Richard Kamler

(This story appeared in High Performance #63, Fall 1993.)

What Richard Kamler remembers most vividly from his two-year stint as an art teacher at San Quentin prison was the day he went to work and saw a pack of dressed-up women waiting outside the institution. As he passed through the gates, a group of men in starched denims greeted him. "It's a wedding day," one explained. Kamler proceeded as usual to his class, and when he emerged later, he heard a scuffle across the courtyard. He looked up to see guards escorting a man in shackles—one of the grooms, returning from his wedding ceremony.

"I just reeled," he said. "Over the years I've heard a lot of stories about the horrors of prison, but that particular image—the contrast between the horror and the joy of a wedding—stayed with me. I had to figure out a way to translate it."

His last project, "Oh Give Me A Home Where The Buffalo Roam," gave him an opportunity to do just that. The San Francisco-based visual artist who has had exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Long Beach Museum of Art and AIR Gallery in New York, has taught in jails and prisons for most of the last eight years. He was teaching at San Bruno County Jail when the City of San Francisco discovered that a herd of buffalo in Golden Gate Park had contracted tuberculosis and deposited the sick beasts in a field outside the facility.

"We always think of bison running free on the plain, and here they are penned up waiting to die outside a jail, where people are penned up the same way," he said. "The context is really striking. There's the herd, the huge oppressiveness of the building, and sometimes inmates in blue walking across the field, or buses coming in."

To heighten the contrast between one of our culture's symbols of freedom and the unnaturalness of confinement, Kamler constructed 100 life-size plywood cutouts to stand in the field with the real critters, and set up speakers to blare the sound of a buffalo stampede. He also provided visitors with Walkmans, in which jail program directors, inmates and a zoo keeper speak about freedom and confinement. Ambient jail noises—such as prison doors slamming shut—rounded out the soundtrack.

The exhibit brought school children, art fans, curiousity seekers—in general, a population that may have never otherwise seen a jail or thought much about confinement. "Prisons and jails just don't work, and they're never going to work," he says. "For one thing, no one knows what they're for. Are they to punish? Rehabilitate? Educate?"

Kamler's career as a political artist began as an art student at UC Berkeley in the '60s. He then moved to New York to apprentice with artist/architect Frederick Kiesler. "When I first got there, he was in the middle of a conversation with someone and I heard him say, 'through art we can change the laws of the world,'" Kamler recalls. "I thought, 'Wow, I'm home.'"

Confinement, correction and punishment have always fascinated Kamler. For his first large-scale installation, he reconstructed a barracks of a Nazi death camp. Later, after he began teaching at San Quentin, he started his "Maximum Security" series, one of which included rotting lamb carcasses and maggots that he retrieved from a slaughterhouse.

Last year, when convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris was scheduled for execution the artist hit on the idea of surrounding the waterside facility with the sounds of lions roaring. Though some accused him of likening prisoners to animals, Kamler wanted to trumpet a "huge cry of rage and sorrow and despair" in response to what he calls "state-sanctioned murder."

The night Harris was to be executed, Kamler and crew boarded a boat loaded down with speakers and docked outside the prison. He'd made a tape at the lion house at the San Francisco Zoo. Harris' execution was slated for midnight, but by 2 a.m., he still had not been killed, so Kamler decided to let loose with a roar that echoed throughout the prison.

Though he made his point, not all wanted to hear it—the warden, apparently, complained to the Coast Guard. Once Kamler's boat set out for nearby Sausalito, the crew heard a helicopter above. Then the Coast Guard pulled up, took control of the boat, and cited the artists with violating a sound ordinance (the charge was later dropped).

Kamler continues to center his work on ideas of confinement, correction and punishment, but about a year ago he stopped teaching in prisons and jails. "I felt it was hopeless. It's better to have [art] programs than to not have them, but I didn't think it was transformational. I wasn't that naive. Now I work one-on-one in halfway houses."

Kamler is currently negotiating with Amtrak to help his bison herd migrate across the country to the east coast. He'd like the herd to stop in cities that have prisons, and to involve communities of prison abolitionists. He's also working on a new piece.

"The more I get into this, the more complex I see it is. Now I'm working on a piece that includes the victims. Many people whose husbands and wives have been killed want revenge. It's a legitimate emotion, it's not just rednecks. How do we let that anger come out?"

Laura Jamison lives in San Francisco and writes about theater, the arts and popular culture. She has also written for the Village Voice, Mother Jones and SF Weekly.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #63, Fall 1993

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999