As an artist, lawyer, consumer, iPhone user, friend, daughter, sister, secret-keeper, sexual participant, voter and employee, contracts have permeated my life. The contract comes in many forms –– oral or written, enforceable or non-binding, consented to or never read. Since learning about social contract theory in jurisprudence, contracts have struck me as a curious microcosm of marginalization, exploitation and disempowerment. Utilizing the contractual medium and notion of the social contract, I have created a body of artwork that has exposed the absurdities of legal conventions by imposing commercial terms upon social situations.
My subjectivity as both a practicing lawyer and artist as well as a member of traditionally marginalized communities including queer, female and Indigenous, come together in my artistic practice. My work seeks to demonstrate deeper structural biases within the Western law. My efforts align with the growing field of legal aesthetics which investigates the relationship between aesthetics and law. Pierre Schlag, in the ‘Aesthetics of American Law’ defines legal aesthetics as “the forms, images, tropes, perceptions, and sensibilities that help shape the creation, apprehension, and even identity of human endeavors, including, most topically, law.” While Schlag is primarily concerned with abstract conceptions of the law, feminist legal scholars and critical race scholars have been preoccupied with giving its purportedly abstract, disembodied operations a human form. An aesthetics of law can likewise be found in this legal scholarship. Essays are rich with metaphor and visual language as tools with which to demonstrate the biased operation of the Anglo-American legal system. Key examples of this include Jenifer Nedelsky’s idea of boundedness and the body[1]; Cheryl I Harris’ whiteness as property[2]; and Ngaire Naffine’s hole in the body bag[3]. Reviewing this literature gives rise to a desire for translation into art, and the collapse of what is impersonal into real human experiences.
My earliest contractual work, The (Foreign Investment) Scam (2014) comprised a fictional contract and email presented alongside real documents. The contract was drafted to reflect the original agreement that might have been struck between British colonizers and Aboriginal people, who were considered fauna and flora at the time. Setting out the terms of such an engagement revealed the exploitative tenor of this encounter. A one-sided agreement was also drafted in The Rape Contract (2016). The project formalized the agreement struck by persons (particularly cisgender women) with the State for their membership to society and reparation for rape. Presented as a commercial contract for ‘Victim Services’, it provided capped ‘Social Payments’ including legal redress, compensation and acknowledgement in exchange for the achievement of community and legal expectations of victimhood. Written behind the legal text in UV ink that can be seen only under UV light is the lived experiences of a survivor of rape. This text contradicts, challenges and ridicules the contract as it fails to account for these realities.
Dispossessed © Shevaun Wright, 2020-21
Hidden voices and terms were employed in The Artists’ Contract (2017). Tracked amendments were made to the Artists’ Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement of 1971. The Artists Reserved Rights Agreement was drafted by lawyer Bob Projansky and conceptual artist Seth Siegelaub in an attempt to address issues within the art world, primarily the failure to share profits upon resale of artworks on the secondary market. It was revolutionary in that it included a royalty clause. However it also failed to acknowledge other issues of representation and ultimately was rarely used by artists. My tracked changes were in blue and red, with the latter comprising a critique from the position of persons who were not consulted in the drafting process, and the former consisting of ethical changes to the contract in order to address gender, race and economic disparities within the contemporary art world. By overwriting and changing an historical art contract, this work, also directly engaged in institutional critique as a primary focus of the project.
From 2017 onwards, my fictional contracts extended the criticism and analysis of contracting into the contractual form itself. White Privilege Deed of Agreement (2017) and The Right of First Refusal (2018) comprised conceptual contracts; contracts between concepts rather than persons or real entities. Exploring issues of race, White Privilege Deed of Agreement consisted of a contract between the concepts of Privilege and Whiteness. Similarly, The Right of First Refusal comprised a contract between the concepts of Whiteness and Property. Both directly respond to Harris’ seminal essay “Whiteness as Property” by making concrete, in a commercial, legal format, the ideas contained in the essay: the notion that Whiteness is a tangible asset that may be traded as if a commodity. The Right of First Refusal contains an extract from the article as part of the annexures to the contract to offer a platform for the incorporation of this writing within the artwork itself. Contract for Breach (2018) consisted of a visual agreement between viewers and the text itself. Setting out the key fictions upon which contracts are built, it exposes the absurdity of the contractual form by making explicit the impossible contradictions that are embedded within the document. For example, the first clause provides that you agree that you have read and comprehended all terms. You then agree that not all terms are comprehensible nor read.
Contract for Breach © Shevaun Wright, 2018
More recently, my artwork has sought to make more direct interventions. In 2021, my work Dispossessed was removed from a show in Sydney due to alleged copyright issues. The work sought to colonize a white male artist’s painting that I had purchased, by selling it to a friend for $1 on the agreement that it would then be regarded as my own. The aim of this work was to elucidate the Australian High Court’s reasoning in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) [1992] HCA 23 regarding the extinguishment of Native Title upon freehold transfer. Mabo was a landmark case as it was the first time that Native Title was recognized under Australian law and the doctrine of terra nullius (that Australia was a land without peoples prior to British colonization) was abolished. However, the case has attracted criticism for in fact preserving the foundation of settler law while appearing to give way on fictions such as terra nullius.
This work explored the many limits of not only the contractual medium but the potential for art to interrogate colonial legacies and structural discrimination. Nevertheless, by pushing against what is acceptable and visible within the legal form, my efforts aim to highlight the need for ongoing activism around these tools which are so often weaponized against people in our everyday lives.
[1] Nedelsky, Jennifer, “Law, Boundaries and the Bounded Self,” Representations, No. 30, Special Issue: Law and the Order of Culture (Spring, 1990): 162-189.
[2] Harris, Cheryl I., “Whiteness as Property,” 106 Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106 (1992-1993): 1707.
[3] Naffine, Ngaire. Sexing the Subject of Law. LBC Information Services, 1997. Chapter 5.
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