"Before the Look of Law" Art Exhibition & Opening Reception
Before the Look of Law revisits The Look of Law, the 2006 exhibition organized by Simon Leung at the University Art Gallery. Organized during the height of the United States' "War on Terror" and military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the earlier exhibition examined the relationship between state power and the psyche. Twenty years later, this project returns to those questions while shifting its focus toward collective forms of resistance and political imagination. The conference accompanying the original exhibition was later published by the College Art Association in Art Journal, and Leung's introductory essay received the journal's award for the year's most distinguished contribution.
Exhibiting Artists: Cameron Rowland, Tarik Garrett, York Chang, Ashley Hunt, Lincoln Tobier, Tiffany Sia, Samar Al Summary, Zoe Leonard, Paul McCarthy, Kiyan Williams, Na Mira, Sheila Pinkel, Alberto Lule, and Kim Zumpfe & Luke Quezada.
Before the Look of Law is a joint project between Critical Theory and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts with the support of Poetic Justice, Terra Foundation, the Glasser Center, and the Claire Trevor Society.
Exhibition Dates: October 3rd to December 12th in Contemporary Arts Center Gallery | Room Gallery | University Art Gallery
Opening Reception: October 10th, 2:00-5:00pm in Beall Center for Arts & Technology
Please RSVP for the reception here: Ecotechnics and Before the Look of Law Opening Reception
More information on the parallel program will be shared soon.
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"Before the Look of Law is a proposition based on several returns. The first is a return to Franz Kafka's parable, Before the Law (1915). There we encounter an image of a man waiting for permission to enter the Law, only to have the door shut on him in the final moments before death. He learns then that the door of Law was constructed not for everyone, as he had assumed, but solely for him. Law is an all-encompassing, isolating and unknowable framework of power to which our sense of the self and the social are tethered. At the same time, Law’s authority does not exist outside its arrangement of how and why it is given and with whom we come to gather before it.
The second is a return to The Look of Law, an exhibition organized by Simon Leung for the University Art Gallery in 2006. Responding to the "War on Terror" and wars waged by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, it charted the interstitial relationship between surveillance, the police, the prison, the military, the border; the erosion of the public sphere; the constant state of war; and the structural collusion between nationalism, corporate capitalism and mass media. From within these confluences, its artworks crystallized direct and residual effects of state power on the psyche.
The third is a return that layers the first two. It focuses on the intersection of Law and the psyche – the look of law – to ask a fundamental question embedded in Kafka’s parable: what does it mean to desire, to stand before, to be subject to, the power of Law? The difficulty of this question is compounded by unspeakably dire circumstances for society’s most vulnerable, including members of our campus. Ours is a time of a technologically accelerated hostile takeover of the collective psyche by a state/corporate/media collusion perpetuating unprecedented destruction of life and land, domestically and abroad.
The works presented in Before the Look of Law span those made in the early 1990’s to newly commissioned pieces. They reassemble the uncanny parts of real life that follow us into the place and time of waiting before the Law. They testify against militarized policing, mass imprisonment, global war-making, and the suppression of gender and sexual freedom. And they operate in double-time and longue durée to place an arrest on “the present.”
Their aesthetic strategies are far-ranging: from parrhesia to parody, speculative para-fiction to granular studies of materiality; from redistributing auras of the indexical to exploring the extra-legality of the readymade. They reflexively focus on the formation and mythification of Law’s capture of life as, among other dynamics, the work of artifice. Each possesses the ability of returning “the look of law” through dilating apertures in its gaze. Each holds urgent and abiding lessons about disobedience, aesthetic, political, and otherwise, at the edge of democracy and fascism."
