Mud Activisim by TAMMS Year Ten Coalition, Chicago
We all know that the process of collaboration can be messy, but can it be muddy? The answer is unequivocally “yes.”
On June 6th in Chicago, artists from Chicago and Milwaukee partnered with the TAMMS Year Ten coalition and engaged in a non-destructive type of public messaging technique called “mud-stenciling.”
The stenciled image read “End Torture in Illinois” and featured an outline of the state and the star locating the TAMMS supermax prison – the epicenter of state-sanctioned torture in Illinois.
Jesse Graves, a Milwaukee-based artist who developed the technique, took part in the action that included more than 30 volunteers, working in teams of three and four heading out to various corners of the city to mud stencil and offer fact-sheets about TAMMS to curious pedestrians. More often than not, a dialogue arose when people walked by as soon as the mud started flying.
Teams hit the tourist destinations of the city, including Navy Pier, The Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Zoo, the Jane Adams Hull House, and the Hyde Park Art Center, along with the Logan Square skate park, UIC, and DePaul University, not to mention random sidewalks and underpass walls, where the stencils will likely stay up for years.
The action itself was designed as a tactical medium campaign. The mud stencils were the hook-line-and-sinker to get TAMMS in the public spotlight and for the media to cover the action and specifically to address what is taking place inside TAMMS.
Prisons by their nature are largely out-of-sight and out-of- mind, but the details about TAMMS should shake the conscience of even the most apathetic of individuals. Prisoners at TAMMS are held in permanent solitary confinement and never leave their cell except to shower or exercise alone in a concrete pen. There is no communal activity, no contact visits, no phone calls, an no educational or rehabilitative programming. Suicide attempts, self-mutilation, and other psychotic symptoms are common at TAMMS, and are an expected consequence of long-term isolation, which can induce or worsen mental illness. At the least, prisoners with mental illness should no longer be housed at TAMMS and each prisoner should remain there less than a year.
At best, these types of sensory deprivation prisons should be completely banned and a greater discussion should emerge on the crisis that is the incarceration of 2.3 million Americans and counting.
For those of us on the outside, speaking out is the least we can do, and the June 6th action provided an outlet that combined political activism with creative resistance. In this case, mud proved to be an especially subversive medium. City governments and law enforcement agencies have little precedence in dealing with mud stencils, so there is a gray area on whether it is legal or not. For if it is illegal, is it also illegal for kids to write with chalk on the sidewalk? Is it illegal to build a snowman in a park or for dirt from ones garden to touch the sidewalk? And is it illegal to stencil with mud when the rain will wash it off? That said, none of the volunteers who mud stenciled on June 6th were arrested or even questioned by the police.
At the end of the day, the action was inspiring to be a part of, yet it remains one tactic and event out of the many actions within the long, ongoing campaign against TAMMS. The mud on the walls and sidewalks of Chicago will wash away in time, and perhaps be forgotten in there absence. Will the same be said for those who are locked up? The hopeful answer is “never.”
Justseeds blog post on the action:
www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/06/illinois_torture_publicized_wi.html
by Nicolas Lampert
images by Sam Barnett
