Open Justice by Carey Young

First published in Law and Humanities, 2018, as part of a series papers devoted to an analysis of ‘Palais de Justice’, by Joan Kee, Linda Mulcahy, Jeremy Pilcher, Gary Watt, Jeanne Gaakeer and Ruth Herz. The full set of papers, including this essay, can be downloaded here.

Justice must be seen to be done: it must be visible. Justitia is a woman, yet law’s structures and systems privilege men. Law is a ‘structure of the imagination’[i]. Justice must have an interior eye, according to Peter Goodrich[ii]. These ideas were organising principles in my video Palais de Justice, a 2017 artistic work, which I filmed and edited over two years. Developing my ongoing body of artistic work which addresses the facades, aesthetics, performances and languages of law, the work was shot at Belgium’s main working courthouse, as has been amply detailed in the accompanying essays by Jeanne Gaakeer, Ruth Herz, Joan Kee, Jeremy Pilcher and Gary Watt. In this brief text I shall attempt to respond to certain of the many insightful, sometimes flattering points made here, whilst also conveying my own thoughts on the work.

The building captivated me right from my first visit. Aside from its terrible roots in Belgian colonial wealth and power, and its innate symbolism in terms of the ‘power to punish’[iii], here was a monumental labyrinth, designed to express law in terms of the sublime. Yet, as many of these essays note, it has long been in a state of slow disintegration. Indeed, the architect, Joseph Polaert, was partly inspired by work of the English Romantic painter John Martin, whose signature aesthetic included depictions of apocalyptic ruins, as if the Brussels Palais de Justice was always already envisioned in its present, slowly crumbling state[iv]. (Derrida’s comment that ‘in the beginning, there is ruin’[v], is surely apt here.) It also seemed to me so disorientingly extensive in scale, and so riddled with signs of decay (holes in courtroom carpets, graffiti on interior walls, broken panes of glass) - perhaps a victim of Belgium’s political and linguistic divisions - that it was somehow in a zone of neutrality, beyond anyone’s full control. Such a sense of possible anarchy was palpable, and undeniably inspiring. I felt that I could take a risk to film there repeatedly, and in what turned out to be a rather brazen way: a method that could perhaps never be possible anywhere else. At each visit, turning each corner I expected to be caught, expelled, banned or even locked up for my surreptitious, yet overt filming[vi], especially after I had requested, and been refused official permission to film[vii]. But such was the building’s Byzantine endlessness, the fact of occasional tourists and news crews wandering the many public areas, and the willingness of security to generally let me continue after I had given them one excuse or another[viii], that it was always possible to set up and steal a quick shot, well in plain sight, and then keep moving onwards, always nomadic, perhaps fugitive, but with the tempting promise of yet more evocative judicial tableaux around every corner.

The concept of filming only female judges in dialectical relationship to the building’s innate patriarchal symbolism, and then editing it into a sequence that would convey a kind of speculative-fictional proposition about women controlling the administration of ‘justice’ – came quickly, and was based on real events: the preponderance of female judges repeatedly on view at the Palais. By keeping my camera equipment as minimal as possible, and through the sheer fact of being a woman[ix], nobody seemed to take me all that seriously, or to consider me as a threat, which was in fact my desired intention. Remaining unnoticed is advantageous for the documentarian, even if one is intent on weaving a fiction. One requires invisibility, also, to be a voyeur. The peepholes of the circular windows in most courtroom doors – constructed for the principle of ‘open justice’ - acted as my lens-like viewing devices. There are many such motifs in the work: eyes, gazes, glances, vignettes, apertures, lenses: a conflation of law and lenses, and perhaps of law itself as a lens or viewing device. The window’s surface captured reflections, creating a 360-degree field of vision that allowed me to surveil action taking place behind the camera as well as in front, and creating a glassy aesthetic which suggests a floating unreality to proceedings in court, and a disjunctured sense of time.

‘The closer we pry, the more we see ourselves as viewers’; ‘we are participants in the stone,’ says Watt. It is this idea of complicity which interests me. The artist stares down the judge, via the camera’s apparatus, and the viewer acts as witness, by proxy. The judge, whether staring into space or looking at her court, appears to meet the camera’s gaze, and through that, the viewer, in a kind of Barthesian ‘punctum’ which chills us as we watch. The work sets up a kind of power relation, or stand-off: artistic versus legal judgement; artistic power versus judicial power. A judge’s power, as prime mover in law’s ‘system of obedience’[x], is obvious. The judge’s power is transmitted through the body of the punished – relations which go right through the ‘depths of society’, as Foucault notes[xi], and here, also into the depths of the Palais, its lower floors devoted to prison cells.

