Equality by lot

The Kleroterion is a sculpture by Taryn Simon. It was originally presented at the Storm King art center in New York in 2024. It is now on display at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Alfred Mac Adam, Professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University, reviews the work at The Brooklyn Rail, a website billing itself as “Critical perspectives on art, politics and Culture. Independent and Free”.

Adam explains the workings of the sculpture:

The machine randomly picked one from a group thus avoiding any possibility for corruption. Simon’s recreation, which looks something like a classic PEZ dispenser as Donald Judd might have reconfigured it, stands alone in one room of the gallery. The space is curtained in red drapery, with red carpet on the flooring forming a pathway to the kleroterion. To run the device, each of five viable candidates for office would be assigned a colored lozenge. The lozenges would be inserted into a slot and a crank turned until all but one lozenge were ejected from the machine, declaring the winner.

As Adam describes things, and indeed, looking at the device itself which has very few slots, Simon’s device is quite different from the Athenian kleroterion. While the Athenians used the device to select office holder from among the population as a whole, and thus had very many slots carved into the stone, Simon’s device is used for selecting one of a handful of finalists. Thus Simon’s device retains the most important feature of elections – the drastic narrowing of the field of possible office holders from the whole population to a handful of candidates. And indeed, when Adam writes about Simon’s kleroterion as a selection mechanism that it is

A theoretically fine way to keep anyone from interfering, unless of course some outside power handpicked the five eligible candidates—a possibility that remains unaddressed,

he zooms in on the crucial phase of the narrowing of the field. While his phrasing is that of a conspiracy theory rather than that of systematic analysis, shifting the focus away from the ultimate selection and to the process that sets up the field of candidates is rather astute.

Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition |