Abstract
Transdisciplinary artist James Gordon Williams writes about two improvised performances on former Cook County Department of Corrections, Chicago, prison bars in an ongoing collaboration with artist Maria Gaspar. Williams reflects on the bar performances that were featured in Gaspar's 2023 installations and solo exhibitions at El Museo Del Barrio and the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, respectively. Discussing how each iteration of the bar performance evolved to include conventional instruments, he documents how his burgeoning understanding of the Ifá orisha system, abolition geography, and theories on the agency of metal helps him think through his relationship with carceral debris to create an abolitionist soundscape in real time.
We should look at more things that are nonsymmetrical in this symmetrical world that we are living in. The eyes can handle it; I don't know if the mind can.
—David Hammons, in The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons (dir. Harold Crooks, 2023)
I met Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Maria Gaspar at a March 20, 2023, dinner in preparation for her October 2023 exhibition sponsored by the Visualizing Abolition public scholarship initiative at the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences. There we exchanged ideas about a transformative collaboration where I, an artist who identifies primarily as a pianist and composer, would play—as a musical instrument—eighteen prison bars Gaspar collected from the Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois (figs. 1–3).
Prison bars enforce caging, enclosure, and dehumanization. Their traditional sonic significations connect to certain tropes in the popular imagination: the harsh thud of a closing cell door, the chaotic frenzy of human beings whose senses have been systematically altered by structurally enforced depravity, guards dragging their batons or keys across prison bars in a horizontal motion, the “dun-dun” sound of the Law & Order television series, “the most successful sound in television history,” these sounds occupy the popular imagination of the prison soundscape.1
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In the summer of 2021, while filming the demolition of Division 1 of Cook County Jail, Gaspar encountered a judge from the facility's courthouse who returned from the demolition site with a jail bar, which she described as “somewhat surreal” experience.2 After all, Cook County Jail is in the neighborhood where she grew up and where she was taken on a field trip as a child, via a “scared straight” program. Prompted by her exchange with the judge, she imagined this debris being used in art installations and exhibitions in service of her abolitionist politics. Gaspar writes, “I felt like I was handed material proof of violence, and, on the other hand, I was holding literal scrap. I was conflicted and sat with that feeling for some time. That moment led to more curiosity and conversations with friends and, eventually, I sourced some more materials which included bars and bricks.”3 Gaspar's recent installations and exhibitions focus on the complex environment of carcerality through the discards of Chicago's Cook County Department of Corrections. Emptying this carceral text of its original significations, in a Gatesian signifyin’ way, she inserts new meaning into the salvaged debris by working with musicians like me to transform these materials into instruments of social life.4
It was not immediately clear that I would be the one to perform on the prison bars, and I thought of connecting Gaspar with a more traditional percussionist. Eventually, I decided to accept this gift of interdisciplinary collaboration because, after all, I am not what would be considered a “traditional” composer. For several years, I have worked on transdisciplinary projects with artists in other mediums whose thought similarly defies established ways of knowing. Spurred by my productive encounters and relationships with artists, like Gaspar, who work in obliquely related mediums, the artist/researcher I am continuously evolving into is inspired by the possibility of unpredictable growth in other areas of creative practice. The liquidity of blackness subverts and disregards social constraints in aesthetic restrictions and prescriptions. In simpler terms, I did not need anyone's permission to play these bars because black radical aesthetics is rooted in tolerance and fortified by adaptability.
