Art is the ultimate hustler: it will sidle up to anything which promises it access to experience, knowledge, or power. For evidence, one need only look at pairings between art and law, art and the environment, or art and business. How might we evaluate the limits of art’s claims to knowledge and the political potential of its interaction with knowledges beyond?
The more we are surrounded by images, the greater claims they make. Photographs are not only routinely used to convey news, they are used to establish what is and isn’t true.
What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development can no longer be counted on to produce a world worth living in? These apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others.
Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology, and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art.
Art, the law, and justice have had a long history together. But we shouldn’t see their relationship benign. Indeed art, with its ‘call for justice’ ca be ‘annoying’.