The art of law (and the law of art) is perpetual crisis

• Published in: Jindal global law review 2022-06, Vol.13 (1), p.141-153
• Main Authors: Keeney, Gavin, Jain, Ishita, Bhavsar, Harsh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Fundamentals of Law; International Economic Law; Law; Law and Criminolgy; Legal History; Philosophy of Law; Photo Essay; Theories of Law; Trade Law
• ISSN: 0975-2498; 2364-4869
• DOI: 10.1007/s41020-022-00164-x

In this performance-based work, which essentially concerns the fable of ‘Khi + Ordo’, we obliquely—through visual-textual storytelling—focus on what we call ‘the agency of the artist-scholar’, deconstructing, inter alia , many of the rules and regulations associated with the art-academic industrial complex—i.e., the institutional dictates to produce commodifiable works, the enforced metrics associated with authorised forms of research and publication, and the often-inelegant and mostly unnecessary dance that the artist-scholar performs with ‘all of that’. The photo-essay is developed from the archive of the Out of India Collective (OOI), but in association with the Metropolitan Transmedia Authority (MTA), its successor collective. It draws upon documents associated with OOI experiments in transmedia undertaken across multiple submissions for residencies, exhibitions, and publications in both academia and the art world in the years 2017–2019, even as it focuses upon the fable of ‘Khi + Ordo’. ‘Ordo’ is a synonym (or metaphor) for totalitarian states and regimes—‘regimes’ being, in this case, those that rule art + law. ‘Law’ here infers, through its negation, the appearance of a higher law, one that is entered upon when one resists assimilation to the rules and regulations associated with police states—incipient or otherwise. We call that other law ‘works-based agency’, and the artist-scholar is beholden to it once s/he departs company with all such quotidian systems of abject hegemony. One crisis leads to another, so to speak, on multiple levels and all at once.