An artist’s power, on the other hand, is more mercurial and fleeting, but nevertheless, not to be ignored in the sense of artistic free speech and its amplification through art galleries and other circulation platforms, and their reach into the public domain over time – the ‘image-world will outlast us all’, posits Sontag[xii]. In this sense, the work gives me the chance to insert a certain idea of female judicial power into the public imagination. Not the only one in filmic terms, as has been noted by Gaakeer and Herz, but nevertheless, when projected in galleries at the intended size of 7 metres wide, it is undeniably sculptural, perhaps even monumental. I may have stolen these momentary images of the judges, or even ‘possessed’ the judges through my camera[xiii], but what I gave back, I believe, was a respectful and perhaps even flattering portrayal of female intellectuals at work, despite the possible ‘moral ambiguity of looking’[xiv]. We do not know what trials were in progress, of course. It would not have been ethical to include such details, and neither did it seem creatively productive when the goal was to conjure a fantasy: the idea that women were in control of this courthouse, of a judicial system, perhaps even of administering ‘justice’ more widely. As a thought proposition, let alone a political projectile, we could run with it and see where it takes us. Adding detail would have confused the matter at hand. The piece is on some level about illusions, although not necessarily utopias, even if it depicts real events.

The soundtrack to the work aimed to develop this quasi-documentary aspect further. Instead of using only the sound from the action depicted, the soundtrack consists of a mix of the building’s sounds to create a distinctive ‘sonic environment’, an abstraction of the Palais’ unique auditory personality. Installed with four high speakers in a gallery, it is a distinctive and important part of the work’s atmosphere and mood. At the Palais, one is struck by the very particular, somewhat hallucinatory auditory experience of the building’s boundless acoustic textures, eddies and reflections. The lengthy stairwells and marble-clad corridors, which open on to the main hall, funnel in layers of footsteps from different bodies at varied distances: the faraway guards and police with their heavy rubber-soled gait and jangling keys, the hurrying female lawyers in stilettos, the confident tip-tap-tip of the male lawyers in their fine leather soles.

Through all this weave the male voices, carrying further and amplified by myriad polished stone surfaces, and which act as the defining, almost ‘choral’ and undeniably spectral sound of the building: the sounds of discussion of trials in progress, of guards and police gossiping...all intermingling like endless circling ghosts of the patriarchal judicial system. ‘Bodies that are present in their absence’, as Pilcher notes. If Piranesi is invoked in the piece, as Herz suggests, it is perhaps best to imagine him within the sonic aspect of this work. I wondered, ultimately, if this is the sound of law, with all its traces of Empire and the domination of the weak, the poor, the feminine, or the subaltern, amplified and mirrored by shining stone. Mulcahy is right when she speaks of this work in relation to the jurisprudence of the senses. The experience of the law is, in part, a sensate one. Artists are uniquely able to explore this. How does law make us feel? How does it act on the body? How can ‘we’ enter the domain of the law and change it for the better? Can an art gallery act as a better environment to consider these questions than a courthouse? These are large and affective questions, which visual art can confront directly.

Various of these essays suggest that there is no narrative to the work. But it has a structure and a flow. In essence, the first third introduces us to the building and sets us up for ideas of theatricality (dramatic spotlighting as lawyers scurry across the main hall) and for the multiplicity of patriarchal imagery (such as the plentiful paintings and drawings of male judges). We are introduced to the idea of women as interlopers or occupiers, and as individuals - whether casually swinging crossed, bare legs, in a well-lit nook, or drawing (the young girl sketching the building a kind of stand-in for myself, and the idea of ‘accuracy’, which this film does not attempt.) Kee insightfully notes a kind of domesticity here, or at least, of insouciant women (including myself) making themselves at home. We segue into the main phase of the film, and begin to spy on women judges through portholes in the court doors. We see a progression of female judges, presiding over many different trials. Women are seen in control – sometimes, of all-female courts, in which judges, bailiffs and litigants are also women. Gradually throughout this sequence, men also appear. But once one has the idea in mind that men are somehow excluded from, or minor characters within this courthouse, we may see them

