The installation of Mark Wallinger’s State Britain in the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain recreated Brian Haw’s protest opposite the Houses of Parliament, which had largely been dismantled by the police under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Wallinger’s work bisected a boundary created by the Act inside which the police could be given greater than usual powers to control demonstrations. The intersection exemplified how, when understood in terms of the performative after Jacques Derrida, art may unsettle the ways in which both the law and aesthetics work to protect the political establishment.
Internet art that visualizes data has art historical precedents that invite its critical effect to be engaged with as rhetoric and not only an accurate representation of a specific state of affairs. Art that opens an engagement with a representation of data as an iteration of an underlying system invites an awareness of the contingency of that system. The nature of the internet makes it an effective site for this to occur. Internet art may allow an awareness of how a system might become more ethical in the future.
Models of Integrity explores art as created, marketed, sold, and experienced within contexts framed and regulated by legal systems. Joan Kee provides a nuanced discussion of the way in which the intersection of art with law invites us to think creatively about law (5). In doing so, she rejects a simplistic characterization of the relationship between art and law as being one of incomprehension and antagonism. Instead, Kee acknowledges and draws out the complex inter-connections between the two spheres, which facilitates the scope art has to open a critical engagement with law. Kee's own engagement with the relationship between art and law is developed through a series of case studies of artistic practices and tactics. For example, the focus of Chapter 1 is "The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement" (also known as the Artist's Contract) created in 1971 by Seth Siegelaub, the famous promoter of conceptual art, and Robert Projansky, a lawyer. In Chapter 2, the legal and logistical complexities involved in the creation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work Running Fence (1976) provides the context for an engagement with negotiation. Kee focuses her study on a moment in art history characterized as "a crucial opportunity for artists to whom integrity represented a necessary expansion of artistic identity in an age of political malfeasance" (4). But Models of Integrity is not limited to concerns about the integrity of art work as an object (19) or concerns about the protection of artistic reputation. In Chapter 3, Gordon Matta-Clark's work, characterized as a "form of self-expression through property" (5), is understood to open a critique of the consequences of law for people's lives in terms of their exclusion from private property and the perpetuation of social hierarchies of privilege through ownership (112). In other chapters, integrity is discussed in terms of being prepared to decline the shelter provided by the "labels of 'art' and 'artists'" (47) or the refusal of "emotional neutrality" (229). Kee identifies art in which integrity is manifested in a variety of ways (5) and examines how it works both within and against the law to uncover alternative "models of integrity" according to which the law itself is held to account. Specifically, through the case studies, the book uncovers the way art in post-sixties America invited reflection on lived experience and "modelled values different from those of corporations, institutions, governments, and other traditional sources of authority" (4). For example, in Chapter 4, Kee looks at Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performances through a lens of contractual obligation, only then to turn the understanding which this vision enables back on the authority of law. Kee claims the "unbending strictness" of the rules Hsieh set for himself in performing his work "grafted personal integrity onto professional integrity in ways that made the force of actual statutory and judicial law seem pale by comparison" (132). Whilst some artists invited reflection on what integrity me...
Art has used the tactic of parasitism, which has included the appropriation of intellectual property such as brand images, to challenge the accumulation and exploitation of consumer data in the socalled co-creation of corporate identity. This is greatly facilitated by online real-time technologies. Corporations understand brands to capture the identity of an organisation. Intellectual property laws are used to protect brands in the crucial commercial process of the formation, stabilisation and manipulation of corporate identity. In TM Clubcard (1997) Rachel Baker employed direct lifts of supermarket logos to parasite Tesco's 'Clubcard,' which was the UK's first supermarket loyalty card scheme. The work associated the supermarket brand with what Baker called a "dysfunctional" database of members. Tesco threatened legal action, which led to Baker redirecting TM Clubcard towards another supermarket: Sainsbury's. TM Clubcard collected personal details, and together with a claim that the work was deceptive, one of the supermarkets also asserted that it was entitled to this data. The work was brought to an end after a warning from law firms that legal proceedings would be issued. Baker explicitly situated the appropriation of the supermarkets' brands by TM Clubcard in the context of Duchamp's ready-mades. The implications of such art for identity construction may be engaged with through the performative after Derrida. A stark opposition between the law and art is too simplistic. The intersection between the two opens the possibility of engaging with the violence of the law as exemplified in the ways it structures and forecloses the ways that identities may be created and perpetuated. This violence is intertwined with the law's claims to being ahistorical and acontextual. Art invites inventive encounters with the contingencies and constraints of the legal system(s) by which it is simultaneously both threatened and enabled.
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