Unsettling Boundaries: Contemporary Art and the Law

Art that appropriates everyday life interrogates boundaries created by the law. Artists have made legal relationships such as contracts and property the subject of their art, have used them as a medium, and have relied on the law to assert their individual legal and moral rights. However, in this book Pilcher proposes that art puts into question the law’s exclusions whilst also inviting us to examine questions of accountability and responsibility for reconfiguring the way legal borders are used to regulate the world.Examining a range of artworks including State Britain by Mark Wallinger, Saydnaya (the missing 19db), After SFX, and Walled Unwalled by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The Underlying by Ami Clarke, Forensic Architecture’s The Killing of Mark Duggan, and Voteauction by UBERMORGEN.COM, Pilcher explores how art has the scope to expose the constraints and contingencies of the regulation of the world by the law.