Read more
A revolutionary approach exploring legal themes such as justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, and power through close readings of major works of art.
List of contents
Foreword; 1. Bruegel's 'Justice': anachronic time; 2. Reynolds's justice, Blackstone's laws: diachronic time; 3. Governor Arthur's proclamation: utopian time; 4. Turner's 'Slave Ship': now time; 5. Klimt's 'Jurisprudence': suspended time; 6. Bennett's laws: colonial time; 7. Cauduro's crimes: ectoplasmic time; Afterword.
About the author
Desmond Manderson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor in the Australian National University, Canberra College of Law and the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is the author of several books including Songs without Music (2000), Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law (2012), and Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique (2017).
Summary
The visual arts offer wholly new resources through which to understand the representation, power, ideology and critique of law. This interdisciplinary book includes exceptional close readings of major works by artists from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century informed by legal and social history, and by recent developments in legal and art theory.
Additional text
'Drawing on recent psychoanalytical, hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches to the histories of art, Manderson weaves a history of the law from 1500 to the present day - a history that neither progresses nor unravels but keeps returning to the archetypal, indeed holy, trinity of law, death and time, which he argues inhabits and manifests in art. Through a close and extended reading of his chosen artworks, and through the innovative methodologies he uses to unpack them, Manderson's chapters build like symphonic movements into a veritable masterclass in the historiography of art. Art, Manderson argues, cannot escape the deathly grip of the law and its temporality - a grip, he argues, that will always entice and elude us.' Ian McLean, Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, University of Melbourne
