Abstract
Illuminated Mirrors and “No Rights” concerns the peregrinations of El Greco, from Crete to Spain, and various influences acquired along the way. The primary argument is that El Greco suffered a double exile: 1/ voluntary exile from Crete; and 2/ involuntary exile from Renaissance art and its humanist biases. As such, much of the art-historical record is a confused and often-doctored record of El Greco’s manufactured persona—i.e., he is not assimilable to the usual categories of art and art history.
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Notes
Scholars and key dates for early publications on El Greco associated with this period of re-discovery include: Carl Justi (1888); Salvador Sanpere y Miquel (1900, 1902); Ludwig Zottmann (1906, 1907); Manuel B. Cossío (1908); A.L. Mayer (1911, 1916, 1920, 1926); Roberto Longhi (1914); Jens Ferdinand Willumsen (1927); and Ellis K. Waterhouse (1930) [2: 71–103]. Hadjinicolaou credits Waterhouse with clarifying the lineage and the number of paintings associated with El Greco’s travels in Italy, even if the list of 26 paintings included by Waterhouse in his attempt to craft a definitive catalogue raisonné for this period has not entirely held up. See [3: 61–88]. Waterhouse is from the interwar school of art historians and scholars that included Anthony Blunt and which was effectively influenced in terms of connoisseurship by Bernard Berenson. In effect and in tone effete, their production almost always sided with emergent trends in the art market and institutional collections and the necessity of justifying attribution toward sales of art works and/or the spectacularization of art works and artists.
“The figure of the saint of Assisi dominated the childhood of El Greco—that great figure of reconciliation between believers divided by schism and a reminder, too, of an exceptional destiny. No saint was to be painted by El Greco so often, with such affection, almost with such frenzy, as St. Francis. It was as if he wanted to wrest from him the secret of his meditations, the mystery of his ecstasies. At each stage of his life El Greco returned to him as a man returns to a safe and familiar refuge. His vision of him was always the same, but, at the same time, different; and these effigies of the saint reflect the curves of his own evolution” [4: 21]. Vallentin states that El Greco painted Saint Francis of Assisi over one hundred and twenty times [4: 21]. Even if this literary rendering of El Greco’s relationship to Saint Francis of Assisi is essentially Romantic in spirit, Antonina Vallentin should be credited with breaking the spell of a type of art-historical scholarship that focuses intently upon the dubious categories associated with historical periods and authorized works, which almost always translate back to reputations and surplus value. El Greco, not unlike many artists now long gone, fell afoul of this retroactively applied consensus that authors and works by the authors’ own hand are the only legitimate means of assessing a life-work, when, in fact, there is so much more beyond what the art market requires to specify authentic works, and, in the case of El Greco, so much that eludes the Renaissance penchant for propping up masterworks and masters at the expense of everything else.
“The isolation of El Greco’s figures and their disembodied detachment from earthly associations are El Greco’s own conception and they have no exact analogues in Venetian art” [5: 55]. Italics in original. Wethey states: El Greco’s skies “have no physical existence.” According to Wethey, El Greco’s more mystical renderings of time/space increase c.1580, i.e., when he has finally settled in Spain. A second painting of Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata is also lodged in this transitional moment—St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, c.1580 (Madrid, Pidal Collection). Wethey also cites Crucifixion, c.1580, as signifying El Greco’s departure (exit as entrance) into his own realm [5: 53–55].
Mannerism is defined as an abdication of classical optimism and confidence in human achievement, which is countered in art by a focus on “absolutes of the spirit,” or a nominal embrace of the Scholastic belief that “a work of art comes into being through a knowledge of God rather than from experience in the physical world” [5: 56–57]; with reference to Dvořák.
