Visitors to Reading jail this autumn might encounter Patti Smith reading the four-and-a-half-hour entirety of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, or see new artworks by Steve McQueen, Nan Goldin or Marlene Dumas dotted around echoing corridors and empty cells.
Artangel announced on Thursday that it was taking over one of the most notorious prisons in the UK, the place where Wilde spent a harrowing, soul-destroying two years from 1895-97.
The organisation is well known for presenting ambitious art in unexpected places and Reading prison, opened in 1844 and closed for good in 2013, is no exception. But the stellar list of about 30 artists, writers and performers it has signed up for the project is particularly striking, from Ai Weiwei and Doris Salcedo to Maxine Peake and Ralph Fiennes. “It’s the closest we have ever come to doing an Artangel exhibition,” the co-director Michael Morris said. “We are really excited about it.”
During two-month project artists will respond to the work of Wilde, the architecture of the prison and themes of imprisonment and separation.
Morris said they had visited the empty jail many times but the first time was extraordinary. “There is a feeling of real oppression: you feel very heavy following the experience.”
Every Sunday at midday in the prison chapel, a writer or performer will read De Profundis, the extended letter Wilde wrote to his lover, “Bosie” – Lord Alfred Douglas. It was written in his prison cell when, after a year, he was finally given access to pen and paper.
Wilde was imprisoned at the height of his fame and powers after misguidedly suing Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused him of being a “sodomite”. The libel case set in train a sequence of events which resulted in him being jailed for two years with hard labour.
After two months in Wandsworth, Wilde was sent to Reading jail, a starkly isolating place – one of the Victorian era’s new model prisons with huge wings and rows of small individual cells. The philosophy behind the design was to prevent any “corrupting” contact between prisoners, with inmates forced to wear special identity-hiding headwear when they were allowed out of their cell.
It was a brutal regime which broke Wilde’s spirit. He left Reading sick and bankrupt, divorced by his wife and unable to see his children. He went to Paris where he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, but by 1900 he was dead, aged only 46.
James Lingwood, Artangel’s other co-director, said Reading had destroyed Wilde but also, perversely, remade him. He became “a tragic figure who would speak beyond his age, a martyr to oppression and the writer of one of the longest and greatest letters in the English language”.
De Profundis is essentially a love letter, albeit one which was never sent, written intensively in the first three months of 1897. It charts Wilde’s journey into the depths, renounces his decadent lifestyle and celebrates the power of art. It contains many examples of Wilde’s pithy wisdom, sobered by his misery. For example: “Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.” Also: “With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”
The list of names reading it includes Peake, Fiennes, Smith, Ben Whishaw, Kathryn Hunter, Neil Bartlett, Ragnar Kjartansson, Lemn Sissay and Colm Tóibín; all keen to read 50,000 words or 100 pages. Visitors will be able to dip in and out or stay. “All of the readers have wanted to do it for themselves,” Lingwood said. “It will be a deeply meaningful experience for them as well as shared to the broader world.”
New artworks have been commissioned from artists including Wolfgang Tillmans, Robert Gober and Jean-Michel Pancin. There will also be existing works by artists including Roni Horn, Vija Celmins and Richard Hamilton.
Another strand will be prison letters written by figures including Ai, Jeanette Winterson, Gillian Slovo and Deborah Levy who will use their own direct or imagined experience of state-imposed separation from loved ones. BBC Radio 4 will broadcast five of the letters over the course of a week.
People will also be able wander the many empty cells including that given to Wilde, prisoner C.3-3. “I think for many people it will be a kind of pilgrimage,” Lingwood said. “Wilde seems to speak to so many people in so many different ways.”
Previous Artangel works include Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave, in which he organised the re-enactment of a memorable flashpoint between police and striking miners, PJ Harvey publicly recording her next album in a glass studio in Somerset House and, last May, Jorge Otero-Pailos wrapping a wall of the Palace of Westminster in latex.
The Ministry of Justice has given its permission for the prison to be opened to the public – the first time it has happened.
The project, which will have timed entry to prevent it becoming too crowded, is the first phase of a wider three-year arts initiative called Reading International, led by the University of Reading.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion