Art Activism and Advocacy through Artist-Placed Public Documents: Text-based Activist Performance Art
Artist-Placed Public Documents as Text-Based Activist Performance Art: A Potential New Art Practice in Contexts of Recent Art Histories
This article presents a general overview and by necessity speaks broadly. Further art history research and art theory research continues. See also here.
The history of conceptual art, which for the purposes of this overview article is considered as beginning in the US in the late 1960s, proposed, in simplest terms, the primacy of the idea over the object or the aesthetic. Text-based works, particularly those using common language, but also often legal, bureaucratic, or institutional language, entered contemporary art through artists like Lawrence Weiner, whose works were text statements often observing or defining material conditions, and Joseph Kosuth, whose conceptual text works framed definitions as an artwork in and of itself. Both artists, and all the conceptualists and post-conceptualists, and then the neo-conceptualists, demonstrated that language, detached from physical materiality, could become the primary medium and could obtain legitimacy as “art.” These conceptual text-based works were exhibited within traditional gallery and museum spaces, or in some cases through books, newspapers, and billboards, and even flyers. Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, William Pope.L, and dozens of others — they took text-based art to new places intellectually, conceptually, and physically. However, at no point, as far as the research shows, did any of the conceptual artists, or any artist since, engage in the act of text placement inside a court, that is, placing a text-based artwork into the institution of the courts, and causing the binding procedures of a state or federal court, where the placement itself is an act that requires, by public law — rules promulgated by the legislatures and courts — a formal public response.
This is the theory of the art practice discussed in this article — that this is activist art building on art and activism to date, now by Artist-Placed Public Document — now by is Text-Based Activist Performance Art. It involves the placement by an artist of a text-based work, created by the artist — such as a fact-based legal complaint identifying actionable conduct — directly into a state or federal court, through the formal act of filing — lodging within the court system — a legal complaint that abides by all of the court’s procedural rules and substantive legal requirements — but not just as a legitimate cause of action — but also as an act of activist art about an issue of importance to the public. Activist art, by artist-placed public document — text-based activist performance art.
The artwork in such a practice is not only the text-words-language of the complaint itself but also the placement act, which activates formal legal obligations upon the named defendants, including compelling their participation and response. The court, a public forum, functions as the site into which the work is placed, functioning as public gallery, public archive, public space. The placement is both an artistic and legal act. The placement is also an act of participation in society and the social contract: There are legal rights, and legal wrongs, and the place where disputes about them shall be decided are with the juries and judges of the courts. In this performance art, the resulting mandatory interaction between the text-based work — the complaint — and its subjects — those alleged to have engaged in the misconduct, the named defendants — is integral to the work’s form and content — and is both an act of art and an act of deference our system of justice, that it may respond to activism when the facts require a change of the status quo.
In the history of performance art, public engagement with legal and governmental systems has occurred, but it appears not quite like this. Artists such as Hans Haacke incorporated documentation and records to expose systems of power and control. In Shapolsky et al. (1971), Haacke displayed legal records — real estate ownership records — to expose legally-actionable slumlord practices. However, Haacke’s placement of text-based documentation occurred in the context of an art exhibition within the Guggenheim Museum, not a state or federal court. As a result, the documents had no legal procedural or substantive force; because they were not inserted into any legal system, they did not, and could not, impose any binding legal obligations upon the subjects they exposed. The activism could be disregarded, looked away from, ignored.
The theory of the art practice discussed in this article — that this is activist art by Artist-Placed Public Document — that this is Text-Based Activist Performance Art — distinguishes itself from prior text-based conceptual and activist art by integrating the procedural compulsion unique to the judicial system. Not only must the defendant respond; the institution of the court itself must respond. The complaint is both a factual and legal document, and at the same time a site-specific text-based artwork, placed into a government public forum where its very placement changes the conditions of that forum and changes the conditions of the situation alleged to be worthy of resolution by state or federal law. By the rules of civil procedure in courts, the named defendants must respond (See, for example, in the Federal Courts, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 12), making the work not only performative but structurally interactive. The audience includes the court itself, the named defendants, the public accessing the docket, and future audiences examining the case record. The placement by the artist causes each of these tangible, measurable things.
Performance art, including from Allan Kaprow’s Happenings in the 1960s forward, emphasized the importance of time, place, and audience in constituting the work. Happenings invited, but could not require, audience presence and real-time participation, creating a situated, unrepeatable event — but wholly voluntary, like the dispute resolution mechanism known as mediation. But this is public court with codified rules. As such, the theory of this apparently new type of art practice — activist art by Artist-Placed Public Document — activist art by Text-Based Activist Performance Art — adapts this participatory structure of Happenings, and traditional performance art, to the judicial process that is inexorable once commenced. The Rules are set in motion; the defendants, and the public court, are by Rule compelled into the performance, until it is determined whether the complaint states a cause of action or not. See, e.g., Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6). The placement act is the initiating event; the litigation process becomes the unfolding event. If the complaint pleads its facts with the highest level of particularity, and if there are disputed material facts, the litigation process may unfold into pre-trial motions and trial itself. See, e.g., Fed. R. Civ. P. 9(b); see also Fed. R. Civ. P. 56. And if non-harmless errors of law be made at the trial level, the unfolding events may include briefing before an appellate court.
In the lineage of activist art, artists such as the Guerrilla Girls used public poster campaigns and direct intervention tactics to address institutional discrimination, using text and statistics to expose structural bias. This was placement art and is referenced as such. Yet there appears to be a relevant distinction in the lineage from the Guerrilla Girls. Meaningful placement into institutions, yes. Meaningful placements resulting in measurable, observable change, yes. However, their placement acts, though public, were not legally binding. They persuaded, but they could not compel. The theory of this observed art practice seems different — this is activist art by Artist-Placed Public Documents *into* government, here public courts; this is Text-Based Activist Performance Art that initiates by Rule a response — and thereby appears to differ from the Guerrilla Girls, paying homage to them and building on their activism, by embedding the artwork directly into a branch of government, the branch where its placement changes the procedural rights and obligations of all parties involved.
This art practice also distinguishes itself from works that use legal language in art contexts, such as Carey Young’s Declaring Independence (2003), where the artist recited a self-drafted declaration of independence in front of, but not in the processes of, international legal institutions. Young used legal language performatively, but the act did not enter any formal legal process, and the act imposed no obligations. Here, the theory of this new art practice uses the same formal precision of legal drafting — in fact more so, see Rule 9(b), but then places the resulting work into a judicial forum, where its placement causes binding procedural effects.
Research into comparable art practices reveals no documented precedent where a trained artist, who also holds a license to file in court, has created a text-based work in the form of a legal complaint, placed it into a court by formally filing, and thereby initiated both a legal process and an artistic happening. This is distinguishable from art-law hybrid works, where artists consult lawyers or appropriate legal forms for aesthetic purposes. The theory of this art — that this is activist art by Artist-Placed Public Document — that this is Text-Based Activist Performance Art — integrates the artist’s own standing, legal responsibility, legal oath, and direct factual experience into the placement process. In many ways, it is an artistic act of profound intimacy, exposed in the most public and adversarial of public forums.
The focus of artist-act-of-placement in this article further extends from the history of site-specific art. From Michael Asher’s Claire Copley Gallery (1974), which revealed the gallery’s physical infrastructure, to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art (1970s), which redefined labor as performance, site and context have been critical to the conceptual and material definition of the work. Here, in this article, the proposition that there can be activist art by the act of an Artist-Placed Public Document — defines the relevant site — in First Amendment language, the relevant time, manner, and place — not as a private gallery, or museum, or even a traditional public square, but as the court itself: a government forum constitutionally open to public access, governed by rule, embedded within state power structures — and designed as the one institution in our society where an alleged defendant must either demonstrate the complaint is without merit or defend the facts set forth in the complaint. Only if the complaint is deemed meritless may its contentions be ignored, and, even then, not until a successful motion to dismiss.
The documentary basis of the court-filed Complaint referenced in this article — quoting primary source documents including public court records — also places this work within the lineage of documentary conceptualism. From Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75) to Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group project, artists have used text, image, and archival sources to document and interrogate systems of power, displacement, and injustice. In these artworks, however, the documentary materials were re-contextualized for the purpose of exhibition or publication within traditional art spaces. The theory and act discussed in this paper, by contrast, extends documentary conceptualism at a fundamental level, by transferring the entire documentary project directly into a functioning judicial process, where its evidentiary weight and procedural force is inseparable from its conceptual and performative structure. Once in, the artist’s placed artwork is controlled by the facts, the procedural rules, and the applicable substantive law.
In the related art process of institutional critique, artists such as Andrea Fraser have made works that examine and expose the ideological functions of art institutions. Fraser’s performances often use the language of grant proposals, fundraising pitches, and institutional self-justifications as the material of the work itself. The theory and act discussed here similarly uses institutional language, but applies it not to art institutions but to the legal system itself — and to the laws we all agree to be governed by, or otherwise face legal liability. The court is not only the site of placement, but the institutional subject being engaged, critiqued, and activated by the placement itself. The artist’s first placement, in a state court, in 2023, provides an example. See below.
Research into the history of legal actions initiated by artists likewise fails — so far — to reveal prior examples of artists placing their own authored legal complaints into courts as both legally operative documents and as formally conceived works of art. Past instances of art-law intersections typically fall into one of three categories:
(1) works that appropriate the form or language of legal documents for aesthetic or critical purposes, such as Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art (1966);
(2) works that document legal proceedings after the fact, such as Trevor Paglen’s photographic projects documenting secret government sites; and
(3) works that involve legal processes as a consequence of the work’s creation or display, such as Christoph Büchel’s litigation over the cancellation of his MASS MoCA installation in 2007, or artist litigation over copyrights, appropriation, or the federal VARA statute concerning artist’s moral rights in their public works.
Research continues, but it appears that in none of these prior law-related art practices did the artist themselves (a) draft a legally valid complaint and (b) place that legally binding complaint into a public court as both (c) a functional legal process for legitimate legal relief and as also (d) an intentional artistic gesture of activist text-based performance art.
This absence of (art world) precedent is further confirmed when examining works by artists engaging specifically with mental health, disability, and stigma. Artists such as Bobby Baker, whose performance works and drawings document her experience with mental illness, or the projects of the Disability Arts Movement, which have long used text and performance to critique medical and social frameworks, have never integrated formal legal processes into the works themselves. As with the Guerilla Girls and the other artists discussed in this brief article, the theory now proposed — that there can be a recognized process of activist art by Artist-Placed Public Document — and that this can be properly deemed Text-Based Activist Performance Art — builds on these traditions by placing the artist’s own experience of the exploitation of mental illness disability into the formal structure of a complaint, where the document functions simultaneously as chronology, history, memorialization, demonstration, procedural catalyst, legal rights invocation, constitutional law invocation — and, as a document on paper, both a physical and conceptual work within the meaning of all accepted definitions of art.
Site-specific art, legal conceptualism, documentary conceptualism, performance art, institutional critique, and activist art all contribute identifiable precedents for individual aspects of this practice discussed and noted in this article. However, no documented case exists where all of these strategies — text-based conceptualism, site-specific placement in court, procedural activation requiring legally compelled response, direct use of the judicial public forum, and self-representation of an artist directly harmed by the underlying subject matter — have been combined into a single, intentional artistic practice. This does not merely use legal language or legal structures as conceptual tools. It directly places an artist-created text-based work into a binding public forum where its procedural force is arises from performative act.
The binding procedural effect triggered by the placement of a complaint-artwork in a court may be seen as itself a formal artistic element. As a performance, the work compels human and intellectual interaction by the named defendants, the court, and potentially the public, should there be a jury, all of whom are not optional audience members but required participants. This compulsion arising from the social contract — arising from our legal norms and our statutory laws — all defining procedural features of the codified legal forum that we call the state and federal judicial branches of our government — appears to have no precedent in any prior form of conceptual, performance, activist, or documentary art. At least in the United States, so far as the research indicates so far.
Consider from an art theory perspective as to the interplay between artist and recipient, artist and viewer, artist and reader, artist and listener — what is discussed in this article, the art practices that it observes and proposes — transforms the nature of the art-audience-interpretation-engagement and turns it, at least as to some participants, on its head in most meanings of interpretation in the art theory world: By an act of the artist causing a procedural domino effect, participation is not an aesthetic choice; nor one of viewer curiosity; the defendants must participate, and their subjective interpretations of the artwork, the Complaint, do not matter: What happens next turns on evidence, fact, and law.
The work’s placement in the court record also creates a permanent public document, a government-maintained archive, accessible to the public, now and future, under several statutes and doctrines. As a result, the work has dual audiences, across time and space — those involved in the litigation process itself, in the now, and the broader public who may access the filing through court records, in the future. This bifurcated audience structure adds an additional conceptual and practical layer to the Complaint-as-text-based-art.