There is some speculation that El Greco was supported in Italy by his brother in Crete, who was also—however briefly—a pirate, on behalf of the Venetians [9: 17–21]. It is possible that “the departure of Domenicos from Venice and his proceeding to Rome at the end of 1570 are closely associated with the serious financial difficulties that Manoussos began to face” following his misadventures as a pirate; i.e., his bankruptcy [9: 21]. Manoussos apparently then went to Toledo in 1590–91, to join his younger brother, Domenicos (El Greco).
Wethey states that El Greco had won national renown in Spain by the 1580s, with commissions from cathedrals and churches well beyond Toledo; e.g., in Sigüenza, Zamora, and Madrid [5: 15].
There was a very large Greek presence in Venice upon his arrival that, apparently, El Greco had next to nothing to do with. Many of these were the so-called madonnero, painters of the painted panels known as maddoneri, or Black Madonnas quite popular with the Venetian nobility for private devotional practices. Byzantine Mariology of the time took the form of three classes: 1/ Glykophilousa, Virgin of Tenderness; 2/ Eleousa, Virgin of Piety; and 3/ Cardiotissa, Virgin of Passion. It eschewed the more maternalistic and sensuous form favored in the Renaissance of the Virgin and Child and was influenced by the School of Theophanes of Crete. The holiest icon in Crete was known as the Messopanditissa, an image of the Virgin derived from some antique model. It was eventually taken to Venice for safe-keeping [4: 24–25]. Most art historians in attempting to describe whatever it was El Greco was doing in Venice fall over backwards to emphasize that he was most assuredly not a madonnero. They also tend to reduce the production of the small painted wooden panels to a craft and thereby dismiss the fact that they actually had significant purchase on the imaginations of their owners. See [7: 6]; with reference to Wethey. “Whereas the Byzantine and mediaeval elements in his style have been much exaggerated, Mannerism in El Greco’s composition has been too little comprehended” [5: vii].
Bronstein uses the terms foreigner-ghost and visitor-ghost to privilege El Greco’s effective role as perennial outsider or exile. He is also using these terms to establish a position for his readings of El Greco’s works in an existential register that permits him to take liberties with the art-historical record, which he considers a long litany of misrepresentations of El Greco’s life-work by modern apologists. This includes the Romantic versions of El Greco as mystical hero, but it also includes the twentieth-century claims of insanity, astigmatism, etc. Notably, El Greco also suffered from what Bronstein calls “whispered slanders of Toledan sacristies,” including claims that he lived in luxury in Toledo, in the household of the fifteenth-century sorcerer, Marqués de Villena, all the while enjoying glamorous friendships and attending salons of the Toledan intelligentsia [12: 12–13]. Bronstein prefers the view that El Greco lived a “grey life, of labor, of patience and trouble,” and of “financial difficulties and debts, of professional humiliations,” yielding, thus, to the financialization of his output [12: 12–13]; with reference to Don Francisco de Borja de San Roman’s biography of El Greco.
Bronstein refers to the years 1577 to 1579 as El Greco’s “period of trial” [12: 28]. According to Bronstein, El Greco is in the process of shifting from looking to seeing—i.e., he is beginning to paint from an inner vision or sensibility that is intensely calibrated to the external circumstances he is enduring [12: 28]. His various apprenticeships are finally over. He has assimilated the terribilità of Tintoretto (plus the furioso), Titian’s various gifts (foremost color), and the sensation of Michelangelo, with the latter’s true Mannerist gifts being confirmed with the discovery of works by the sculptor Alonso Berruguete, a follower of Michelangelo. The two key works marking this rite of passage are the Santo Domingo el Antiguo altarpiece (1577) and Espolio (1579). The Martyrdom of St. Maurice (1580–82) and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586) followed quickly, leading to Coronation of the Virgin (1591–92) and Immaculate Conception (1607).
