The promise of Internet art : an engagement with the intersection of the performative force of the law and Internet art

• Main Author: Pilcher, Jeremy
• Published: Lancaster University 2009
• Subjects: 776
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.557155

My thesis concerns the relationship between the law and intern et art, in particular those works that claim to critique the social bond that is constructed through the law. This relationship is typically characterized in adversarial terms. Using Derrida's work on performatives I argue for a more nuanced approach which acknowledges the performative nature of art explored in work concerned with images and objects that are taken from the "everyday world" (Archer, 2002:12). The way in which such art has undermined the ability to identify it as art on the basis of aesthetic judgements has brought its relationship with the law sharply into focus. The law has been called upon to enforce the designation of such work as art in cases where there has been conflict between identification of work as art though artists' declarations on the one hand and through institutional validation on the other. Moreover, art's concern with the everyday has been understood in instrumental terms as a critical social engagement. This has facilitated positioning it as being opposed, but necessarily subservient to, the performative force of the law. I propose understanding art as allowing the emergence of an awareness of law’s claims to being a historical and a contextual. Approaches to intern et art's use of technology tend to disavow this because it is usually understood in terms of making "reality" more transparent through its use of technology. In contrast my argument is that internet art stages the way technologies change the rhythm of the construction of the social bond. Internet artworks may be understood as sites at which decisions have to be made as to where the boundaries are to be drawn between art and the everyday. As such intern et art witnesses the constructed nature of society and opens the possibility for change to the social bond.