For Piranha Club #2 on March 10th, we prepared the last meal request of Lawrence Russell Brewer, the last last meal served in the Texas penal system. Brewer had ordered an obscene amount of food which when presented to him, he refused to eat in protest. The state then revoked this tradition for all death row prisoners. I did the math and figured the meal could serve about 10 folks. In previous projects I propositioned acquaintances to name their death row meal which I would then cook for them. However, actually addressing a death row inmate’s last meal, rather than working with supposed last meals for the hypothetically condemned, brought the complexity of the issues of capital punishment and the last meal tradition to the surface. The nine diners that night seemed to hardly stray from topic.
My own thoughts on the issue had been somewhat tangled, though this project led me to my main point of inquiry, what rights should condemned prisoners have? Even in brutal Medieval times, the last meal was offered (regardless if it was to clear the conscience of the judge, executioner, juror, and witnesses and potentially prevent hauntings by the executed’s spirit). So it disheartens me to think that in our contemporary age we can refuse this basic empathy to someone about to be put to death (and come to think of it, engage in the spectacle of execution in the first place. So much for the advancement of society- tis’ a justice and violence obsessed culture of ours). Conjuring Lawrence Russell Brewer disturbed me for weeks, his crimes so heinous. But the poetics of the last meal lie in an unequivocal empathy for these most marginalized members of society. Was his action to protest his guilt or his sentence? After all, sitting down to eat this meal symbolizes the acceptance of one’s fate to die, resigning to the sentence. However, it is the state’s action that I find shameful, denying this basic rite to all prisoners to come. They let Brewer counter spectacle with spectacle and they just had to have the last word. The denial of the meal became another symbol, a symbol of punishment towards all those who refuse the state. A primitive reaction, which is not surprising from a state that sanctions such primitive justice.
So how did we implicate ourselves in cooking this meal, in eating this meal? We simultaneously accepted Brewer’s fate for him and cleared our conscience of putting him to death. It was an act of empathy toward both the condemned, deemed evil by society and toward the savage system of justice that put him to death. In a sense empathy is our own refusal.
Piranha Club #2: The Last Last Meal
My own thoughts on the issue had been somewhat tangled, though this project led me to my main point of inquiry, what rights should condemned prisoners have? Even in brutal Medieval times, the last meal was offered (regardless if it was to clear the conscience of the judge, executioner, juror, and witnesses and potentially prevent hauntings by the executed’s spirit). So it disheartens me to think that in our contemporary age we can refuse this basic empathy to someone about to be put to death (and come to think of it, engage in the spectacle of execution in the first place. So much for the advancement of society- tis’ a justice and violence obsessed culture of ours). Conjuring Lawrence Russell Brewer disturbed me for weeks, his crimes so heinous. But the poetics of the last meal lie in an unequivocal empathy for these most marginalized members of society. Was his action to protest his guilt or his sentence? After all, sitting down to eat this meal symbolizes the acceptance of one’s fate to die, resigning to the sentence. However, it is the state’s action that I find shameful, denying this basic rite to all prisoners to come. They let Brewer counter spectacle with spectacle and they just had to have the last word. The denial of the meal became another symbol, a symbol of punishment towards all those who refuse the state. A primitive reaction, which is not surprising from a state that sanctions such primitive justice.
So how did we implicate ourselves in cooking this meal, in eating this meal? We simultaneously accepted Brewer’s fate for him and cleared our conscience of putting him to death. It was an act of empathy toward both the condemned, deemed evil by society and toward the savage system of justice that put him to death. In a sense empathy is our own refusal.