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The first part of the title of this essay was inspired by a phrase Wole Soyinka uses to describe the nature of the Ifá religion; he writes, “African deities were made of sterner, yet more malleable stuff—the principle of alloys.”5 Soyinka is describing a religion that survived in the minds, hearts, and souls of enslaved people who endured the most horrid conditions of transatlantic slavery and still brought that system into new geographies because it does not claim to know the truth, like other major religions in the world, but celebrates instead the flexibility of knowledge in a lifelong pursuit of truth.6 Similarly, the strength of black aesthetics is its malleability, much like a baobab tree with deep roots in its culture and branches that are flexible enough to ride the strong winds of inevitable change without breaking. This is why African cultural arts forms, already transdisciplinary, incorporate new cultural forms and strategies without ever losing their spiritual center: as Alessandra Raengo writes, “blackness queers, blackness mobilizes, blackness multiplies, blackness collages, blackness invents new forms of spatiality, temporality, sentience, co-existence.”7 At the outset of civilization, my ancestors laid down the spiritual template of creating utilitarian and aesthetically exciting artifacts from quotidian lived experience before genre boundaries would keep them discreetly apart. Consequently, Gaspar led the way by being the first performer on the bars, while my ontological positionality is tied to the very possibility of their reinvention.
After discussing their musical potentiality with musicians and artists, Gaspar was to first to play the collection of discarded prison bars in a maximum-security prison in Chicago for a group of students. This is how she describes the audience's response:
I . . . presented [the bars] during an artist talk at Stateville Correctional Center through an organization called the Prison and Neighborhood Arts and Education Project. I played them for a group of students, and they were somewhat astounded. They told me about the associations they have with cell bars, which connect to sounds of violence and harm; the way guards use them to afflict fear. They were surprised that the iron bars could sound beautiful. This exchange really filled me with possibility and fueled my interest in exploring the many ways (especially sonically) the bars can be . . . liberated from their previous function and power.8
The Prison Bars
Located at 2600 South California Avenue in Chicago, the Cook County Jail, which was built over a century ago, is one of the largest county jails in America. Although generations of prisoners encountered these bars, it is unlikely that any of them imagined the very bars that imprisoned them would be used in an experimental collaborative performance between a fine artist/community activist and a pianist composer.
The ninety-six-acre Cook County Jail has historically been an overcrowded and filthy place where inmates often do not get timely mental health care and where all inmates are always vulnerable to violence from other inmates.9 The jail has been successfully sued several times for conducting illegal large group strip searches of women and men and eventually was found to have ignored the Eighth Amendment (“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted”) and the Fourteenth Amendment (“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”).
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During Gaspar's videotaped tour of the Division 1 section of Cook County Jail, Commander Sheriff Cozzolino describes the building, including the cells where the former prison bars came from. With a seeming sense of pride, Cozzolino emphasizes their strength: “Each of the thirty-three tiers look exactly like this, so very sturdy bars and everything, you're never gonna build something like this . . . would be triple or quadruple the cost of a normal building, because there is so much iron and metal on the bars and everything. This building is meant to last; it's eighty-six years old and can probably last another eighty-six.”10 Later in the video another corrections officer discusses the color, recalling how prison bars were changed from blue and orange over the years to the current beige color. Explaining the change, he claims, “light colored bars might mean more depression; [the inmates] become too aggressive or they become more enlightened so now there's more depression cause now they have this good feeling and then they realize that they are in jail.”11 Delivered as anodyne explanations, these comments reveal the prominent position these bars occupy in the minds of the incarcerated and corrections officers alike, whose consciousness, identity, and regard for others is shaped by the architecture of the carceral state.
My role in the collaboration was to help Gaspar elevate this discarded debris through an improvised sounding of formerly vertical prison bars into horizontal instruments of beauty, “transforming materials that confine into materials that liberate.”12 Gaspar wanted to give voices to countless prisoners who had no voice; she wanted to examine how “these materials who were previously enacting suffering on others can now act to produce freedom through sound and vibrations. And most importantly . . . the voices of people who were locked behind those bars can be heard and felt. . . . It's always been about seeing and hearing people who have been systemically erased from society.”13
Two Performances on Bars
My performance of the bars happened in two iterations. My first “sounding” was in connection with Gaspar's installation in the exhibition Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colección14 at the El Museo Del Barrio in New York City in June 2023 (fig. 4, video 1).15 I had an additional performance on the bars at the Institute of Arts and Sciences of UC Santa Cruz, in the context of her exhibition Compositions.16
James Gordon Williams performing on prison bars in conjunction with Maria Gaspar’s exhibition Force of Things at El Museo Del Barrio, June 21, 2023.