With reference to the medieval Franciscan tradition of Francis and the Sixth Seal—i.e., the apocalyptic fervor of the West in the thirteenth century. “Did [El Greco] paint in that picture, perhaps without knowing he really did so—his true image of St. Francis—the secret of his heart? One wonders …” [12, 13]. The preferred title of this painting is Apocalyptic Vision. [14: 111–46]. Basing his narrative on historical records, Mann lists the subjects of the commission at the Hospital of Saint John (a.k.a. Tavera Hospital) as: 1/ Incarnation; 2/ Baptism of Christ; and 3/ Apocalyptic Vision. The estimation that Apocalyptic Vision is a depiction of the opening of the Fifth Seal comes from Cossío. For the provenance of the painting, based on Metropolitan Museum of Art records, see [14: 134, fn 123].
Vallentin then adds, for emphasis, “elemental power” and “surging impetuosity” to describe the tenor of the painting. For her full treatment of Opening of the Fifth Seal, see [4: 276–77]. Vallentin agrees with scholars that the painting has been cut down at some point but does not offer any reasons other than the implication that the upper portion was unfinished.
This would, of course, quite literally vaporize in his late paintings, with the notable exceptions of portraits.
“The ‘what’ of the subject, the ex-voto and its contents, is ‘theirs,’ and with them remains. The form, El Greco’s ‘how’ and the sense of this form is ‘ours,’ today’s.” [12: 17]; with reference to “yesterday’s Spain,” etc., and a type of de facto internal exile (even as double transplant) endured by El Greco, increasingly marked by fatigue as foreigner-ghost. This internal exile endured was not so much about Italy or Spain, per se, as the world as such, in his day, crossing over from the Renaissance humanist juggernaut of Italy to the Counter-Reformation conservatism of Spain, but notably by way of the Mannerist interregnum. Bronstein uses comments by Pacheco regarding El Greco to signal the conservatism he endured in Spain. Pacheco is also used by Bronstein to set up a very strange dichotomy regarding El Greco’s position in that world, which concerns perceptions. Pacheco praised El Greco as “the best and most popular painter of Saint Francis,” and, by inference, of “imagery for people’s devotions” [12: 16–17]. This is a classic judgment hiding a prevailing criticism of elevating art above and beyond its role as icon, something conservative Spain held on to well into the Counter Reformation. Bronstein then claims that El Greco held a “commendable, if humble, reputation in sacristies and monks’ parlors” [12: 17]. This is then followed by: But “only a very slight one among the halls of grandees or coteries of the learned” [12: 17]. All of this is used to illustrate the competing roles played by El Greco, mostly in the imaginations of historians and scholars. Much like the reasons for fleeing Rome, there is no real purchase on any of it as the real thing—i.e., as provable.
Curiously, both Laocoön and Opening of the Fifth Seal are unsigned. Doubly curious is the purported fact that Opening of the Fifth Seal was first discovered by the Spanish painter, Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945), “behind an old velvet curtain in Cordoba.” It was first called Sacred and Profane Love, but was subsequently renamed by Cossío, Opening of the Fifth Seal, due to its somewhat clear evocation of Revelation 6:9–11. See “Opening of the Fifth Seal,” in [15: 122–23] (explanatory text of the painting by Bronstein). See the Metropolitan Museum of Art provenance record below for a possible explanation of its first being discovered in Cordoba. Is it possible that we are in the land of multiple authorial presences with these two works? Why did they remain unsigned? Additionally, what is the reason for the claim that the top portion of the painting is missing, i.e., that it was cut down at some point prior to discovery in Cordoba? Is it because the painting was never finished and whoever acquired it wanted to sell it? It is also quite possible that Laocoön and Opening of the Fifth Seal are unsigned because both are unfinished. Does this have any bearing on their ghostly and apparitional effect? If yes, does it even matter? Subsequent over-painting, by another hand, repeated restoration, whether by amateurs or by experts, etc., have a very troublesome relation to the works that are, for whatever reason, altered over