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Abstract

This paper explores spectatorial encounters with criminal trials. Particularly focusing on the 2018 work of Australian contemporary visual artist Julie Fragar that followed her watching murder trials in the Supreme Court of Queensland, it is argued that the artist as a legal outsider grapples with the inhumanity of the trial. This grappling can go in two directions. For some there is a need to bring the human back, to see the person beneath the mask of the role that they are performing, to connect the gothic horror of the trial back to a redeeming humanism. For others, and this is evident in Fragar, the horror of the inhumanity is visceral and overpowering, and the grotesque masque of judgment needs to be witnessed. Both perform a corrective and critique to the business as usual of processing, judging and stamping onto human lives that is legal insider’s performance in the criminal trial.

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Notes

  1. ‘Draught of a Code for the Organisation of the Judicial Establishment in France’ (1790), in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–1843), 4:316 cited in [23: 1].

  2. See, for instance, the work of Peter Goodrich [15,16,17]. See also [18].

  3. https://www.courts.qld.gov.au/going-to-court/courtroom-etiquette accessed 27 November 2018.

  4. https://www.humanities.org.au/2018/11/19/welcoming-28-newly-elected-fellows/ accessed 29 November 2018.

  5. From Hungarian author Dezsö Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti: A Novel, published 1936. cited in [20: 736].

  6. Although she is more generous to Justice Lex Lasry presiding Supreme Court of Victoria justice at Farquharson’s trial.

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Crawley, K., Tranter, K. A Maelstrom of Bodies and Emotions and Things: Spectatorial Encounters with the Trial. Int J Semiot Law 32, 621–640 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09618-3

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