Out of Bounds: Confronting War Crimes and the Breakdown of Justice with Contemporary Art

Recent art has turned to judiciary and extra-judiciary practices, specifically in the context of international conflicts, in order to assert art’s political accountability and relevance to our capacity to historicise the present. The war in Iraq inspired works that directly address issues of representation and remediation, such as Marc Quinn’s Mirage (2008), in which the aesthetic experience opens onto an ambiguous experience of the breakdown of justice. Other works have chosen to turn carceral space itself into the site of a collective remembering that harnesses affect to a critical reflection on the administration of justice, on assent and dissent. This article will turn to key works by Marc Quinn and Trevor Paglen that confront extra-judiciary malpractices, but also to recent collective art projects involving an interdisciplinary take on the experience of imprisonment, such as Inside. Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (2016), in which artists of all backgrounds responded to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis on the very premises of Wilde’s incarceration, as well as the work of 2019 Turner Prize co-recipient: Jordanian sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan whose recent works rely on testimonies from Syrian detainees and probe the political pragmatics of aural art. All these works have turned to the document—literary, visual, aural—to reflect on the process of experiential mediation. How does the experience of imprisonment, or extra-judiciary malpractices, come to the spectator? How are they read, heard, interpreted, remediated? The article ponders the remediation and displacement of aesthetic experience itself and the “response-ability”—following Donna Haraway’s coinage—of such a repoliticised embodied experience. It will assess the way by which such interdisciplinary works rethink the poetics of the documentary for an embodied intellection of justice—and injustice—in the present.

History, pastness and the postgenomic imaginary

This article considers the ways that poets, rappers and artists including Kendrick Lamar, Residente, Zaffar Kunial, Michael Symons Roberts, Hannah Sullivan and Marc Quinn have responded to the biomedical postgenomic gaze and the ways in which they have dissented or built on this seemingly new way of conceiving of the human. These poets and rappers consider what it means to imagine in a postgenomic way and the possible implications of this for writing, art and living. The multiple texts I explore and articulate how postgenomic identities have been expanded and understood and imagined. They participate, therefore, in the consideration articulated by Jenny Reardon of the ‘postgenomic condition’ but, as I argue, they extend and debate this. These texts interrogate what the postgenomic condition enables aesthetically and, more importantly, what type of critique might be developed. Rather than be constrained by being postgenomic, they see opportunity for expansion, development, innovation and critique. In these articulations, then, we can discern a roadmap for being postgenomic, as poetry seems to offer a thoughtful means for navigating the complexity of this new state.

Doubly Monstrous?

In this article I consider instances in visual culture in which artists and filmmakers aestheticize women with damaged, missing or anomalous limbs. I focus upon Joel Peter Witkin’s photomontage Las Meninas (1987), Peter Greenaway’s film “A Zed and Two Noughts” (1985), Alison Lapper Pregnant a statue by Marc Quinn, Mathew Barney’s film “Cremaster” (2002), David Cronenberg’s “Crash” (1996), Luis Buñuel’s “Tristana” (1970) and David Lynch’s short film “The Amputee” (1973). I argue that although the artists and filmmakers reveal, rather than disguise the damaged, anomalous or missing limb(s) of the women, thus valorising their particular embodiment, these women are paradoxically still portrayed as deviant and monstrous.

Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination

This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and “prosthetic” pregnancy, it asks whether the “monstrous” can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and potential power of the pregnant subject.