Conviction
by: Rebecca Zorach

My neighbor Don Coleman recently began serving a two-month sentence in federal prison for stepping “over the line” during a protest at the “School of the Americas,” a US military training group at Ft. Benning, Georgia, which trains Central American military and paramilitary personnel. Many trainees of the School have gone on to commit unspeakable atrocities in their home countries.

As his wife Ann Marie tells the story, before the sentencing phase, Don's attorney asked the judge to take into consideration the fact that Don had never before been convicted of anything.

“When the time came for the judge to give Don his sentence, he began by saying that he disagreed with Don's attorney about whether or not Don had ever been convicted of anything. The judge said, ‘I believe that Don has been very deeply convicted for a very long time.’ The judge then asked Don, if Don agreed with his assessment. Don answered, ‘Yes, Sir.’ Then the judge said something like, ‘and you expect that your congregation will continue to come down here.’ Don answered affirmatively. And, then he was sentenced.”

Don’s action was a small, bodily gesture. He had been to School of the Americas protests many times before – he was “convicted” before in the judge’s sense; he had conviction. But he had never stepped over the line. His doing so was not only a political act: it was an act of the body and an act of feeling. What did it take for his body to ready itself for that act? He had not only to step across the line but also to accept the consequences of doing so. He had to confront the imperative to give up nearly every habit of his body and to live a profoundly different bodily reality for the many days of the sentence he knew he would receive.

What would it mean for art to explore the scary edge of earnestness? Renaissance authors believed earnestly that proper, orderly building would make more moral subjects. Twentieth-century art and architecture veered back and forth between the earnest faith that art would fundamentally remake the viewer, and the contrary notion that art is a sphere apart, contextless, accountable only to itself. Whatever their differences, both views were deeply earnest. And earnestness is embarrassing. Our world, now, is uncomfortable with strong expressions of political emotion or utopianism – or with art that speaks in the imperative voice, or seems to.

Meredith’s work has its imperatives. “Do this” or “you should do this” or “this is good for you.” Assuming that our bodies and the environment (both built and unbuilt) are mutually constitutive and constitutable, it carries conviction that we should examine and alter our bodily habits to change our thinking and feeling and to change the world around us. It’s about the care of the self but a care of the self that implies the company of others and an existence in specific contexts. Meredith’s work is not just about comfort: it is also about discomfort and disturbance. You have to go through one to get to the other.

Irony and detachment can be aesthetically pleasing. But sometimes they’re a kind of weak yet dogged reflex, a stand-in for critique, where “interesting” becomes the best thing you can say about work. Maybe this is the necessary stance in a world in which conviction sometimes means racist jingoism and a range of fundamentalisms. Conviction is scary. But consider: what is it, actually, that is scary about accepting a charge to make ourselves ready to remake ourselves – and whatever our line might be, to step across it?

Rebecca Zorach is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and part of the Feel Tank Chicago Collective.

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