Volume 16, Issue 2 - Focus: Law and Art in the Aftermath

Thinking about artistic representation as a form of political representation enables a better understanding of what can be seen and said, who has the ability to see it and say it, and how it is possible to know and do politics in different ways. In the case of Australia’s immigration system, this understanding is critical. Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum and refugees is widely criticised by the international community as violating international human rights and humanitarian laws and norms. The legal and bureaucratic frameworks surrounding refugees in Australia not only render their stories largely invisible but continue to perpetrate harm and suffering which goes unaddressed. In the absence of state protection, artistic representation becomes an important intervention into the practices and narratives surrounding Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum and refugees. In this article, I explore Hoda Afshar’s video and photographic artwork Remain (2018) which documents the experiences and struggles of a group of stateless men who were left to languish on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, in the aftermath of the Australian government closing its Manus Regional Processing Centre. Remain is one of the only available avenues open to the men to share their stories and to communicate the harm caused by national policy and practices. I argue that the artistic representation of Remain becomes a crucial form of political representation in this aftermath; political representation which would not otherwise be possible.

Drawing on the work of Kamari Maxime Clarke and Peter Rush, this essay offers a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) as a cinematic articulation of affective justice. In particular, it explores how, via the contrivance of a staged trial against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the film makes a direct yet deft intervention in the politics of international criminal law and global justice in the aftermath of the policies of structural adjustment imposed on the South by international financial institutions (IFIs). Mobilising the possibilities of cinema as a political and aesthetic practice, Sissako presents an “imaginative solution” (B.S. Chimni) that resists and re-envisions international law in the register of an affective call to justice. This call is grounded in two particular commitments: first, in an implicit critique of narrowly judicialized forms of justice that disregard the deeply felt realities of violence and inequality in the African postcolony; and second, in an imaginative effort to look beyond the limited horizon of current law and to envisage alternative possibilities for pursuing accountability and narrowing the impunity gap in present-day frameworks of international and global justice.

A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In this article, I argue that a key strand of this ‘legal turn’ should be historicised in two entwined ways. It can be seen as an extension and re-formalisation of some central concerns of late twentieth-century contemporary art; namely relational and participatory aesthetics, and the dematerialisation of the art object. But the artworks considered here can also be analysed as a fragmentary site of ‘juristic subjectivity’ in the aftermath of legal positivism. According to Carl Schmitt, the positivisation that took hold in the nineteenth century exiled the jurist from their role in formally elaborating the substantive law created by social praxis—turning the jurist into a “mere scholar” in relation to law. In this sense, the separation of juristic thought from law is the aftermath of this destructive event. Yet the etymology of aftermath also links it to a secondary growth that re-emerges after a mowing or harvest. Similarly, the ‘contract artists’ analysed here evidence a ‘regrowth’ of juristic thought that relies precisely on its position outside of law ‘properly so-called’, and inside the conditions of contemporary artistic production and consumption. Analysing contract artworks by artists Adrian Piper and A Constructed World, this article suggests that they differ markedly from the contract art, usually connected to the Siegelaub-Projansky agreement, that has received the majority of academic attention. Whereas that so-called “legal moment in artistic production” prioritises the author function, the abstraction of value, and the commodification of social relations, through the above double historicization I will argue that this ‘other’ contract art repurposes legal forms to institute a lived experience of juristic social relations, presenting a new kind of material jurisprudence.

