Law and the Image – Conference Report

Colette R. Brunschwig

From 24th to 25th September 2010, a conference was held at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm with the title “Law and the Image.” It was organized by Prof. Dr. Leif Dahlberg, School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH, Stockholm, Håkan Gustafsson, lecturer, Department of Law, University of Gothenburg (Göteborgs universitet), and Pelle Snickars, lecturer, Research Department, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm.

According to its website, the purpose of this conference was ”to address the different ways in which law regulates the uses of images, as well as the changing historical image of the law – both in law and literature and in other artistic practices. What happens for example in the transition from analogue to digital, and what are the legal and political implications of digitization? Digitization activities in the heritage sector, where analogue image archives becomes binary files, are a battlefield where copyright and fair use, creative commons and open source seem constantly to be renegotiated.” (see http://www.kb.se/Forskning/2010/Law-and-the-Image/; last accessed on November 26, 2010).

With the kind permission of Professor Dr. Leif Dahlberg (see http://www.nada.kth.se/~dahlberg/research/index.html, last accessed on November 26, 2010), I would like to quote a part from his conference report:

”The conference opened with a paper by Costas Douzinas (Birckbeck College, University of London) that examined the scopic field and regimes of visibility in phenomenological terms, making the argument that law historically constituted a cognitive and aesthetic field of normative world making. Rather than merely inverting Shelley’s dictum that the ”poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, Douzinas argued for the necessity to develop legal aesthetics. The majority of the papers that followed, tried in various ways to answer this call for a phenomenology of law.

The most immediate way in pursuing such legal aesthetics was in examining law itself as an aesthetic object. Martin Kayman, Cardiff University, and Gary Watt, University of Warwick, discussed the power of law to produce icons, in the sense of unreadable texts or textiles. Kayman explored how American law circumnavigates the prohibition against public display of religion by (performatively) declaring certain religous texts as ”iconic” and thereby transforming a text into an illegible image. Watt analysed legal argumentation as a form of dress-making in which the primary purpose is to hide rather than uncover naked reality. 

Several speakers at the conference focused on the way that visual art can be used to present political power, but also to question it and to put it into question. Sidia Fiorato, Università di Verona, analyzed the choreography of modern classical ballet, in Romeo and Juliet, as a way of reading individual resistance to patriarchal political power. Paul Raffield, University of Warwick, studied the semiotics of Medieval and Early Modern English portraiture and its capacity both to constitute and to subvert traditional perceptions of law, legality and kingship. 

Even more problematic are perhaps the legal structures inherent in the artwork (and the artworld) itself. In four different papers – by Ari Hirvonen, University of Helsinki; Max Liljefors, Lunds universitet; Christine Poggi, University of Pennsylvania; and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Aarhus Universitet –, contemporary artists and artworks were discussed in terms of disclosure and deconstruction of law. Hirvonen discussed the Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft’s provocative use of female bodies to uncover the relation between corporality and individuality, which ties the human to both the moral and the legal norm. Similarly, Poggi discussed Santiago Sierra’s use of underprivileged people in his artwork, both as ways of disclosing social inequalities and as problematizing the aesthetics of the white gallery space (the white box). Liljefors analyzed how contemporary artists directly or indirectly violate laws not only in order to create art, but also to break into – and become recognized by – the artworld. In several of these artworks, the artist’s intention appears to be to criticize the socio-legal order, as for instance in Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience as analyzed by Simonsen. Several of these papers also situated the artworks in the legal phenomenology set up by Douzinas in his opening speech.

The relationship between law and images also has a regulative aspect, as formalized in modern copyright legislation. Several papers focused on the relation between law and the image, suggested either a widening of its reach (Katarina Renman Claesson, Stockholms universitet) or on the contrary to increase public access to artistic and intellectual works (Merima Bruncevic, Göteborgs universitet, and Pelle Snickars, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm). In connection with these papers, there was a very constructive discussion of different kinds of rights, distinguishing individual property rights (usally held by artists and authors) and so-called ”related rights” (typically held by media companies). 

The last group of papers focused on the use of images and imagery in the legal process, again explicity returning to the opening call for a legal aesthetics. Daniela Carpi, Università di Verona, analyzed the use of photography in criminal trials and the problematics of contextual fragmentation. Richard Sherwin, New York Law School, extended this discussion into the domain of moving images from CCTV and video surveillance cameras. In both cases, the presumed naïvete of the legal eye should not remained unchallenged, but instead be exposed as the scopic dress of a legal aesthtics. Examinning law on the screen demands a deeper media literacy. 

As hopefully may be gleaned from this brief conference report, the papers were interconnected with each other in both fruitful and critical ways. In the eyes of this reviewer, this was a most stimulating and productive conference.” 

This report demonstrates that conferences like these promote dialogue between scholars and practitioners interested in multisensory law and its branches, such as visual law and audio-visual law.

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