as somehow pathetic. Male lawyers, puffily performing their best selves, aim to convince women judges who scarcely bestow attention, or who look scathingly bored by their efforts. A male lawyer stares lengthily and bemusedly at the camera, and waits outside a courtroom for a female judge who never lets let him in, the high handles on the doors minimising his height, as if he is a child. An old janitor wheels his trolley slowly through a gloomy basement, a lifetime’s servitude summed up in a hunch and a shuffle. These men appear as minor players once we have in mind the idea of a court dominated by women. We may, I hope, reverse our ideas of what is normal and expected in relation to law. Here, men wait, they ask, they may not receive anything much: least of all, the attention of the judge, or indeed the artist. They are solitary bit players. The focus, indeed the focal point, was always the judge. The female gaze here is direct and unwavering.

In the final third of the piece comes its crux. Now we move closer, homing in on younger female lawyers seen from behind, in moments of address to the judicial bench. Through long, paparazzi-style lenses, we focus on details and textures: necks, ears, hands and hair. I wanted to convey a sense of tenderness and tactility – or the desire to touch. Here, the uncompromising female gaze suggested by the earlier portions of the film becomes more ambiguous – we move into a phase of doubt and perhaps ambiguity. The soundtrack (here comprising recordings from the dank basement corridors between the family courts and the prison cells, mixed with distant babble of female voices) suggests proximity and even claustrophobia. Here, the camera, and perhaps the viewer, luxuriates in looking at women, through a series of long takes. But we are intruding. Is this the scopophilic view of the peeping tom? Are we looking at women, or are we just thinking about the act of looking at women? And is this, in court, a sexual or perhaps perverse pleasure? Is the camera always gendered, in any case? These shots have a long duration, and since the camera does not move, but the bodies depicted do, we become more aware of the hard edges of the frame. Here the fixed camera suggests more of an empathy with the static court architecture than with the court’s perpetual ebb and flow of bodies, words and lives. In the final shot, a confident litigant walks directly past the camera, through a door, and into the court’s half-focused interior. As the door slowly closes behind her, and the door’s reflections start to capture the light of the outside world beyond, we may for the first moment begin to feel excluded, the end of our ‘inhabiting justice’ as Kee describes, as if the semi-fictional court’s world will continue without us, beyond the brief interlude of this film.

[i] D. Graeber, Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016) 72

[ii] P. Goodrich, Legal Emblems and the Art of Law, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 16

[iii] M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London: Penguin, 1991), 116

[iv] P. Loze, Une architecture monumentale et symbolique, in J-P Buyle and D. v Gerven (eds), Justice pour le palais, (Brussels: Filipson Editions, 2014), 35. Several writers here also note the references to Vermeer. I believe that Polaert was very well acquainted with the work of Vermeer and Van Eyck (for example, for example, The Marriage of the Arnolfini, 1434), due to the many instances of side-window lighting he used as courtroom illumination. The resemblance of certain of my shots to Vermeer paintings, and of judicial figures rendered with Rembrant-esque lighting, should be clarified with this observation.

[v] J. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, as included in B. Dillon (ed), Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art: Ruins, (London: Whitechapel Gallery, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 42

[vi] A camera, mounted on a tripod, pointing directly into a courtroom is never going to be concealed, even if I was not stopped or questioned during the majority of the hundreds of shots which I created.

[vii] The Court President refused permission ‘for reasons of terrorism’, as he apparently did for all non-journalistic filming requests. Given that I could hardly include myself as a threat of this sort, and that my small tripod would not be in anyone’s way in practical terms, and also given the many tourists wandering the building with cameras, and the fact that the building was out of copyright, I decided to ignore his ruling. This was further supported by legal advice sought from Annick Mottet of Belgian law firm Lydian, that according to Belgian laws around the ‘right of personal portrayal’, which were developed through case law, since the judges and anyone on the bench were public figures, revealing themselves in public during the trial, they were not protected by any right to privacy in my footage.

[viii] Police and security guards were convinced enough by Annick Mottet’s legal argumentation, as described above, that they always allowed me to keep filming.

[ix] It was often my camera assistant (a man) who was approached for questioning, as if he was the director, despite the fact I was the one behind the camera.

[x] P.J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, new ed edition, 1992), 138

[xi] M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London: Penguin, 1991), 27

[xii] S. Sontag, On Photography, (London: Penguin, 1977), 11

[xiii] S. Sontag, ibid., 14

[xiv] M. Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975 3(1) Screen, 6–18) reprinted in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 746 – 757.

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