“I push through the sleep-like fog
and try running down the corridor
the corridor of a prison that I’ve studied every night
in the bird’s eye-view of my dream
As if the corridors of my body are about to burst
the walls slosh and roll
Like a tomb there’s no emergency exit anywhere
Every day I walk the same corridors that jail me
looking at the things that appear and disappear in the window”

—from Sue Hyon Bae’s translation of Kim Hyesoon’s “My Panopticon, That Bird’s-Eye View” (A Drink of Red Mirror)

Andrew Felsher’s Notes from a Prison Cell (Bottlecap Press, 2023) follows the thoughts and observations of an art installation located on a mountaintop. The art installation is known as “the prison cell” and it exists as its own self-aware entity. Disconnected from both a physical prison and from the unnamed artist who originally made the installation, the prison cell eventually befriends a talking sparrow sensitive to artistic concerns and an opinionated pebble who recently freed itself from its own prison: the hiking boot of a person affiliated with a “prestigious university.”

Reminiscent of a fairy tale, there’s a deliberate flatness to Felsher’s characters that’s essential for inviting readers to contemplate more abstract elements. Why a talking pebble? Why a sparrow who says things like “Wifi is a means to connect”? As Kate Bernheimer reminds us: “flatness allows depth of response in the reader.” There’s a simplicity and rhythm to Felsher’s sentences that permits an existential sense of humor (i.e. “When the artist died, people returned”).

Much of Felsher’s prose explores lack. A lack of connection with people. A lack of self-understanding. And, what feels most pressing: a lack of meaning typically afforded by the presence of an artist’s statement. Since the prison cell exists as a conscious art installation without an artist’s statement, art (for the artist), in many ways, can become its own form of solitary confinement. Institutions can, of course, deeply benefit artists. But what happens when the reverse is true? What happens when an institutions leaves an artist feeling meaningless? In an effort to feel “meaningful,” the prison cell recruits the sparrow to write an artist’s statement using twigs. An excerpt from the first iteration reads:

A PRISON CELL IS NOT A PRISON CELL. IT IS AN EMPTY YEARNING FOR CONTROL. THE ARTIST SEEKS TO JUXTAPOSE NATURE WITH CARCERAL APPARATUSES.

And while this artist’s statement goes through some unexpected edits and revisions, the prison cell’s initial yearning for “control,” might actually be a yearning for the opposite of control: nature. Nature without curation. Nature without human dominion. Perhaps it’s what Anna Tsing brilliantly calls “disturbance” in The Mushroom at the End of the World. When the prison cell becomes too focused on whether it’s meaningful art or not, it becomes less of an art installation and more of a prison cell. 

Even though the prison cell is without a panoptic watchtower (as noted on the first page), Felsher’s conscious prison cell experiences what Foucault terms “permanent visibility.” 

The crowds gradually shrank, until there would only be one person every few hours. And then one person a day. Then one a week. 

When there was nobody left and the artist couldn’t move, the prison cell said, “Why do you do this to yourself?” 

The prison cell’s feeling of imprisonment is not strictly a physical or architectural apparatus. The knowledge of being under constant observation alone is imprisonment enough. We also learn, from one of the pebble’s rants, that prison can take many forms: credit scores, money lending, gender, and, especially, language itself. The pebble’s mention of language reminds me of Bataille’s thoughts in Guilt:

“Communication, through death, with our beyond (essentially in sacrifice) – not with nothingness [le néant], still less with a supernatural being, but with an indefinite reality (which I sometimes call the impossible, that is with what can’t be grasped (begreift) in anyway, what we can’t reach without dissolving ourselves, what’s slavishly called God” (1988)

I think death, or, the undead, is appropriate when considering what exactly the prison cell is. Is it actually a prison cell? Is it an art installation? When the poor artist eventually returns to the prison cell to live out his days as a performance artist (perhaps similar to exhibit A or exhibit B), spectators dub him “The Prisoner.” Later, a more emaciated version of The Prisoner becomes “The Body.” In this moment, the art installation feels closest to a “tomb” (i.e. Bataille’s “communication, through death”) as echoed in the Kim Hyesoon poem quoted above:

Like a tomb there’s no emergency exit anywhere
Every day I walk the same corridors that jail me

Foucault’s detail of permanence also feels necessary since, spoiler alert: part of being the prison cell (with an unknown expiration date) means watching it outlive (?) some of its companion-spectators. And, speaking of what and/or who watches, it also feels important not to forget that while readers are eventually introduced to the fictional artist who made the prison cell, we know the creator of the prison cell is also undeniably Andrew Felsher, author of Notes from a Prison Cell. 

In Felsher’s notes, one will find hole-like echoes of Kim Hyesoon, a playfully dark sense of humor reminiscent of David OReilly, and the self-discipline and self-imposed resistance explored in artist Matthew Barney’s earliest iterations of his Drawing Restraint series. The chapbook also features remarkable illustrations by artist Fi Jae Lee (who one cannot help but associate with the many translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry). Specific to Notes from a Prison Cell, I’d describe Lee’s rectangular three-dimensional images as ideological chambers. In these prison cell-like chambers, readers will witness the startling remains of human beings: leaking organs, wristwatches, books, bones, boomboxes, censored orifices, and limb after limb after limb. Surreal, residual decadence.

And now, without any further adieu, “Say thank you. Drown in the algorithmic quicksand.”