James Gordon Williams performing on prison bars in conjunction with Maria Gaspar’s exhibition Force of Things at El Museo Del Barrio, June 21, 2023.
In the first iteration, I used all eighteen bars. I did not have much time to practice them, but I arranged them quickly in an intrinsic sonic order right before the event—that is, not in a scale that reflects the well-tempered sonic order expected in the West but in a “tonal” order that has nothing to do with common notions of aesthetic beauty. This first performance occurred on a large multipurpose table covered with a white tablecloth, elevated on a platform. It was important for Gaspar that the bars should be laid down flat, so as to not signify their original usage—which is to say that prison bars are designed to be installed vertically to prevent climbing. Initially I removed the bars that had a similar pitch because I was looking for a sound that would give me more access to chromaticism. Yet I ended up using all the bars, placing one set in a vertical position aligned with my body and another set arranged in a perpendicular fashion, which I played in a downward glissando. Given the hexagonal shape of the bars, they constantly move when struck. And since I was using brass mallets to play them, painted rust of various colors flew onto the table. Consequently, playing these bars presented a safety hazard as I was concerned that the peeling materials would fly into my eyes, nose, or mouth. Despite the challenges, I was able to make the bars ring like bells, looping rhythmic patterns that that I hoped communicated a transformative logic of liberation.
The second performance happened on October 7, 2023, at the Institute of Arts and Sciences (IAS) at UC Santa Cruz, immediately after Gaspar's artist talk on her solo exhibition Compositions (fig. 5). This second iteration evolved into a more sophisticated and meaningful performance by including conventional instruments into the soundscape, such as a snare drum and cymbal, to expand the range of percussive timbres, therefore moving the bars further away from their original significations of tools of incarceration. The platform for this bar performance was invented by IAS Head of Exhibitions Louise Leong, in consultation with Gaspar and me. A butcher block was bought and cut to a size big enough to hold the bars while providing room for me to have the snare drum on the right side and the cymbal on the other. A white keyboard stand held up the butcher block. Working with architect and scholar Alexander Eisenschmidt and incorporating my feedback after the first performance, Gaspar devised a system where foam pieces would be measured and cut to hold the bars in place. Gaspar writes, “I tested it out with different materials, and it was really in response to your playing and seeing how those bars were impacted by the mallets. [I realized that] stabilizing them with a material that wouldn't make the bars bounce was key.”17
I planned the performance in three stages. In the first stage, I called on the spirit of the African deity Ogun by beginning with a recording of saxophonist John Coltrane's Ogunde.18 The metallic sounds of Coltrane's ancestral spirit offered a sonic prayer that transformed the institutional space into Ogun's temple. While Ogunde was playing, I spit aged Guyanese rum on the bars as an offering to Ogun and to consecrate them to the ruler of all things iron (figs. 6 and 7, video 2). My performance was an extension of deep research into the Orisha systems and the mentorship of New Orleans–based percussionist Bill Summers, who advised me on the Ifá divination system and ways of consecrating these former prison bars in the spirit of Ogun.19
James Gordon Williams performing on prison bars in conjunction with Maria Gaspar’s exhibition Compositions at the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, September 6, 2023.
James Gordon Williams performing on prison bars in conjunction with Maria Gaspar’s exhibition Compositions at the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, September 6, 2023.
I began stage 2 of the performance with small, improvised motivic loops on two bars that gradually spread across the other bars. This rhythmic motif helped me relax into the performance and helped the audience get used to the various bar timbres as I gradually added different bar pitches. During this stage, I introduced the snare drum and cymbal into the bar soundscape for improvised colorations and punctuations to longer phrases. Adding those conventional instruments to the soundscape allowed me to reframe the conventional instruments into the prison barscape as opposed to welcoming the bars into a conventional soundscape.
