participants, DeVante Lew-
is, they worked with a group returning
from incarceration through the re-entry
support organization Fortune Society.
The beginning was loose — conversa-
tion, developing comfort with one an-
other, sharing meals. Eventually a
method emerged, as they considered
emotions raised by incarceration.
The decision to go wordless in “Mir-
ror/Echo/Tilt” followed naturally. “Af-
ter just existing together, with personal
narratives emerging, in order to orga-
nize ourselves around these stories we
actually had to remove language,” Mr.
Leonardo said.
The locales where they filmed are
pungent with history: They include the
long-abandoned Bronx borough court-
house; the former Fulton Correctional
Facility, also in the Bronx, a minimum-
security prison closed in 2011; a long-
sealed theater in the former Bellevue
Psychiatric Hospital, now a city home-
less shelter and intake center.
The buildings, like the performers, ex-
press a kind of identity in flux — edifices
emerging from carceral or related uses,
if not yet stably dedicated to something
else.
Four years in the making, “Mirror/
Echo/Tilt” is complete as an art project,
in the sense that it has produced a mu-
seum show. Outside, however, the work
has only begun. Since late 2016, the
three collaborators have worked with
the artists’ nonprofit Recess and its
partner, Brooklyn Justice Initiatives, on
a diversion program for “court-in-
volved” youth.
They have trained facilitators and
written a curriculum that others can
adapt. “Having an open-source recepta-
cle for this information became a goal,”
Ms. Smith said.
Mr. Lewis, the participant from the
Point who stayed for the rest of the
project, shared that he grew up with
family members “constantly going back
and forth between prison and home” —
experiences that he avoided scrutiniz-
ing or talking about.
He had a background in acting, but
this wordless method unlocked some-
thing new, he said. “It allowed me to
present my full self, I guess.” He added:
“The best thing I could take away from it
is that the body remembers.”
Now working full time for an alterna-
tives-to-incarceration program, Mr.
Lewis is turning his attention to the im-
pact of the court and prison system on
young women — the gender roles and
the demands on their emotional labor —
and plans to work toward a syllabus.
“Mirror/Echo/Tilt” has taken shape
in an ambiguous time. High-profile
deaths of American black men after en-
counters with the police, which first
prompted the project, have hardly
abated. Yet alternative justice programs
are spreading, reformers have won elec-
tion in some cities as district attorneys,
and prison abolition is no longer
laughed away.
Ms. Crean cast the collaboration as a
work not of protest, but rather of imagi-
nation.
“If there is a problem — a system —
and one has to demonstrate how an-
other way of being is possible, that’s
what artists and educators can do,” she
said.
The piece, she said, was at once art,
education, a social intervention. “It can
be accessed from any of those points,”
she said. “But for us, it’s all of those
things.”
From left, the artists Melanie Crean, Sable Elyse Smith and Shaun Leonardo; a photograph taken during the video shoot of their collaboration, “Mirror/Echo/Tilt”; and a production still from the video itself. Below, another image from the shoot.
LELANIE FOSTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES MELANIE CREAN, SHAUN LEONARDO, SABLE ELYSE SMITH MELANIE CREAN, SHAUN LEONARDO, SABLE ELYSE SMITH
Speaking loudly silently
Artists confront the culture
of imprisonment with a
wordless video installation
BY SIDDHARTHA MITTER
MELANIE CREAN, SHAUN LEONARDO, SABLE ELYSE SMITH
“Mass incarceration is a type of
performance. There’s posturing,
there’s labeling, all this
theatricality.”
On April 13, 1919, a column of British
troops marched into the Jallianwala
Bagh, a public garden in Amritsar, a
city in the Indian state of Punjab,
where more than 15,000 people had
gathered for a peaceful protest against
the increasingly restrictive policies of
the British government, and in particu-
lar the deportation of two followers of
Gandhi. At the orders of Brig. Gen.
