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The brochure from our local museum had described its new exhibit as an "installation," a term that, in our town, we usually apply to dishwashers, church officers, or, more recently, computer software. My husband declined the invitation to the opening, preferring to spend the afternoon laying bricks for a new patio, so I went alone the following Saturday to "The Waiting Room," a multimedia production by San Francisco artist Richard Kamler.
"What was it like?" my husband asked when I got home, looking up from a patch of sand he was leveling.
"Big," I said. "It took up two rooms."
In the main gallery, ten gray posters, each about 12 feet long, hung from the ceiling. They outlined an area, a placard explained, the size of the room where lawyers, spiritual advisors, and family members wait to visit inmates at California's San Quentin prison. Inside this space, two rows of empty chairs faced each other. Stenciled on the posters were instructions taken from the prison's handbook for visitors. One poster warned, for example, that visitors' hands must be visible at all times, another that bras containing wires would set off the metal detector.
Beyond this space, along one wall of the gallery, were mounted cafeteria trays, the kind with partitions. Most of the trays were empty, inscribed with the names of executed prisoners, the dates of their death, and the words, "Declined last meal." A few trays held renditions of some portion of a requested last meal—an ear of corn, a banana, a hamburger. Against the opposite wall, four video monitors played tape loops of interviews with relatives of condemned prisoners or their victims' families. Speakers concealed around the room emitted two other persistent sounds, a ticking clock and a beating heart. Every once in a while the heartbeat would speed up briefly, then stop.
"So what did you think of it?" my husband asked when I'd finished this description.
"Interesting," I shrugged, "but is it art?"
My offhand gibe concealed the bothersome questions that had beset me all the way home. These questions weren't about the aesthetic merits of the show. True, I found somewhat overblown the artist's description of his work as "very dense." (For real density, you need to visit the Texas Prison Museum in the old drugstore on the town square where you can see not only Old Sparky, the retired electric chair, but such objets d'art as photographs of Bonnie and Clyde's bullet-riddled bodies, crude weapons fashioned by ingenious prisoners from toothbrushes and spoons, and the changing fashion in convict clothing.) As for the question of artistic genre, it hardly behooved someone attending her first "installation" to challenge the typology.
Nor was I troubled by the moral issues the exhibit raised. If you live in Huntsville, a town routinely and accurately labeled by the press "the execution capital of the nation," you've already heard and wrestled with every legal, sociological, and theological argument both for and against the death penalty. That—and our profound uneasiness with our town's media persona—probably explained why so few of the hundred or so people filling the auditorium that afternoon were residents of Huntsville.
It was what had gone on in the second room of the exhibit that remained a disconcerting enigma. In the museum's auditorium the artist had designed what he described as a "social sculpture." The printed program had listed it as "A Community Conversation." Why "community?" That was where, I dis covered, the whole experience began unraveling for me.
How and under what conditions does an aggregate of individuals merit the name community? What has the word come to stand for in our collective imagination? Clearly, in any number of contexts, community has taken on a certain coloration that distinguishes it from its dark doppelganger, society, which in recent decades has come to mean some distant and impersonal power, one that exerts an almost exclusively negative influence on our lives. Society now serves as a convenient catchall culprit for our every affliction. Membership in society, like affiliation with a political party, we somehow assume to be optional for human beings.
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