The Brooklyn Rail

One of the great and enduring insights of historical materialism is that while people make their own history, they are not able to choose the conditions in which they do so, because the world they wish to remake is the same one that has already made them. That we might have agency in ways and for reasons we do not decide is another way of saying that we are produced by history just as we strive to intervene in it. To see the relationship between individual and system, between ideas and the social conditions that give rise to them, requires an interpretive capacity that must be fostered, sharpened, and refined. Jesse Krimes’s art is uniquely oriented to help us do that, as his work is fundamentally concerned with the way social systems create ways of seeing, thinking, and behaving, or forms of subjectivity altogether. In Corrections, Krimes considers the role that photography has historically played in allowing states to simplify their respective populations to better classify and control them. Not content merely to highlight this sordid history of photography, Krimes has created works that both materially and conceptually undermine this function, and in the process, he asks us to imagine how we might go beyond them altogether.

Split between two adjoining rooms, the exhibition, curated by Lisa Sutcliffe, begins by placing Krimes’s work in direct conversation with nineteenth-century photographs by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon. Amidst rising rates of recidivism in fin-de-siècle Paris, Bertillon developed a system that combined physical measurements, photographic portraits (a precursor to the modern-day mugshot), and record-keeping into a tool that police used to track those suspected of criminal behavior. In Mugshots of Suspected Anarchists, from French Police Files (1891–95) we can see the photographic expression of this system, as more than one hundred portraits are arranged into rows with at least one portrait card flipped to show its back where biographical and anthropomorphic details are listed. The clinical quality to the display, coupled with the visual details in the portraits themselves that indicate their criminological content, reinforce the context of the mugshot and the web of assumptions and implications that accompany it, namely that where we see a face and imagine a life behind it, we will have already presumed some measure of guilt and wrongdoing. Put more simply, the mugshot primes its audience to see criminality long before any legal ruling has been reached.

In Purgatory (2009), which hangs across from Bertillon’s display, Krimes examines the mugshot’s function as a socially constructed lens for seeing people categorically—a process he has called “mediated decapitation”—rather than as discrete and unique. Made during his six-year incarceration, the work combines prison-issued soap, playing cards, and images transferred from newspapers into an austere-yet-experimental display that calls the durability of social hierarchies into question while also troubling our assumptions about who we expect to see as a criminal. The work consists of rows alternating between decks of twenty-one playing cards glued together with toothpaste, and bars of soap upon which Krimes has transferred images taken from local newspapers, including both present-day mugshots and celebrity portraits. After carving out space in each deck and embedding the bars in these cavities, Krimes then mailed them out two at a time. Bearing the faded and at times barely legible images of persons both popular and anonymous, the bars of soap frustrate our attempts to verify the identity of whomever we are looking at. The decks of cards have been provisionally made whole again, though with mismatched suits so that even a seemingly innocuous, impersonal system of classification and hierarchy has been undone. Though the structure of presentation mirrors that of Bertillon’s, Krimes has manipulated his materials so that we are unable to see criminality as Bertillon would have hoped we would.

Hanging in the second and larger room of the exhibition are two monumental and intertwined works by Krimes that respond to the way our understanding of the world is inevitably skewed and fundamentally mediated by images, a condition intensely experienced by those incarcerated. Like Purgatory before it, Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010–13) was made while Krimes was incarcerated and solely with materials available to him during that time. The images that he transferred onto prison-issued bed sheets using hair gel and a spoon were taken from copies of the New York Times published between 2010-13. The paper, which Krimes read daily, served as his connection to a world he had been removed from. At fifteen feet tall and forty feet wide, Apokaluptein is overwhelming in its scale and visual complexity. Perhaps first resembling something out of Bosch or Bruegel, its contemporaneity is made obvious as soon as its imagery is studied and we begin to discern advertisements, flags, celebrities, politicians, images from the Arab Spring, and scenes of turmoil more broadly, all overlapping and side by side with one another, inverted by image transfer. Krimes structures the work around heaven, earth, and hell, with the bottom section largely comprised of advertisements, the middle of man-made disasters around which models have been placed, and the top and final section left open and spacious save for the nude female figures that seem frozen mid-dance. Though the work is first and foremost an expression of the way information reaches those who are incarcerated, it also presents a bleak, if compelling, portrait of the general character of social life in America, in which ads and the possibility of consumption assume pride of place over journalism and the pursuit of edification.

Across from Apokaluptein is Naxos (2023–24), a work that matches the former in size while carrying Krimes’s engagement with the experience of incarceration into the present. To make this work, Krimes first asked incarcerated people around the country to look for what they considered an “ideal pebble” in their prison yards and mail it to him. He then wrapped these pebbles in colored thread before suspending each of them—nearly ten thousand—from a needle. The colored threads and the specific point at which the pebbles hang are meant to directly reflect the visual field of Apokaluptein. Though this relationship between the two works is difficult to see directly, our ability to appreciate the sheer scale of what Krimes has done in Naxos remains undiminished. From a distance we might first see repetition, but when viewed up close the color-wrapped pebbles shatter the compositional unity of the work, forcing us to see difference in place of sameness. Rather than be expressed by a mugshot or some other carceral tool, in Naxos Krimes has allowed those incarcerated to contribute to how they are represented. Like the mugshot before it, the pebbles are an abstraction of the person they are meant to stand in for. The crucial difference—or one of them, at least—is that while the mugshot is ultimately a form of social control that ends up creating an entire system of interpersonal relations, the pebble is transformed by Krimes into a gesture of refusal to be seen and understood within that very system. In place of one form of abstraction he has substituted another, less rigid one, and as a result we can now wonder about the person behind the pebble—who they have been and who they still hope to be—while allowing them to be understood as individuals, abstract though they may be, rather than statistics.