Artist Statement

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Gag College is a work of fiction, intended to provoke several questions about society, how people's images are constructed within society, and the nature of punishment.

What does making punishment public do to the people being punished and the community at large?  Public humiliation and shaming were a part of most cultures not too long ago, and these practices still exist in some countries (China for one) and in smaller communities.  Most countries abandoned public humiliation as a punishment because of its negative psychological effects.  In spite of this, however, some people advocate a return to this method of punishment, citing its cost-effectiveness over imprisonment.  Some parents have made their children wear signs in public due to their bad grades, and some American judges, such as Judge Kenneth Robertson Jr. in Alabama, have even imposed sign-wearing as an official judicial punishment.

When public humiliation was an official punishment, people rarely traveled more than two or three miles from their homes over the course of their entire lives; communities were very close-knit, and news of someone's misdeeds was confined to a small, albeit influential, circle.  In today's Internet Age, though, the tales of these public shamings are sent across the entire world for people to hear about and see.  Even the image of an arrested person in handcuffs being shown in newspapers and on television news broadcasts can have a similar shaming effect, before the arrested person has even stood trial.

Some, including the artist James Sham and the television show Surviving History, have recently explored the notion of public humiliation being used as a form of "mob justice."  The audience to the punishment, by and large, determines what punishment actually takes place.  If someone is sympathetic to the person being punished, or believes that the act the person is being punished for should be permitted, then the act of punishment evokes sympathy, and the sight of the person being punished has the exact opposite effect of what is intended.  When the audience doesn't like the person being punished, or believes that the act being punished deserves harsh treatment, then the person being punished is truly at the mercy of the mob.

What does the effect of gagging someone as part of a public punishment do?  When we see images of people undergoing punishment, we only "hear" the law's side of the story.  The person being punished rarely, if ever, has a chance to let his or her side of what happened be known.  By gagging someone, the ability to speak, among other abilities, is taken away, and the person has to take whatever "mob justice" is dished out, without the ability to respond or protest what is happening to him or her.  If our culture and our media are only interested in the images and accounts of wrongdoers being punished, then have we not already gagged them by effectively taking away their voices?

These are just some of the themes I explore in Gag College.  I've decided to make Gag College a communally-licensed project because I know that I won't come up with all of the answers to my questions on my own.  I need, and request, the ideas of others in developing this fictional world, in the hopes that through our art, we may develop a better understanding of the topics above.

- NoName