time yet are presumed authentic. It is doubtful that anything El Greco might have added to Laocoön and Opening of the Fifth Seal would have in any way diminished their fiery and portentous nature. In some ways their unfinished status, if that is what it is, adds additional depth to the mysterious charge of the late works, while, in the process, throwing the art-historical hounds off the trail. Justice is, therefore, doubled—or doubly served. See also, “Opening of the Fifth Seal,” in [16: 210–13]. Exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 7, 2003–January 11, 2004, National Gallery, London, February 11–May 23, 2004. According to the Met, and there is no reason to disbelieve the Met’s version of reality, other than perhaps that it too is based on highly mutable narratives, Opening of the Fifth Seal is a “large fragment of one of three altarpieces […] for the church of the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist (the Tavera Hospital),” commissioned c.1608 and never completed. The three paintings intended for the Tavera Hospital remained in El Greco’s workshop until his death. His son, Jorge Manuel, finished two of three altarpieces: 1/ Annunciation; and 2/ Baptism of Christ. He did not, apparently, touch 3/ The Fifth Seal. Somehow, and under whatever circumstances, Opening of the Fifth Seal was cut down in 1880 by a “restorer at the Prado.” The upper half is nowhere to be found. See [16: 210]. The Met also restored the painting and has archived both photos and records of that process. For the details of this commission, see [14: 111–46]. Ironically, Jorge’s Annunciation was also cut in two at some point, with half of it, as of 2003, in Madrid and half in Athens. The irony is extraordinary. The official Met record of provenance reads, in chronological order of ownership: “[T]he artist, El Greco, Toledo (until d. 1614; posthumous inv., 1614, fol. 4v, as [one of] ‘los quadros del ospital enpezados’); his son, Jorge Manuel Theotocopoulos, Toledo (1614–d. 1631; inv., 1621, no. 183, as one of ‘Dos quadros bosquejados para los colaterales del ospital grandes’); José Núñez de Prado y Fernández, Madrid; Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Prime Minister of Spain, Madrid (before 1890); Dr. Rafael Vázquez de la Plaza, Córdoba (by 1890–1905; sold for 1,000 pesetas to Zuloaga); Ignacio Zuloaga, Paris and Zumaya, Spain (1905–d. 1945); Museo Zuloaga, Zumaya (1945–56; sold to Newhouse); [Newhouse Galleries, New York, 1956; sold to MMA].” See [17].
With reference, no doubt, to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, first published in 1908, after Nietzsche’s death in 1900, but written in 1888. Bronstein’s reading of El Greco’s rebellion circles issues such as “conscious deformations” of conventions (however slowly evolved), by way of an inner charge given to works, as if the works are actually in charge, and “passionate application,” which he elaborates as a direct homage by El Greco to Byzantine sources, even as he passionately deforms those sources. See [12: 20–21]; with reference to Byzantine works such as: fourteenth-century Chora mosaics; fifteenth-century Mistra; sixteenth-century Mount Athos, etc. “Etc.” here includes Slavic icons. There is a type of El Greco-esque space–time involved. By the late 1500s, and into the early 1600s, El Greco is paying his respects to all schools he has passed through. There is a “continuous, ornamental (medieval)” something at work. “The adhesion there of the form, of the figure, to this geometric frame. And not only asymmetrical, ovoid, and continuous-ornamental in its volume, but also in the now-contrasting, now-harmonious color accord [and discord]; in the suddenness (very late Byzantine) of the high light’s action, in the ‘deformed’ anatomy of bodies, faces, hands” [12: 29]; with reference to Coronation of the Virgin (1591–92) and Immaculate Conception (1607), but primary as justification for claiming that El Greco has arrived at “the art of the flame that de-forms, of conflict, of discomfort, of alternating despair and serenity” [12: 29].
With reference to [19]. Kyrou’s text is associated with the art-historical re-patriation of El Greco in the first decades of the twentieth century. See [20: 242]. Hadjinicolaou’s appropriation of Kyrou is subtle but also clearly strategic. A second wave of re-patriating El Greco was underway in the 1990s through a series of rolling exhibitions.
