Images on the limit of the law: the effigy in modern art

Abstract

The disciplines of jurisprudence and visual studies have recently and meaningfully overlapped. Jurisprudence has become increasingly interested in how the legal subject is ‘interpellated’ through images of authority and law. Visual studies has extended their analysis past art to certain images that command and discipline, that control and punish (as opposed to merely the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, etc). Both disciplines explore the possibility that images can be treated as people (or at least embedded socially like a God or ideology), as a social ‘subject' in themselves, and this definition of the image is explained through psychoanalytic theory, sociology and anthropology. This thesis focuses on this image that acts like the father figure, a ‘king', an image in front of which we are asked to bow down.

In an apparent reversion these innovative approaches to images are brought back to the modernist canon. Simply put. artists are legal subjects, as we all are, but subjects with a particularly attuned sensibility to images, including the law's images. The modernist avant-garde is reframed in legal terms, in particular representations of sovereignty. Through mimicry, parody or appropriation modern art uses vestiges of ‘the king's body’ as a site of critique; disguised behind the formalism of modernism, the vestige of courtly art still lingers where the artist dissents not as the avant-garde outsider but from within the symbolic order.

The approach is not analytical but attempts to play at the limit ofthe law. The artists respond to the issue of sovereignty in different ways depending on a number of different factors: historical. social and political. The political freedom of the modem legal subject. the aesthetic freedom of the modern artist. and the particular autonomy of the sovereign are all conflated terms in the artworks chosen. The artists use many differing strategies in response to the authority of the sovereign — they taunt. tease, anarchically displace, hysterically call for, indifferently accept, and attack the 'king’ through their images. In the end the ‘king’ is probed by attacking the fantasies that cover his lack the ‘void‘ on which power and law is founded.