Since my performance of the bars was about elevating them to a different purpose, stage 3 of the performance included my playing along to a recorded track of “Elevate,” by the group Forward Back. Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us that abolition geography is the work of imagining free spaces against the structural and systemic mechanisms of racial capitalism.20 I think about my bar performances as a way of sounding an abolition geography, a kind of worldmaking through improvised place-making that animates visions of a different world. Place-making is both a formal process and an improvisation.21
“Elevate” is a composition about lifting the community with positivity. The lyrics, for example, state, “We at the party Guemilere / We Elevate / We Elevate / Y'all Elevate / Y'all elevate.” In the song, Summers explains the word Guemilere, reciting: “All the party, the entire universe was represented at that particular party; the moon and the river and the ocean and the sky and Guemilere, there it is.” I played the rhythms along with the singers rhythmically chanting the names of orishas during the song, “Oshun—Shango—Obatala—Ogun—Yemaya—Elegua”; I made the bars sing in unison with the chanting of the orishas, as I followed Summers's drumming on the track. Summers, who is an Olubata, or guardian of the sacred batá, played the batá drums leading the orisha chants.22 The batá drums are a family of three drums with specific roles, so Summers recorded each part separately for the track. The iyá, or mother drum, is the largest; the midsized itólele is known as the father; and the okónkolo drum is considered the child drum, also known as the “toy of the gods.”23 Summers's drumming represents not only a more than fifty-year-long study of the sacred batá but also his deeper commitment to restoring his community through education about their culture.24
Summers argues that if black men had a deep knowledge of African familial systems represented by the Batá drum family—which includes lessons of personal responsibility, respect for elders, and especially matriarchal authority—“they would have had a greater chance of avoiding prison.”25 Yet Summers's critique does not consider that the legal system couldn't care less about the individual's lack of equal access to housing, health care, and an equally robust educational system on par with communities who have a higher tax base to make public schools private.26 From an Abolition Democracy framework, Angela Y. Davis argues that “the law does not care about the conditions that lead some communities along a trajectory that makes prison inevitable. Even though each individual has on paper the right to due process, what is called the blindness of justice enables under-lying racism and class bias to resolve the question of who gets to go to prison and who does not.”27
Summers's message of how the Orisha system and the sacred drum provide healing properties and a curriculum of personal transformation is also represented in the following lyrics, largely penned by rapper Reggie Stephens: “Dance to the Anya with rhythms where I from / Africa you come alive from the drum / The whole world come alive from the drum.” This music perfectly fit the project of elevating the bars into an enduring sphere of positivity.28
A colleague of mine who attended the UC Santa Cruz IAS performance gives insight to how it was received, documenting the emotional topography of the audience I was unaware of while in the zone of performance:
I appreciated your connection with Yoruba. . . . The iron of the rust belt, the labor of blacks and discrimination of blacks witnessing their labor as borders, chains, and locks from freedom. . . . I was emotionally moved, close to tears once you zoned everyone in. And then the performance was just beyond my emotional capacity. I looked around and there were audience members also wiping their tears. I say this because the camera recording you may not have witnessed [shown] that.29
These conscientious and sensitive comments show how they connected my performance on the bars with enslavement and antiblackness relative to their experience of the Rust Belt. At the point of performance, I practice emptying myself to be in the moment so the sonic text can live and pulse uninhibited, and only retroactively can I draw some kind of knowledge from the various iterations. Thus, I prefer to think of my percussive offering as a temporary cognitive intervention; echoing artist David Hammonds, a nonsymmetrical act in a grossly symmetrical world.30
Echoing Raymond Williams, Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes the Black Radical tradition as an ongoing process of structuring feelings that gravitates toward liberation and manifests in the continual interactions with the ancestors who inspire a kind of liberatory space-making rooted in lived experience.31 And I do believe that this repository of mysterious ancestral knowledge will continue to be a great source of creative imagination, ad infinitum. And while cataloging a musical aesthetics of abolition might be an attractive idea to some, I know that the soundscape of abolition geography straddles across centuries of everyday performances in the streets, houses, invisible churches, in the recesses of one's mind. The worldmaking aura of sonic blackness is fluid and defies definition.