With reference to “In Lovely Blueness.” See [21].
See “Bibliography,” in [11: 549–65], for an exhaustive list of the authorized scholars associated with this historical accounting (i.e., book-keeping) project. For a parallel take on the same period, inclusive of literary-biographical works, see “Bibliography,” in [4: 297–301]. Part way through Vallentin’s more generous bibliography we find the following telltale entry: “Jean Cocteau, Les Demi-Dieux: Le Greco (Paris: Au Divan, 1943)”; i.e., an irreal biography of El Greco by Cocteau, and part of the series known as “Les Demi-Dieux.”
Exhibition catalogue. The exhibition was co-produced with the Toledo Museum of Art, Museo del Prado, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1982–83. Brown’s Introduction is a masterful summary of the entire history of El Greco scholarship up to the date of the exhibition in 1982–83, albeit in the form of a chronology of reception, and even though it ends with a feigned attempt at objectivity and neutrality while more or less declaiming El Greco an art-historical saint.
The Romantic movement assimilated El Greco by way of Théophile Gautier, who visited Spain in 1840. Napoleon appropriated works by El Greco during the French occupation of Spain in 1808–12. See [22: 19–20].
Notably, this also cleared the way for the emergence in Spain of the re-adoption of El Greco after a long period of effectively disowning and/or ignoring him. Cossío et al. are then more or less free to investigate and honor and/or trouble El Greco’s legacy, and the Prado will, as a result, mount a major exhibition in 1902. Cossío’s monograph on El Greco will subsequently appear in 1908. For this first campaign, in Spain, see [22, 19] falling squarely within the high point of the clamor, with both Spain and Greece attempting to overcome various versions of socio-political collapse through nationalistic agendas. El Greco was introduced to the German art intelligentsia by Julius Meier-Graefe, a champion of post-Impressionism, who made a pilgrimage to Spain in 1910. El Greco’s reputation was further propped up in France by Paul Lafond, in 1906, who was a champion of the proto-expressionist label applied to El Greco’s late works. See [22: 27].
With reference to [23]. Dvořák’s formal assimilation of El Greco, as published in 1928, dates back to at least 1920, when he gave a first lecture on El Greco. It might be said that Dvořák’s work at this time is also dealing with world-historical issues at play and that the anxiety underwriting his approach to art-historical criticism is part of that larger corpus of disturbance that also sponsored forms of cognitive dissonance in the works of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Henri Focillon (1881–1943), and André Malraux (1901–76). The neo-Hegelian remainder is telltale, as is the sociological cut. See, for example, [24].
Brown cites the discoveries of El Greco’s “writings on art,” which supposedly confirm his Italian humanist leanings and counter the Spanish, Counter-Reformation mystical trends others have claimed for his late works, e.g., acquired via the works of Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) and John of the Cross (1542–91). These discoveries were documented in [26].
Frick Collection exhibition catalogue, May 15–July 29, 2001, in association with seven paintings, two of which, as part of the Frick holdings, were purchased in Spain in the early 1900s, by Henry Clay Frick, a wealthy American industrialist—i.e., at the time of the Prado exhibition and the Spanish celebration and rediscovery of El Greco. “Although this kind of climate-controlled history is too deterministic for the postmodern world, the old verities die hard, and El Greco studies are still influenced by a chauvinism rarely encountered in the serious study of art history” [27: 9].
Here it is possible to see (or intuit) in El Greco’s work a Plotinian expression of a mental journey versus a visual journey. It is also consistent with the Bonaventurian itinerarium mentis of ideational Franciscanism.
This is perhaps indicative of an ultra-fashionable, self-imposed and artistic, pseudo personality disorder known as ascetic-bon vivant. Eventually, in most all such cases, the ascetic side wins out, as it did with El Greco in his last years, and as presented in his last (unfinished) paintings.