Reginald Dyer, the soldiers began
firing into the crowd without warning.
When screaming men, women and
children rushed toward the exits, Dyer
ordered his troops to aim at them.
Many who were attempting to climb
over the high perimeter wall were
gunned down, their bloodied bodies
falling in heaps. The firing went on for
10 minutes, killing an estimated 500 to
600 people and wounding many more.
While Dyer was the one to order the
killings, another man was also respon-
sible for the massacre: Michael
O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of
Punjab, who justified the carnage and
defended Dyer’s actions. At the core of
Anita Anand’s “The Patient Assassin”
is the story of Udham Singh, an Indian
who sought to avenge the murders of
his countrymen by shooting O’Dwyer
to death in London in March 1940. In
recounting the lives of these three
main characters — Singh, O’Dwyer
and Dyer — Anand, a British-Indian
biographer and broadcast journalist,
provides a revealing look at the brutal-
ity and oppression of British rule, and
how it seeded the desire for retribution
in the hearts of so many Indians.
Anand’s account of the movement for
Indian independence draws a contrast
between the extremist path chosen by
Singh and the nonviolent struggle led
by Gandhi, posing a question that
hangs over the book without being
asked explicitly: When is violence
morally legitimate in a people’s fight
against a tyrannical regime?
Born into a low-caste Hindu family
in 1899, Singh had lost both his parents
by the time he was 7 and was subse-
quently raised in a Sikh orphanage in
Amritsar. When he was 18, he enlisted
in the British Army, serving as a car-
penter in Mesopotamia during World
War I before returning to Punjab in
early 1919. Whether he was in Jallian-
wala Bagh to witness the massacre is
not known, but Anand says it is possi-
ble that “he knew some of the dead
intimately and cared for them deeply,”
which inspired his transformation into
a radical. Moving to East Africa for a
job with the Uganda Railway, Singh
became associated with the Ghadars,
an organization of Indian revolutionar-
ies that had been founded in San Fran-
cisco. He later traveled to the United
States, serving briefly as a driver for
the group before working in other jobs
and marrying a Mexican woman.
Upon his return to India in 1927,
Singh was jailed for five years for
having smuggled several guns into the
country. In 1934, he moved to London,
where he supported himself by selling
hosiery and other goods for much of
the next six years — until the fateful
day when he took O’Dwyer’s life at a
public lecture.
Anand does a stellar job of sketching
Singh’s trajectory from orphanage to
hangman’s noose, and from obscurity
into the pantheon of Indian heroes. But
the lack of available details about his
activities, including the precise nature
of his relationship with the Ghadars,
forces her to tell the story at a remove
that at times feels unsatisfying. In
contrast, the book offers a crisp por-
trait of O’Dwyer, providing a clear
sense of the attitudes he shared with
his fellow administrators in the Raj. In
their eyes, Anand writes, “Indian men,
women and children were lesser hu-
mans.”
Singh’s character and motivations,
on the other hand, are rendered in
such broad and sometimes speculative
brush strokes that readers are likely to
be left wondering what really drove
him. Yet the book more than makes up
for this shortcoming by reconstructing
its key events in compelling, vivid
prose.
Gandhi denounced O’Dwyer’s assas-
sination as an act of insanity. To most
Indians, however, it was an act of
justice, especially because, unlike
Dyer, O’Dwyer had never shown any
remorse. Someone had to do it, even if
it took more than 20 years. The British
Empire delivered its own justice to
Singh a lot more quickly. He was exe-
cuted on July 31, 1940, four months
after he killed O’Dwyer.
Payback for a brutal massacre
BOOK REVIEW
The Patient Assassin:
A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge,
and India’s Quest for Independence
By Anita Anand. Illustrated. 374 pp.
Scribner. $30.
BY YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a contributing
writer at National Geographic, is the
author of “The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell.”
Garlanding a statue of Udham Singh in Amritsar, India.
NARINDER NANU/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
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