Liquid Ogun in My Blood
The Yoruba orisha Ogun became an intoning framework for my second performance on the bars.32 Ogun's aspects include not only a warlike destroyer but also a creator. He is a deity that represents human industry and building. He taught humanity how to create fire, forge iron, and therefore build societies. He is a spirit identified with transformation and the ability to survive adversity, surpassing social constraints. Ogun is the sign of personal reinvention through the self-imposed isolation necessary for devoting oneself completely to creation. During this cycle of destruction and creativity, one gains the ability to destroy what is known in order to create a new permutation of what has yet to be.
We all have iron in our blood, the same substance used to imprison human beings. The atoms in metal are always in the process of recombination and recomposition, but perhaps, as the internal properties of the metallic shards bang up against each other in these former prison bars, they are also remixing among their own crevices, compressed into an illusion of penal infrangibility. In this second performance, I thought of myself not as an artist but as an iron worker performing a sonic feedback loop in concert with the already ongoing internal metallic feedback loop, or “feedback spirals,” occurring ad infinitum in the bars.33 Through my “musical” manipulation of this unconventional sonic instrument it is possible that this experiment continues without end. More than a public performance by a “free” black man redefining these former tools of incarceration and imposing my will upon them in a performance, I am perhaps becoming alloyed with the bars via the spirit of Ogun. The same quivering that happens within the internal liquid elements of the bars is happening on a different level within my body. The feedback loop between the internal elements of the metal structure is in concert with the internal feedback loop within me. I am not only playing the bars; the bars are playing me. We are not accompanying each other but are collective soloists on an equal level, recognizing the life inherent in each of our liquid bodies. As I think about this performed duo between our shared atomic structure, the bars sheathed in the flesh of metal and I sheathed in human flesh, I think about the impossibility of full imprisonment of incarcerated who are linked atomically with the materials meant to cage them. To the incarcerated, this might be seen as a romantic notion. Yet it might be a way toward finding mental refuge in a space of unfreedom.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank artist Maria Gaspar for allowing me to collaborate with her interdisciplinary abolitionist art.
Notes
Maria Gaspar, interview by the author, October 15, 2023.
Gaspar, interview by the author, October 15, 2023.
Gaspar, interview by the author, October 15, 2023.
Gaspar, “96 Acres,” private research video, 2014.
Gaspar, “96 Acres,” private research video, 2014.
Gaspar, interview by the author, October 15, 2023.
Gaspar and Williams, “Force of Things.”
Instagram communication with Maria Gaspar, October 20, 2023.
Ogunde is another name for Ogun.
My relationship with Bill Summers grew from him personally handing me a vinyl record of his band Forward Back's Volume 1 (2022) in New Orleans during an academic conference. I had been listening to this music for several months, especially the tracks “Elevate,” “Planets,” and “Doors.”
Forward Back, Volume 1. Track 2, “Elevate,” 0:57, 1:55, 2:05, 2:33.
Phone conversation with Bill Summers, October 22, 2023.
Summers has argued, “Young Black men who are now in prison may not be there today if I could have shown them the message behind these drums. The message explains family structure while stressing that you are responsible for your actions. You also must show a degree of respect. Seniority is very important in learning these drums as well” (Summers and Shepherd, “Traveling the Universe”).This echoes what the late Randy Weston stated about teaching black people the beauty of their culture. See Williams, “ ‘Root of All of This Music.’ ”
See Davis, Abolition Democracy, 94. See also Kozol, Savage Inequalities; and Alexander, New Jim Crow.
Though Gaspar and I never had a conversation about what performing the bars should mean before the performances, I instinctively understood what she meant to do with them.
Email communication from a colleague who attended the performance, October 7, 2023.
See the film, The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art and times of David Hammons, (Harold Crooks, 2023).