Book Review: Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America

Abstract

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...