It could also be argued that Hegel’s project was not actually teleological, as it is often assumed to have been, especially given that it became mired in socio-political forms of mediation and statism—or, that the initial universalism of the project collapsed when confronted with reality.
Could this be the reason that Thomas Aquinas ran out of ground with his Summa Theologica and eventually gave up, and retreated into silence? Oddly, Schopenhauer will follow Aquinas into a type of enforced silence, once he too has exhausted his critique of world as will and representation. The common ground here is the imposition of forms of mediation that cancel access to what is actually sought—in this case (i.e., Aquinas + Schopenhauer) by scholastic theology and by existential philosophy. The arts would, then, be one way out of this stalemate. And an embrace of the arts as a form of literary-artistic scholarship, or philosophically and/or theologically informed inquiry, might be one of the last redoubts for accessing what is effectively beyond rationalist inquiry and actually resists rationalist inquiry.
This is also the agenda of the art-academic industrial complex, insofar as the neoliberal machinery demands that everything formerly locked behind institutional walls, for whatever reason, good or bad, be available to all, with “all” often meaning available for exploitation by neoliberal-capitalist means. This curiously includes monetization and exploitation as commodity. Digitization is one of the main engines of this theft by redefinition of the commons as entrepôt for all goods awaiting leveraging. The post-contemporary art world, while also playing the public card, is perhaps the more devious player in this game, with the curatorial enterprises of that world masking huge networks of privilege and the production of reputations and symbolic capital. The original impetus of opening things up has, for the usual reasons (e.g., careerism and production of power), led to the closing and policing of the art world by other means. The primary products of the art world and academia remain, despite all good intentions, celebrity and privilege for a few. Behind the curtain of making things public (e.g., the Public Humanities) is the commodification, manipulation, and policing of the knowledge commons.
“In generating and acting through an atmosphere, law matches the expectations of a consumerist society, while continuing to nurture these expectations so that more of the same is needed. An atmosphere generates a cycle of addiction where, once the supposed desires are converted into ‘real needs’, more of the same is offered continuously and in excess” [28: 48].
The term paysage moralisé (moral landscape) is derived primarily from literature, e.g., Rousseau’s “walks” (Reveries, 1782) and “idylls” (Confessions, 1782), which seem to answer (echo) the call of Madeleine de Scudéry’s seventeenth-century rhetorical promenade through Versailles (La promenade de Versailles, 1669), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), not to mention his “walks,” which, in turn, cues Herder’s “walks” (in Critical Forests, 1769). For the use of the term a-legal in this context, see [29]: i.e., a review of Agamben’s The Highest Poverty and Opus Dei. Tosas characterizes Agamben’s foray into Franciscanism as an attempt to clarify to what extent the regulae established by Francis are “a-legal” [29: 170]. The regulae of the Franciscan order (rule as form-of-life) changed across the years, during Francis’ lifetime, going from modest to bloated to ultra-spare.
See [30]; with reference to [31]. Herzman describes Francis as a “text” and a “sealed document,” claiming that Dante wished to become the same and that The Divine Comedy is his attempt to do so. Francis of Assisi received his “seal” on Mount Alverno, with the event of the Stigmata. Dante received his laurels in Canto I of Paradiso, and his “seal” in Paradiso XV–VII, Heaven of Mars.