This paper considers the relationship between site, memory and fine art practices, as viewed from the perspectives of a practitioner informed by the discourses of commemoration and the aftermath of conflict. Through an exploration of art works derived from encounters with displaced spaces, peripheries and edgelands, Gough situates his practice – and that of several selected artists – as a conversation between “ place ” , “ space ” and the geopolitical. Artists have long employed the notions of ambiguity, transition and the hybrid in their work. Framed within the discourses of liminality and aftershock, practitioners have explored various strategies to address rites of in-betweenness to evoke a sensation of transition and displacement. To explore these ideas, Gough posits a number of his artworks as ‘provocations’, and draws attention to other contemporary artists and practitioners similarly drawn to the aftermath of constructed places and re-constructed histories. The paper draws upon two suites of Gough’s work each addressing aspects of the aftermath, and each to a degree addressing issues of transgression. The first is a series of site-specific photographs take on the decrepit and abandoned British army bases in former West Germany where Gough’s family was garrisoned during the Cold War. They speak of an abjectness and blankness tempered by the depth of familial association. The second suite of practice use frottage , rubbings and photographic collage, to assemble a cycle of triptych forms drawn from prolonged site visits to the sites of twentieth century battle in Turkey, France, Belgium and Macedonia: locations richly associated with transgressive military intervention and now comprised of preserved terrain, military cemeteries and rhetorical topography that has long informed Gough’s practice.

Susanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games presents a dystopian world grounded upon the power of images. The controlling government uses visual eloquence to determine and project an accepted conception of the real and of its subjects’ identity which forcibly engenders normative commitment. Its main instrument in this sense is represented by “The Hunger Games”, an annual event in which two tributes are selected in each of the 12 districts of Panem to compete in a brutal fight to death until one victor remains. This acts as a punishment and a memento for the huge uprising of the past which led to the retaliating destruction and elimination of District 13. Within this context, tributes Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark engage in a visual and narrative counterposition against the government to reclaim the articulation of their identities and disrupting the created hyperreal dystopia of power.

I argue that the BBC, rather than exacerbating the sensationalism so prevalent in the British press at the turn of the century, worked steadfastly to curtail the rampant affronts to character that became commonplace in media representations of celebrity. The BBC’s efforts to “enculturate” its listeners became an incubator for the literary and legal culture of the age. As such, it blurred boundaries between elites and lower-class cultures. The BBC, founded in 1922, combated loose and sensational reporting, while it struggled with financing and legal identity. In 1927, the company was wound-up and the government established a new entity, under Royal Charter. This was crucial to the legal autonomy of the corporation, and differentiated it from those established under parliamentary statute. It also gave the BBC a monopoly over broadcasting. I will focus on these differences as I argue that while the voice of the new BBC was, by legal mandate, to be “unbiased,” the effects of John Reith’s management curtailed any hope of this goal in program content. I argue that while, pursuant to further government mandate, the BBC “may neither editorialize nor carry advertising,” Reith’s control and attempts to educate became points of contention to the legal mandate of the BBC. In effect, the BBC suffered an identity crisis at its inception, on one hand an unbiased instrument of government, reporting the proceedings of Parliament, for example, and on the other, a protected and autonomous legal entity under Charter. Alongside the Royal Charter and legal precedent surrounding the BBC’s inception and operation, my examination touches on the following primary texts: Ezra Pound’s The Testament of François Villon (1931), The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929 – 1960 (2008), Shaw’s Radio Plays, and some of the interviews conducted by the BBC with T.S. Eliot.

This paper analyses Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man as an influential example of post-9/11 literature. This novel, in describing the shattering impact of the destruction of the symbolic reference points that determine our experience of reality, has undoubtedly contributed to defining a “before and after 9/11” cultural scenario, where the new era is abruptly marked by the presence of new meanings, new attitudes, new spaces and new categories. This complex reframing of reality has engendered a new approach to the role of art, and especially of literature, in the Western world. This paper demonstrates that Falling Man can be read a site of political (re)configuration, in which the return to the link between the creative process and the issue of terrorism – a theme that runs through much of DeLillo’s writing – leads to a move beyond established categories and concepts. Such a move responds to a public need for a reconceptualisation of paradigms of terror/horror. I argue that the novel’s narrativisation of terrorism has introduced important suggestions into the contemporary cultural panorama, which now allow us to identify both a new form of terrorism that is closely connected with the emergent metamodern sensibility, and new aesth-ethical concepts that are better suited to describing contemporary violence.