Beauty imprisoned

This weekend I was struck by irony and a contrast between beauty and sterility, celebration and punishment at two local attractions. First, I visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. With some guilt, I was overwhelmed by the aesthetic qualities of this semi-ruin. Its peeling, paint-covered walls, the geometrical arrangements of square doors and arch ceilings, both marked by sun's rays escaping in from the outside through slit skylights. Just a few blocks from the Penitentiary is the recently open Perelman building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which (after lunch) we visited next. It was when I was watching a video from a fashion show by Kansai Yamamoto that the contrast struck me. The Penitentiary was finally closed in 1971. Its at-the-time revolutionary model of making people see their own inner good by penance and self-reflection by that time had long been abandoned as the facility became an antiquated, overcrowded prison. The life for many of its occupants was rather miserable. Also during the 1970s, Kansai Yamamoto was designing his exuberant, boutique-bound clothing. He along with many other artist were trying to break out not from the physical constraints of a prison, but from some abstract, cultural conceptions about what makes a good looking or provoking suit or a chair. Yet, in this temple to high art, the aesthetic object seemed like inmates affixed to monotone walls or behind glass cases, in isolation from each other, removed from the context of their creation, watched over by guards. The contrast, then, between the two places was of seeing artifacts of a human life on the one hand reduced to mere existence in isolation, sustained by one meal of bread and water with a life of creative, luxury, high fashion on the other. Yet it were the ruins of the prison that seamed beautiful and the celebration of creativity---sterile. In the end, I remember that my Moroccan eggs and coffee were really good at Figs.

See also: online book on the history of the E.S.P.; more of my photos from the trip