Tongue-Cut Sparrows
Tongue-Cut Sparrows, 1996, three-channel video, duration 08:55 (excerpt 2:18)
Each day men and women congregate on the streets below the jails in different cities throughout the world in an effort to communicate with their incarcerated friends and loved ones. They do not speak with words but have invented a simple and effective sign language using their arms and hands.
Even though this form of communication is usually on a public street it has a very private aspect to it, and is ultimately more personal and immediate.
As might be expected, most of the signing deals with family matters and local gossip, however, I asked if they could sign William Shakespeare, Alighieri Dante, William Blake, as well as contemporary writers, Cormac McCarthy, Benjamin Saenz, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Not only were they very receptive to the idea, they were instrumental in choosing certain passages and works that exemplified their love and loss and desperate need to communicate.
–James Drake
Click on images below to enlarge
Tongue-Cut Sparrows, in all its variations, is a work in which the essential and eternal need to communicate electrocutes the body so violently that a new language is born and a new history emerges. If the closes person to you is incarcerated (and make no mistake that large parts of the world’s population are, and most often in direct relationship to their class and race in the dominant culture), what kind of justice is therein the enforced silence that blocks out the touch of the world? […] Drake saw, and then recorded, the phenomenon of an emergence of nothing less than a new language. The men and women both inside and outside of the El Paso County Detention Facility invented a language (and think how difficult that is—how great the pain must be to have to circumvent all of civilization’s past inscriptions), a language of gesture, of icons, of a semiotics founded in loneliness, to produce an eloquent choreography of caring.
–“Skin Language” by Bruce W. Ferguson
Tongue-Cut Sparrows Inside/Outside, 2007, two-channel video, duration 22:00 (excerpt 6:27)
Exhibitions
Tongue-Cut Sparrows (Desire is not Enough)
Moody Gallery, Houston, TX
September 8 – October 13, 2018
James Drake: Tongue-Cut Sparrows
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
March 10, 2018 – May 20, 2018
three-channel video installation
Videosphere: A New Generation
Albright Knox Art Museum, Buffalo, NY
July 1 – October 9, 2011
Talking Pictures
Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM
October 10, 2009 – January 10, 2010
Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense
Venice Biennale 2009, Italy
52nd International Art Exhibition
Curated by Robert Storr
Tongue-Cut Sparrows
Diverse Works Art Space, Houston, TX
September 12-October 6, 1996