MAY 2022
Issue #24
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.
We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Toni Morrison
“We need arts and entertainment to help inspire us toward justice…
The world of arts and entertainment can use their cultural influence
to inspire change that we need.”
Keith Ellison, Minnesota AG
After all the attention the Black Lives Matter-led racial justice movement generated after George Floyd’s death in 2020, new data show that the number of Black people killed by police has actually increased over the last two years.
(Click to read article)
After all the attention the Black Lives Matter-led racial justice movement generated after George Floyd’s death in 2020, new data show that the number of Black people killed by police has actually increased over the last two years. (Click to read article)
POLICE TORTURE - Professor Laurence Ralph’s The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, is a scholarly anthropological examination of police torture in Chicago. Professor Ralph broke with scholarly tradition and “decided to write his book as a series of open letters to friends and neighbors, to torture victims, perpetrators and witnesses, and to officials both past and present who have the power to stop the torture … I did not want what they told me to just be beneficial to other scholars who theorized torture for a living. I wanted to honor what I had learned from them by embracing their challenge to speak to multiple audiences.”
The preceding excerpt came from an article published by Princeton University ‘The Torture Letters’: Laurence Ralph explores Chicago’s dark history. One of those letters is “An Open Letter to the Boy and Girl with Matching Airbrushed Book Bags on the Corner of Lawndale Avenue and Cermak Road.” The New York Times has published an illustrated video of that letter.
Artwork by Tania Love Abramson & Paul R. Abramson
The N.Y.P.D.’s 1955 Interrogation Facilitator
Police torture persists for two reasons. There is, to begin with, a complicity among people in power. I’ll protect your ass, if you’ll protect mine, so to speak. That understanding, as one might imagine, effectively renders accountability nonexistent. The second reason that torture persists in the United States is that we have legally sanctioned the torturing and tormenting of many people for centuries, especially those we have considered to be either expendable or threatening. Delivering harm thus became a matter of form for officers of the law. Now, putting these two factors together, the Torture-Tree then emerges, whereby all measures of abuse can arise. [1]
This iteration of Dr Payne’s Electroshock Apparatus- The N.Y.P.D.’s 1955 Interrogation Facilitator - is meant to symbolize Professor Ralph’s insights, in particular, that torture has been a longstanding way of life for many police officers and their departments. Though, of course, there are certainly exceptions to this rule – and perhaps police departments are now changing in this regard – but that notwithstanding, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Our artwork is meant to acknowledge the latter.
As we noted previously in the February 2022 issue of Breathe, our goal for Dr. Payne’s apparatus was to first obtain a likeness of a 1950s electroshock therapy device. After finding an appropriate facsimile, we then created the signage, in this instance, The N.Y.P.D.’s 1955 Interrogation Facilitator. Though we believe the viewer would quickly get the message, we figured that the black eye and bloody nose would clear up any remaining ambiguity.
[1] Laurence Ralph (2020). The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tania Love Abramson, MFA, is a visual/conceptual artist, performer, videographer and writer/poet, as well as a Lecturer in the Honors Collegium at UCLA. She is the author of three art books, Shame and the Eternal Abyss, Concern, and Truth Lies, as well as the co-creator and co-instructor of the UCLA Art & Trauma class. More of her work can be found at tanialoveabramson.com. Paul R. Abramson is the lyricist and lead singer of the band Crying 4 Kafka. Crying 4 Kafka has been memorialized in Erika Blair’s book The Sanctity of Rhyme: The Metaphysics of Crying 4 Kafka in Prose and Verse (Asylum 4 Renegades Press, 2018). Paul is also an artist of note, and an Editor at Breathe. Otherwise, Paul is a professor of psychology at UCLA. Photo Credit: Photo-Automat, basement level, C/O Exhibitions, February 2016, Berlin.
By Sienna Bland-Abramson
In light of George Floyd, a (long overdue) reckoning of racial injustice has now gripped the nation. Hollywood, nevertheless, is still ripe with mixed signals. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given their penchant for sweet-talking as many people as possible, including a starkly divided population, where palpable discomfort and white guilt about our country’s racial history remain. This is particularly evident in Hollywood’s divided stance on the issue of police iniquities towards African-American citizens - and other marginalized groups, for that matter - by how it adopts both favorable portrayals of law enforcement, while also perpetuating racial stereotypes.
It is a truism to say that culture informs Hollywood, no less than Hollywood informs the culture. Up until recently, for instance, Hollywood’s message was largely that “Cops = Good and Criminals = Bad”, though of course there were notable exceptions, the movie Training Day, for example. That said, here’s the spoiler: due to the fundamental flaws in our judicial system and our heinous racial history, prisons in the United States are unduly populated with African-Americans, and other marginalized peoples, who have little hope of ever relieving their often faulty criminal records.