DOCTOR ZIMBARDO AND HIS EXPERIMENT

Seems like Doc40 stays about 48 hours ahead of the news media. Two days after Jett had reminded us all of the Stamford experiment with prisoners and guards, it was all over MSNBC and our local Fox News (and those were only the ones that I saw) neatly packaged, along with a up-to-the-minute sound bite of the good doctor himself, like some government spin control office had the whole thing ready to go in case the whole subject of torture became public, and the “aberration” case needed to be made. (See yesterday.)

BUT LET’S NOT FORGET...

Fox Butterfield writes in today's NY Times...

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates...The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex. The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

THE BUGGERS ARE AT IT AGAIN

Another position statement comes from the Netherlands-based Buggers, and is reproduced below. (Although I did cut a lengthy first paragraph about pulling down Saddam’s statue in Iraq, partly because I felt there’d been enough talk about Iraq this weekend, and also because it made the thing much too long.)

The use of vandalism to undermine the ideology behind official art or the media has been an effective strategy of revolutionary art in Western societies since the early 20th century. In fact, the vandalistic techniques developed by Duchamp, Picabia, Heartfield, Burroughs & Gysin, Guy Debord, the Dutch Provo movement, Destroy All Monsters, and many others, have proved
to be vital impulses to Western art, literature, music and thought. In its purest form vandalism is no more than the destruction of capital or property. But even this seemingly uncomplicated form of vandalism has led to vital and complex art, music and thought. We already mentioned Gustav Metzger's auto-destructive art in our position #1, but now also think of people as various as John Cage, Dick Raaijmakers, Iggy & The Stooges, and The MC5*. The controlled but real destruction of goods during performances refuses to represent anything else. It blows up all representation, and radically forces the spectators to face the void. Dangerous buggers! Seemingly more complex techniques of vandalism  adding something to objects, taking something from them, damaging them in various degrees, etc.  can be summarised as hostile modifications of objects, and range from the simplest drawings in school diaries to the attack on national monuments. Duchamp demonstrated in his modification of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa (using the schoolboy's technique of adding a moustache and an obscene subscript) that vandalism can give access to the unconscious, much like the Freudian joke or lapsus. Burroughs & Gysin's cut-up technique shows that hostile modification can induce paranoid lucidity and disclose covert
ideologies and connections. But the sheer impact of ridiculising, sexualising, desexualising, cursing, damaging, etc. can be effective too.

As long as its powerful and loud enough. Vandalism offers a wide range of possibilities to change the perception of reality, to expose the ideologies and mental constructions that define objects in public space (Space in its broadest sense, also including television, the internet, language and history). Anti-vandalism regulations and measures determine to a considerable extent the design, construction and choice of materials in public space. This, together with the increasing surveillance and control of public space, makes it fair to say that we live in an environment of suppressed vandalism. The suppression of vandalism is not synonymous with public order but is an important part of it. In Western capitalist societies public order mainly serves the protection of property, investments and the conservation of ideologically valuable goods. For that reason The Buggers believe that vandalism directly undermines the grip of Western capitalist industries on citizens, and that strategic use of vandalistic techniques is a powerful weapon in reclaiming public space. At present the Robert Johnson collective in Paris demonstrate that deconstructing advertisements and reclaiming public space through vandalism forces the capitalist industries to expose their repressive nature. Bugger on!

The Buggers are hosted by: Sea Urchin Editions, PO Box 25212, 3001 HE Rotterdam, The Netherlands, email: the.buggers@sea-urchin.net

* I was kinda surprised, however, at the omission of Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and The Who. I recall one of the first times I ever spoke to Pete was at a 1967 after-party for DIAS (Gustav Metzger's Destruction In Art Symposium) at which an upright piano was sacrificed.

CRYPTIQUE – M...m...m...my g...g...generation.