The Brooklyn Rail

From a distance, the series of uniform eraser-sized white slabs lined up on a blue velvet-lined shelf appear to be stone sculptures stripped of their pigment and linear detail, bearing only traces of patina. Upon closer inspection, eyes, hair, and mouths emerge to form somber facial expressions. They etch themselves deeper into the viewer’s vision with each passing moment, revealing their true nature: the faintly rendered images are photographs of prison inmates.

These spectral renditions of twenty-first-century mug shots, Purgatory (2009), are an installation featured in contemporary mixed-media artist Jesse Krimes’s current solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corrections. The work serves as a fitting introduction to Krimes’s oeuvre, much of which was either made during or was inspired by his six-year incarceration for nonviolent drug charges. Since his release from prison, Krimes has spearheaded initiatives like the Right of Return Fellowship and the Center for Arts and Advocacy, which rehabilitate and support the emerging careers of incarcerated artists.

Krimes’s artwork exists at the nexus of sculpture, assemblage, and printmaking, an intersection shaped by the limited materials he had access to in prison. The mugshots in Purgatory, for instance, were derived from newspaper clippings that Krimes painstakingly superimposed onto slivers of soap, a singular process on impermanent surfaces that counters printmaking’s characteristically iterative quality and material longevity. Krimes colligates these slivers of soap with trimmed Bicycle playing cards, swapping suits and faces and occasionally inserting soap fragments, placing the beneficiaries of the prison industrial complex (the ruling class of kings, queens, and jacks) on a level playing field with its victims.

Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13) also incorporates artifacts of prison life, consisting of bed sheets printed with newspaper—the same technique as Purgatory—augmented with a few painted details. Stretching across a wall like a mural, Apokaluptein overwhelms the viewer with a hallucinatory amalgamation of a newspaper’s dissonant sections, layering fashion advertisements over scorched land, portrait photography with modern paintings, and war photography alongside paparazzi photos. The installation calls attention to our seemingly paradoxical contemporary situation, in which an international 24/7 news cycle characterized by myopia and superficiality ultimately overwhelms viewers, rendering them unable to respond to urgent sociopolitical issues despite their state of heightened awareness.

Krimes derives Apokaluptein:16389067’s title from his inmate number, directly incorporating the archival structure of modern disciplinary practice in his work. As Corrections’s didactics tell us, the exhibition places Krimes’s body of work “in dialogue” with a foundational example of police archivism: prison photography that reflects the methodologies of nineteenth-century criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who pioneered what we refer to today as “mug shots.” Though Krimes directly references neither Bertillon’s biography nor his policework, he makes use of the visual language pioneered by his work. Bertillon’s photographic conventions (frontal portraits of subjects sporting grim expressions placed against white backdrops) set a standard for mug shots, one that persists to this day, including in the mug shots that Krimes has appropriated in his work.

The exhibition rightly alludes to the function of Bertillon’s work as an agent of collective scrutiny, referencing the French police’s publication of mug shots in newspapers as tantamount to “inviting the public to play a role in surveillance.” Although the exhibition does not do so, this analogy could be pushed further yet. One might connect Bertillon’s practice of collecting biological information about inmates for police databases (known as “Bertillonage”) to the now nearly ubiquitous surveillance-driven practice of collecting biometric information even in everyday life.

Corrections references the wide range of data Bertillon collected, from the logical (hair and eye color) to the seemingly nonsensical (middle finger measurements), and correctly notes that these prefigured the widespread adoption of fingerprinting suspects and convicted felons. Troublingly, however, the exhibition omits mention of how fallible, and indeed subject to malicious distortion, Bertillon’s methods ultimately were. For example, Bertillon is known to have manipulated biometric information as evidence in the Dreyfus Affair, the 1895 conviction of French Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), an infamous miscarriage of justice and act of antisemitic persecution. Dreyfus’s false conviction for treason was contingent upon Bertillon’s untruthful testimony as a handwriting expert, during which he produced a series of arbitrary measurements to “prove” that Dreyfus produced the trial’s sole piece of evidence, a forged letter detailing French military stratagem.

Corrections would have benefitted from a more robust contextualization of Bertillon’s career, especially in light of the dramatic rise of antisemitic threats and violence, both here in the US and abroad. That said, juxtaposing Krimes’s artwork with Bertillon’s photography and thus adding a compelling historical dimension to Krimes’s practice while invoking the Met’s archive is an inspired curatorial choice. It also further distinguishes Corrections from Jack Shainman Gallery’s concurrent Jesse Krimes solo exhibition Cells, which is dedicated to Krimes’s more recent nonrepresentational output and more closely adheres to the conventions of a contemporary art gallery exhibition.