The Art of Capital Punishment
BY PATRICK TIMMONS
Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment, Recent Works by Malaquias Montoya Dougherty Arts Center, Austin, January 5–30 Instituto Mexicano, San Antonio, February 17–28
’ve
always been against the death penalty,” says Malaquias Montoya. “I’ve
just never been an activist.”
Perhaps not an anti-death penalty activist, but Montoya, who teaches at the
University of California-Davis, has long been considered a leading figure in
social protest art. He is best known for public murals, silkscreen images, and
offset lithograph posters decrying a trio of global evils: imperialism, racism,
and sexism. Recently he came to Austin to introduce his latest work, which focuses
on capital punishment. As he explains, during the 2000 presidential election
he became aware of Texas’ high execution rate under then-Governor Bush
and was inspired to illustrate his feelings about what he refers to as “state-sanctioned
killings.”
Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment, Recent Works by Malaquias
Montoya unites in a single room more than 20 images depicting the development
of capital punishment in the United States since the late 19th century. As the
catalogue text indicates, Montoya “does not produce his art for the purpose
of selling, he does not exhibit in commercial galleries, and he is suspicious
of museums.” But he does want to reach people—particularly people
who will be motivated to contact their legislators.
The
violent subject matter of Premeditated demands a meditative space,
one that allows lengthy, directed contemplation of difficult questions. Montoya
begins this conversation with the viewer by asking, “Why do we kill? And
what happens to us as a humanity, as a culture?” In paintings such as The
Execution of the Innocent or The Execution of the Mentally Retarded,
the viewer is asked to consider the moral implications of state power, a question
that resonates strongly in a state that is the epicenter of America’s modern
death penalty experience.
Montoya’s death penalty art derives edgy rawness from his belief that “revenge
doesn’t bring anything.” But revenge does make for emotionally disturbing
art, as is apparent from the observations of visitors to the Dougherty Arts
Center. “Powerful,” was the word most often used to describe their
reaction to Montoya’s images of traumatized, dead bodies. “Depressing,”
was the one-word response of a 10-year-old girl at the exhibit opening.
Undoubtedly, the grotesqueries of the exhibition will disturb viewers of all
ages. Montoya features most of the readily identifiable forms of capital punishment
used in America over the past century and a half—with the notable exceptions
of the firing squad and the gas chamber. At every turn, he also provides the
viewer with an eclectic, if predictable, group of texts, seemingly chosen for
their stirring condemnation of capital punishment.
He quotes French existentialist Albert Camus and U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Thurgood Marshall, both outspoken abolitionists. These and other texts make
it seem as though the artist is trying to anchor his images in reasoned expressions
against capital punishment. He need not have bothered. The images themselves
direct the viewer to scrutinize its value, as Montoya himself concedes. In contrast
to the text, the images of death “hit you somewhere else.”
The lynching series delivers the first emotional punch and establishes the historical
framework. Inspired by the well-known macabre postcards published as Without
Sanctuary, Montoya’s lynching series is a group of images that depict
a southern black man. The line of mucus or blood dribbling from the dead man’s
nose forces us to see death at the end of a noose as humiliation, and reminds
us that such scenes were common throughout the South in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. Indeed, Montoya says that as a young child he remembers hearing
about Emmett Till’s notorious 1955 lynching.
In recent years, a significant body of scholarship has emerged, demonstrating
the existence of what some researchers refer to as “the death belt.”
In this group of former Confederate states—including Texas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia—whites lynched people of color after
Reconstruction failed in 1877. And those are precisely the states where capital
punishment flourished in the mid- to -late 20th century. Montoya obviously understands
this history: His images force us to focus on the noose and the expelled fluids—perhaps
blood or vomit—near the face. In so doing, the artist establishes the relationship
between lynching and hanging.
The images of lynching and hanging are followed by several that depict electrocutions.
In the late 19th century, an influential group of reformers believed that modernity—in
the form of the electric chair—would make the death sentence less painful.
New York state became the pioneer. Montoya shows this development in The
Execution of William Kemmler and The Human Experiment, both of
which memorialize the first person executed by electrocution, in 1888.
The
horror of the act has less to do with grotesque images, because—in contrast
to lynching and hanging—authorities often covered the head of the person
to be electrocuted. But with his depiction of the restrained body, the contorted
fingers, and—particularly in Ruth Snyder, first woman executed—the
seeming passivity of the condemned, Montoya provokes us just the same. He makes
it difficult to imagine how anyone could have considered electrocution a less
traumatic form of death. Moreover, he informs us in the accompanying text, that
an eyewitness described how electrocution cooked Kemmler’s flesh while
a team of doctors looked on in horror. In Botched Execution, Montoya
reminds us that Florida continued to use the electric chair through the 1990s.
Even before the overdue retirement of the electric chair, Texas began to tout
lethal injections as another modern and purportedly less painful form of execution.
A More Gentle Way of Killing (which appears on the cover of this issue
of the Observer) depicts this argument. But the stylized juxtaposition
of Christ’s head on the body of the condemned man is Montoya’s way
of telling us that lethal injection and crucifixion share the same purpose—killing.
Even in The Gentle Sleep, when Montoya uses natural representation
of a person’s head to depict lethal injection, he unnerves. Although the
condemned man looks peaceful, the accompanying text describes the “death
rattle,” the expulsion of air forced out the windpipe as the chemical Pavulon
renders the diaphragm useless, leading to suffocation.
