Rotten Prettiness? The Forensic Aesthetic and Crime as Art

Autor: Rebecca Scott Bray
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: Australian Feminist Law Journal. 40:69-95
ISSN: 2204-0064
1320-0968
DOI: 10.1080/13200968.2014.931900
Popis: This article explores the forensic aesthetic of four contemporary artists who draw on the legal archive. The growing cultural engagement with law's archive demonstrates that artists and curators are no longer simply exhibiting archival police photographs. Artists are engaging in diverse translations of crime and highlighting abstract uses of forensic material. Consequently, contemporary artists who engage with the subjects and objects of crime demonstrate different levels of archival access, alternate versions of the ‘legal archive’, and entail varied responses to the extra-legal use of legal evidence. These developments mean that judgment about the use of archival products needs to be equally nuanced. This article explores the growing complexity of the relationship between art and law's archive that is not reducible to questions of either evidence or aesthetic style. It argues that we need to unpack the unique demands we make for evidence as spectators of crime, and the difficult mediation offere...
Databáze: OpenAIRE