A dark room at the National Gallery. Squinting to read the information. A child has a tantrum but it is an erudite tantrum, she’s not happy in this room with Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, she wants go back to the Virgin Mary. I share a laugh at this with a woman standing a few pictures down. When the father scoops the child up with a smile and bustles out, this stranger and I are suddenly the only two people in the room. I return to looking at the picture in front of me, she, in her own rhythm moves one closer to my left. “These are brilliant,” she says, “I hope they have reproductions.”
Then she joins me. I move to the next one. She moves too. “I feel like I am stalking you,” she says. “Stalk away,” I reply, cheerfully. We look at the picture together. “I’m studying prisons,” she offers, “I just got back from the States, Louisiana, Death Row.” “Wow, heavy.” “I’m doing my PhD on Penology,” she says, in what is now a rush of information, “I have to explain to people that Penology is not the study of penises.”
Moments before I had been showing off to my father, referencing Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, musing on the relationship between prisoner and gaoler and how that might echo the bond between performer and spectator.
All I manage now is a stuttered, “Penal. Penology. Panopticon…” I am still smiling. Underneath my beanie I am lightly sweating. She doesn’t pick up on my obtuse word-association. My father returns and she wanders to the next room. When we move there, she has already gone. Nor is she in the bookshop where I have the faint hope that I will see her again, looking for reproductions.
Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons(Carceri d’invenzioni) are at the NGV International (what they call the St. Kilda Road building) until September 30. It’s free, and there’s some pretty cool Leggo on the way in too…
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