The role of medical science in the process of capital punishment has grown over
time. In the Texas death house, medical technicians insert the IVs, then administer
the lethal drugs from behind a one-way mirror. A doctor enters only to pronounce
the time of death. In The Executioner Montoya portrays the dual role
of medical science: A figure of a physician, syringe in hand, wears the executioner’s
black hood. Montoya also plays with the traditional image of doctors as life’s
guardians. Here, they are also the gatekeepers of death.
Today, of course, the black hood takes on still another connotation, one of
global infamy—the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib.
n
his latest exhibit, Montoya has created an iconography of U.S. executions. In
so doing he places our present within the framework of a horrific past, from
which we are not so far removed. The images provoke. But are they all that surprising?
In Premeditated, Montoya unwittingly reveals that anti-death penalty
politics is at something of an impasse. The images he has chosen form part of
an identifiable tradition that decries state killing. But will art and overt
condemnation sway those who continue to believe in the appropriateness of capital
punishment to avenge the victims of violent crimes?
Montoya tries to break this deadlock with a piece called The Victim.
The victim does not refer to a crime victim, but to the collateral damage created
by an uncaring society that kills to avenge violent crimes. He wanted the exhibit
to culminate with that piece, he told me, “to somehow show how grotesque
we become when we kill. ” In his view, we are all victims of capital punishment.
Premeditated
may have begun with the former governor of Texas and the so-called “death
belt,” but it does not end there. After a three-year hiatus, executions
resumed in California last month when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied
clemency to Michael Beardslee. Now Connecticut is contemplating its first execution
in 40 years. Still, Montoya is not deterred.
“Just looking at these images of the death penalty reminds you of what
kind of world we live in,” he told me. “And how much work we have
to do to change those things. In a way they energize me, through anger, through
a feeling of the injustices that we have to work against. It’s a motive,
and that motive keeps me going.”
Former Observer intern Patrick Timmons received his Ph.D. from the
University of Texas at Austin last May and now teaches history at a college
in Georgia. He witnessed the execution of Jessie Joe Patrick in Huntsville on
September 17, 2002.
_______________________________________________________________
EXECUTION DIARY
| BY DAVID THEIS
ontemplating
the photographs in Diary of an Execution, an exhibit by Swiss photojournalist
Fabian Biasio, is a humbling and harrowing experience. The exhibit is currently
on display at Houston’s ArtCar Museum, one of James and Ann Harithas’
art spaces. You have to pass through some almost giddy examples of car art to
get to Biasio’s photographs, so stepping into the room set aside for Diary
is like leaving a rowdy street to enter a quiet chapel.
The exhibition documents the days leading up to the 2003 execution of James
Colburn, whom the state of Texas put to death despite protests from many quarters.
Colburn was mentally ill—paranoid schizophrenic—which the state didn’t
even attempt to deny. Colburn was simply judged to have failed the right/wrong
test. Schizophrenic or not, he knew that he did wrong when he killed 55-year-old
Peggy Murphy in his hometown of Conroe.
Indeed, according to the facsimile of the arrest report on display, he raped
and killed Murphy, then asked her neighbors to call the police. The report states,
“He killed the woman because he wanted to return to prison.”
The exhibition doesn’t go into great detail concerning Colburn’s mental
health. He only appears in a few images, in fact. Instead the heart-breaking
show gives us pictures of his sister, Tina Morris, in the days leading up to
his execution and immediately after. Biasio seems to have had complete access
to Morris’ grief, as she breaks down again and again in front of his camera.
The photos tell a very powerful story, some through the use of homey and ironic
detail, such as the photo of Tina buying plastic flowers for her still-living
brother’s upcoming funeral. But some are simply overpowering, even if you
try to look at them from an aesthetic point of view. There’s the quartet
of photos showing Tina swigging on some kind of bottle, then breaking down in
the Polunsky Unit parking lot before going in to see her brother.
The caption for a photo taken 24 hours before the execution tells us that she
“vomited all day.” We see her calling family members to coordinate
their last trip to Polunsky. The next morning, Tina’s boyfriend, just off
the night shift, picks up Tina in his pickup to drive her to Huntsville. Biasio
takes a matter-of-fact shot of the road, allowing us to see the last stretch
of highway upon which James Colburn will ever gaze.
Once at Huntsville, the family members kill time by putting together a puzzle
in the macabrely named “Christian Hospitality House.” A minister comes
in to lead them in a group prayer, and Tina’s cheeks puff out in pain as
she tries to pray along. At 5 p.m. she makes her last phone call, and at 5:30
she and her relatives finally make their way to the Walls Unit.
At 6 p.m.—execution time—we see a small crowd of protestors, one holding
a “Treat the Mentally Ill” poster. At 6:21 James Colburn is dead.
“I have no one to blame but myself,” he said. At 6:30 we see the removal
of his “personal items,” a plastic bag full of empty soda cans.
Then comes the image of Tina stroking her dead brother’s cheek. “For
the first time in 10 years,” the caption reads, “Tina can touch her
brother.”
Three days later, James is buried in the family’s Corsicana plot.
There’s not much to say about the photographer’s art, other than to
say that by documenting the hour-by-hour passage of time, Biasio succeeds in
making the somehow abstract notion of execution quite real, and, I would think,
shameful to us as Texans and Americans. Of course, shame is in short supply
these days.
A footnote: On January 20, Dave Atwood of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the
Death Penalty, one of the exhibition’s principal organizers, was sentenced
to five days in prison for crossing the yellow protest line at Huntsville during
an execution last November. Diary of an Execution is on view at Houston’s
ArtCar Museum through March.
