Abstract
A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics is an interdisciplinary anthology edited by art historian Marit Paasche and video installation artist Judy Radul. Published by Berlin/New York-based publisher, Sternberg Press, with the support of the Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo, the volume marks the occasion of Radul’s large-scale media exhibition, ‘World Rehearsal Court’. 1 Through the contribution of internationally renowned artists and scholars, A Thousand Eyes assesses how the aesthetics and spatial arrangements of new media technologies affect the court of law. The idea unifying the anthology’s essays is the court’s permeability to the world outside. The court depends on architecturally and hermeneutically excluding the outside world. However, its trials are increasingly staged on screen, relying on a burgeoning range of new (representational) media technologies, bringing what was outside, in. The essays in the volume interpret the court, and the photographs, video and audio recordings brought within its confines, according to their correlates in contemporary art, cinema and mass media.
Sociologist Richard Mohr begins from the premise that the court’s architectural borders have, since Ancient Greece, been patrolled and protected from the profanities of the outside world. Mohr considers how new media technologies challenge the court’s architectural borders. Scholar of Russian theatre and cinema, Julia Cassiday and documentary filmmaker, Eyal Sivian, explore the performative constitution of the court. Cassiday explores how the success of Soviet show trials depended on disguising their avant-garde theatrical nature, whilst Sivian explores how video technologies were used selectively in Adolf Eichmann’s trial to strengthen Zionist collective memory. He exposes a preference in documentary filmmaking to represent victims rather than perpetrators, a deficit which could be addressed by aesthetic jurisprudence and/or visual criminology. Legal media scholar Cornelia Vismann and one of the anthology’s editors, Radul, distinguish between the effects of different media technologies on the court. Vismann compares cinema with television through an analysis of Otto Preminger’s movie Anatomy of a Murder. She argues that cinema shores up, while television’s spatial architecture threatens law’s hermeneutic borders. Radul’s ‘Video Chamber’ (the only new chapter written for this publication) distinguishes theatre from the moving image of cinema. She understands the camera’s lens as demarcating space like the theatre’s stage. However, she applies Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1980) concept of assemblage to distribution of perception in court, to explain how the camera’s lens dissolves the fourth wall of the court (as theatre), so that space, rather than division, defines the court. She concludes that video technologies render the ‘real-time-real-place’ nature of the court permeable to the outside world, beyond the closed world of theatre through the inclusion of these ‘other’ spaces.
Radul’s chapter moves law and literature scholars beyond thinking about the court as a theatrical and rhetorical space and legal theorist and historian of rhetoric Peter Goodrich continues this idea in his essay. Goodrich asks, whether literature is still worth critical legal scholars’ attention with the increasing presence of new media technologies. He endorses an even more interdisciplinary interpretation of law.
Historian Martin Jay attends to the ‘meaning’ of the allegorical iconography of justice, specifically the Roman goddess of justice, Justitia. Jay applies Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s (1973) political economic theory of equivalence and fetish to an historical account of Justitia’s vision. He interprets her (lack of) sight as representing changing legal attitudes towards context and degrees of admissibility in the court. Legal scholar Costas Douzinas extends Jay’s idea of vision and context. Douzinas promotes understanding the law as porous and seeks to develop a critique of visibility with regard to images.
Legal historian Piyel Haldar and philosopher Avital Ronell question the possibility of objective proof in court. Haldar explores evidential images. Haldar posits that the court admits as evidence, images on the basis that they represent an objective, real, but that this premise is at odds with how those images are subsequently interpreted. Ronell works through the limitations of language. In court, testimony is irreducible to fiction. However, she argues that language—as a literary form—is fiction.
A Thousand Eyes is relevant to scholars in aesthetic jurisprudence because of its focus on iconography; to scholars in law and literature because of its focus on the role and intersection of theatricality, rhetoric and literary forms; and finally, to scholars of visual criminology because of its focus on spatial architecture and the image in criminal justice. Nine of the ten essays in the anthology have previously been published elsewhere. Notwithstanding the integrity of each essay in isolation, this does show. Radul’s chapter neatly fits the anthology as it was written for the collection. Her critique of space and the court is expanded in another anthology published recently (Radul, 2011). It seems timely for her theoretical work to appear as a monograph.
The essays may collectively appear an odd fit, but brought together here, along with artworks, they mark some kind of affirmation of the intersection of aesthetics, law and criminal justice. I first saw A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics in the Tate Modern bookshop in London and later, in Modern Art at Oxford. The anthology’s presence in the bookshops of two of the UK’s leading venues for the presentation of modern and contemporary visual art, both with an established international reputation, demonstrates the art world’s recognition of law. However, my worry is whether the converse is true. Can the essays be read together as a celebration of law’s recognition of art? The future development of aesthetic jurisprudence and visual criminology will determine the extent to which A Thousand Eyes can be declared a celebration of creative publishing.