Power and Misrecognition: The Cordelia/Fool Series

Abstract

Power and Misrecognition: The Cordelia/Fool Series asks which qualities of painting can help in our understanding of ourselves as subjects of law and power. I have developed a mode of theatrical, performative painting that stylistically and narratively remains open. The narrative of the tableaux seeks to account for the law’s inability to totally account for its subjects. The medium of painting is revisited as the traditional courtly or authoritative art, especially the genre of history painting; in this series though painting’s agency is shown to be displaced and debased. The painting itself also embodies the foreclosure of the law’s complete imagining and imaging of the subject. My approach is contextualised within a variety of alternative artistic responses to legal subjecthood: post-conceptual painting, psychoanalytic theory, and critical legal studies. Ultimately this research paper and body of paintings argue for a meaningful and ethical response to “interpellation” constituted through an aesthetic acknowledgment of openness and law’s incompleteness. In this process the subject of the law is paradoxically shown to be the site of control but also the site of resistance and negotiation. This mode of resistance, from within the law’s structures, is defined through the act of artistic praxis as something that is ultimately part of the legal irrational, and also through a close law rereading of Cordelia’s character from King Lear, who becomes a proxy for the misrecognition of the law. My overall research findings have been presented in this research paper, an illustrated play (and set of tableaux scenes) and a series of paintings.