Imminent Lawless Action: Buck-Morss v. Enwezor

This essay argues that the seemingly disparate concepts of art and law are connected by the question of dissent and its its own juridico/linguistic limitation. It is my contention that at this stage of our global order, the only space left for an artistic practice is that of questioning institutional frameworks through and against the language of law.

If in fact the United States is our current version of Empire, then it is precisely through a cultural production informed by but not limited to Western artistic notions of the avant-garde that the questioning of U.S. laws, the U.S. Constitution and their global materialization will be elucidated.

I. Introduction

A keen reader would be quick to question the privileging of art as the only viable practice from which to question and subvert institutional orders of abuse, gross authoritarianism and vulgar displays of power. My only answer to this, and perhaps my only viable answer, is that when I speak of art I speak of it in quotation marks. For it is only as “art” that one can begin to define a new space that is forward-looking and yet of course indebted to a long history of cultural practices and interventions, previously defined (and at times derided and misunderstood) by many professionals and academics as the avant-garde.

I speak of law because, again, it is my belief that only through the learning, the being intimate in, and the dismantling of this linguistic code can one have any viable options left for a liberated sense of existence. It is be learning the function and functioning of these “legal fictions”(1) that one can initiate an investigation into the grey areas well understood by a chosen few, but certainly unrecognizable by the large majority. It is through an actual testing of these grey areas, through a material practice, that the force of law and its crushing grip shows its demonic face. It is in and through this materialization and not through representation that law itself can be put on trial. Lastly, if the First Amendment scholar, Steven Shiffrin, is correct in stating that the primary role of the First Amendment is to protect dissent(2), then the First Amendment is our own worst enemy. I respectfully dissent and contend that true dissent needs no First Amendment protection.

Of course, when one speaks of law one speaks of many things, but the same happens in art and will certainly happen in globalization. But this should not stop us from attempting to surmise and delineate a fourth direction or a fifth sunset. One fears that amongst the inability to pinpoint a unified measure and definition of globalization the potential will be lost for any true understanding, leading to an irresponsible and immaterial tossing of this concept/metaphor.

II. Art v. “art”

The decline of art and its socio/political importance can certainly be seen in the advertent and conscious disavowal of its potential as a critical practice. This understanding, and perhaps the misunderstanding by many in the visual field, that critical art meant the immediate marriage and translation of much 20th Century critical theory into a visual format. In this sense, visual art since the early 1980s was perfectly aligned with the birth of the Sony Betamax, in that it did nothing more than allow a facilitation and gross misunderstanding of the role of agency in subjectivity and political manifestations. In other words this simplified understanding of the relation between art and theory was nothing more than the ability to disengage with a visual text and simply freeze frame, forward, and edit it for easy consumption and manipulability. One no longer had to engage at that particular moment and with a certain amount of urgency and immediacy. One could always wait until after dinner time!

This disavowal transformed and morphed into a waiting for someone else to freeze frame, forward, and edit. We became more enamored with preconceived ideas and images than with our own creative imagination and the visual possibilities of its discontent. Of no immediate obviousness was the stalling of critical art writing for and by artists themselves. The critical apparatus of the pen gave way to a thorough understanding of market forces and to a desire to be part of Debord’s much derided spectacle. In fact, one would have thought that so much critical theory, philosophy and identity politics would have ignited a wider and more in-depth critical understanding and verbal production by artists, but was instead formulated and packaged as semiotics within a frame, deconstruction on a canvas, and Marxism as a muse for institutional critique.

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