Abstract
Law and literature, an exemplary product of the textual turn in the study of culture, has found itself challenged by the more recent visual turn in critical thought. However, debate hitherto has been largely based on a two-dimensional approach to the visual. By going beyond the metaphor of the ‘legal screen’ in favour of a theory of the ‘statuesque’, this essay adds a new dimension to the way we think about the force of law in culture. Drawing on eighteenth-century and contemporary aesthetic theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century public art, the article presents an account of the political aesthetics of law in which a place for the possibility of justice may be made.
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Notes
Pliny is referring to sculpting in marble; casting in bronze was regarded as more recent.
Martini had abandoned sculpture following the defeat of fascism.
Three works featuring the human figure appeared on the ‘Fourth Plinth’ at Trafalgar Square since the series was initiated in 1999: Mark Wallinger, Ecce Homo (1999); Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), and Anthony Gormley, One and Other (2009). For an examination of the return of the human statue and its relation to a cultural desire for foundational bodies of truth and law, see Kayman (2010).
In ‘Psyche’, Derrida describes deconstruction as ‘a certain experience of the impossible’ (2007, p.15, my italics), just as invention is ‘an experience of finding for the first time’ (p.23; my italics).
The statue of Laocoön and his sons being strangled by a sea-serpent was considered by Pliny the Elder to be the greatest artwork as yet created. It is believed to date from c. 42-20 BCE—although the marble sculpture held by the Vatican may be a copy of an earlier original.
The reference to this law—which appears anecdotal—appears in Varia Historia, by the Roman rhetorician Claudius Aelianus (ca. 175–ca. 235), 4.4.
This tendency is exacerbated where the visual, for example, is presented as being more ‘direct’ in its address than the verbal, or where the citizen is envisaged in a vulgar manner as no more than a passive victim of state oppression.
Hesse’s work can be viewed at: http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/71396, accessed 5 May, 2012.
The 7 July Memorial can be viewed at http://www.carmodygroarke.com/projects/publicspace/066.html, accessed 5 May, 2012. Four bombings took place in London on ‘7/7’: three on underground trains, and a fourth on board a bus. Fifty-six people were killed, including the four bombers, and hundreds injured.
In that sense, rather than challenging that narrative, Anthony Gormley’s One and Other (2007) confirmed the post-colonial inclusiveness, the ‘free flow of pedestrians’ that Westminster Council sought to protect.
Cf. ‘I imagine that not one person in 10,000 going through Trafalgar Square knows any details about the lives of those two generals. It might be that it is time to look at moving them and having figures on those plinths that ordinary Londoners would know.’—Ken Livingstone 20 October, 2000 (quoted in Kelso 2000).
An image can be found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarc_big1.html, accessed 5 May, 2012.
While the statue no longer perturbs the space of Federal Plaza, in November 2011, Foley Square became the site of the Occupy movement’s initial New York action.
As John Lechte (p.18) puts it: sculpture ‘evokes touch as much as it entails real touching.’
The idea that law is tactful in no way contradicts the theory of the law as violence argued in ‘Force of Law’; since the end of public executions, that violence is held back, the law is ‘tactful’ in displaying its violent touch as a threat rather than a routine.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Julia Chryssostalis and to other participants at ‘The Letter of the Law’ conference (University of Athens, May 2011), to Oren Ben-Dor and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos from the ‘Westminster Dialogue’ on Art and Law (November 2010), and to Maria Aristodemou, Claire Connolly, Ralf Grüttemeier, Greta Olson and Alison Wray, for all their assistance in developing this essay.
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Kayman, M.A. The Law and the Statuesque. Law Critique 24, 1–22 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9114-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9114-9