The two members of the Spirituals at the Basilica of Santa Croce were Peter John Olivi and Ubertino da Casale [32, 34]. “Olivi (ca. 1248–98) was born in Sérignan, in the Languedoc region of southern France. He entered the Franciscan order at the age of twelve, studied in Paris from 1267 to about 1272 (during the final years of Bonaventure’s generalate) without becoming a master of theology, and spent the remainder of his life teaching at various Franciscan houses of study in southern France, with a stay in Florence from 1287 to 89” [34]. And: “Olivi’s outspoken originality led him into conflict with religious authorities: his writings were condemned by the Franciscan authorities in 1283, and although he was later rehabilitated by the new minister general Matthew of Aquasparta, he remained a controversial figure. He spent the last part of his life as a lector at Montpellier and Narbonne. Soon after his death the Franciscan order renewed the prohibition on reading or retaining his works. Although his philosophical views were controversial, what proved to be fatal was his reputation within the so-called ‘Spiritual’ reform movement of the Franciscan order. Olivi’s understanding of the Franciscan vow and poverty became influential among the spiritualists, and after his death he was venerated by fervent laymen in Languedoc” [34]. The term theo-politics is borrowed from Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. See [35]. According to this theo-politics: “San Francesco alter Christus and his friars would be the new apostles, advocates of the humble virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience” [36]. Lavin’s reading of the frescoes behind and above the high altar and papal throne at the Upper Church at Assisi concerns the implicit and explicit tenets of the Mariology associated with Franciscanism. She also accepts that the paintings are by Cimabue, or at least his workshop.
It is possible that Dante wrote the first seven cantos of Inferno before 1302, although scholars disagree regarding historical evidence supporting the premise. See [37: 42, fn 39]. It is also possible that Dante and Giotto met, in Padua, and that “Dante + Giotto” is yet another instance of multiple authorial voices in terms of the frescoes Giotto painted at the Arena Chapel (1304–06), foremost Last Judgement [37: 39–43].
Regarding contemporary lawscapes as forms of mediatic spectacle, in the spirit of Guy Debord’s critique of cultural production, but with reference to Habermasian rationality and Luhmannian functionality, see [28]. “Law as practical reason: hidden. Law as morality: hidden. Law as discourse: hidden. Law as rational consensus: hidden. Law as rights, law as communicative reason, even law as legal system: hidden” [28: 31]. “But law qua law: hypervisibilised, shiningly omnipresent, photogenically central, iridescently dominant. Law qua law: an explosion of packaging, a selfie thirsty for our likes. This is the real law.” [28: 31]. Philippopoulos‐Mihalopoulos’ reading of the Kafka-esque qualities of the lawscape resides somewhat uncomfortably within both critical legal theory and critical socio-legal studies, the two disciplines much of his work cites, primarily because he is, at heart, an artist, and his argument is that “art” is probably the only way out of the lawscape, and that absurdity and parody (per Agamben) are effectively only a transitional strategy that permits artists and authors to “see” what they are ultimately up against and quite often complicit with. That temporal strategy, at least in terms of how law scholars engage with the lawscape, is defined as: “When law students come to realise the not infrequent absurdity of law, the largest and perhaps ultimately taboo question inevitably arises: is law lawful? The legal system itself avoids asking the question because it would threaten its very cornerstone. Society at large avoids asking the question because it would threaten social stability. But explorative pedagogy and art can and ought to ask. The question can only be answered with levity, irony and sharp playfulness that critiques law’s authority while at the same time respecting the need to carry on with law. This is a rather complex call. The liminality between respecting and doubting legal authority cannot easily be achieved. In fact, the more spectacularised law becomes, the harder the task is” [28: 38]. In the Luhmannian context, which Philippopoulos–Mihalopoulos cites for its fairly closed systems-theory approach and then more or less discards: “The more we lawscape, the more we are being lawscaped by the lawscape. There is no emancipation from systems theory here: the lawscape generates us” [28: 40]. Yet this is, indeed, the position occupied by authors and artists beholden to the neoliberal capitalist commercium that generates and polices systems of reward and punishment for artists and scholars (and artist-scholars). Notably, the primary punishment (which is also the primary reward, in the Franciscan sense) for exiting the commercium of the neoliberal art-academic industrial complex is “poverty,” which, in contemporary academic, para-academic, and art-world terms, has been translated to, or re-defined as, “precarity.”
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Keeney, G. Illuminated Mirrors and “No Rights”. Int J Semiot Law (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10072-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10072-5