Presented with the concept of humans in cages in a gritty warehouse gallery deep in West Oakland I must admit I was a bit dismissive. I received an email calling for participants to live in these cages for a week and forwarded it to a friend who is looking for a new apartment as a joke. The project has been done. The media however is site specific installation art.
In 1974 Joseph Beuys lived with a coyote for 5 days at the René Block Gallery in New York for a performance action titled Coyote, “I Like America and America Likes Me”. It seemed a late Vietnam war comment on imprisonment of native cultures by official agenda. The recent, ultra-publicized enclosure of David Blain hanging in a plexiglass box over the Thames in London for his 2003 stunt, Above the Below was meant to be a feat of public human endurance (though I doubt this will become an Olympic event any time soon). The medium of encasing people on public display in gallerys is not new, in circus it is one of the main events. As it was last night at LoBot and as it is every night on the evening news.
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Red and black shacks behind
audience are human cages.
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Its hard to watch the television without seeing a picture of a prisoner. The latest flood of prison images from Guantanamo Bay with orange jumpsuits and bags over the heads was a great spectacle. Even better the cell phone images of Iraqi prisioners positioned by their vaudvillian M.C.s at Abu Ghraib. So why do I need to see prisoners in cages in a gallery?
Each participant keeps a daily log of their experience. A zookeeper let's them out for 3-5 minute breaks to releive themselves. Food is delivered to the cage. They are within shouting distance from eachother. There is priviledge - some have laptops in their cages - a questional bit of contraband, since phones are not allowed, but the zookeeper couldn't pull the meat from the tiger. A breakout had already occured as of 3 days into the event.
In the grassroots Oakland art scene, LoBot is making big noise. The location is a desolate community of art warehouses in West Oakland behind the old train station. There will always be detractors when a art crosses familiar paths but the Human Zoo brings something unique to the contemporary bay area community. Humanity in captivity for folks who don't live in a culture with a large imprisoned population. Perhaps we need to organize school field trips to maximum security prisons and give the residents the mic.