A summary of all the above: Based on a review of available documentation, with research continuing, it appears that no prior art practice, work, or artist-initiated project combines these specific elements seen here: (1) text-based documentary conceptualism grounded in evidence and fact, (2) first-person artist experience both intimate and universal, (3) site-specific placement *into* a government body, here the judicial system, (4) an act of art, using an artwork, to cause procedural activation requiring response to the art and the activism, by rule, and (5) sustained public accessibility, now and future, through the court record itself. This article appears to support the proposition that this constitutes a distinct and demonstrable evolution within the history of art, since conceptual art, one that is unique so far but which is available to any artist when the facts and law are right.
Based on current research into the history of conceptual art, activist art, performance art, institutional critique, documentary art, and site-specific art, there is no documented precedent for an artist creating a text-based work in the form of a bona fide legal complaint, placing that work into a court system through official filing, thereby triggering binding procedural obligations on named defendants, and framing the entire process — from creation to placement to procedural compulsion — as a formally conceived work of art for the purposes of activism and advocacy as to a universal issue of relevance to the public both in the United States and worldwide.
While artists have appropriated legal language, engaged in institutional critique, exposed governmental processes, used public records as source material, and while artists have directly confronted issues of mental illness stigma and disability rights, no indications in our art histories has been found, so far, of any artist formally inserting their own authored complaint, of their own experience, into a judicial system, intentionally using procedural rules to force response where no other remedy exists, and defining this sequence as both activist art, text-based art, and performance art. This absence of (art world) precedent, combined with the specific intersection of personal testimony, legal procedure, and artistic intent, supports the conclusion that this may be a new form, a new practice: Artist activism by Artist-Placed Public Document. Artist activism by Text-Based Performance Art.
The artist has now placed and performed this form of art twice, each time initiating a separate instance of Text-Based Activist Performance Art by Artist-Placed Public Document.
In 2023, the artist placed the first work, into a state court, presenting the court and the defendants with a question of first impression never before addressed by any court in the United States: May an attorney representing a client with a mental illness disability misuse that client’s mental illness for the attorney’s own advantage. The state’s supreme court eventually responded: No such misuse could ever constitute a legally cognizable wrong.
In 2025, the artist placed a second work, this time into a federal court, presenting a separate and distinct question of first impression, also never before considered by a court in the United States: May attorneys, who are officers of the court, exploit a person’s mental illness disability as part of a pattern of misconduct to intimidate and silence? Both the 2023 artwork and the 2025 artwork stand as legitimate legal complaints, and stand independently as a distinct legal, artistic, and activist intervention, addressing different legal questions, in different courts, under different bodies of law.
At the same time, the works form a conceptual and performative diptych — a body of work of two pieces, framed by a common focus on the exploitation of mental illness disability, and the exploitation of mental illness stigma. Through these two dialogical placements, the artist’s developing art practice, and the developing art theory behind it, treats the formal insertion of artist-created, text-based works into judicial forums as both a recurring artistic methodology and an ongoing advocacy practice —
— to be used only appropriately, consistent with procedural rules, rules of professional conduct, and substantive law. Stated differently, to be used only when there exist admissible evidentiary facts that, if proven, establish that remedies at law exist — or, by extension of law, on questions of first impression before the courts, should exist.
The art of activism. The art of legal advocacy. Both exist — and both are at their most legitimate — when there exist open and not-yet-decided questions of law before the courts.
Including when such questions sound in public issues of statutory rights and rights provided for in the constitutions of the several States.
And including when such questions sound in public issues of our fundamental rights secured by the Constitution of the United States.
…
Partial Reference List and Citations
Asher, Michael. “Claire Copley Gallery Installation.” 1974. Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles. Exhibition documentation.
Bochner, Mel. Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. 1966. SVA Gallery, New York. Exhibition documentation.
Büchel, Christoph. Training Ground for Democracy. 2007. MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. Exhibition documentation and related court filings,
Büchel v. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., 565 F. Supp. 2d 245 (D. Mass. 2008).
Calle, Sophie. Suite Vénitienne. 1980. Artist’s book. Bay Press, 1990.
Fraser, Andrea. Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk. 1989. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Performance documentation.
Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly. Chronicle Books, 2020.
Haacke, Hans. Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-
Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. 1971. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Exhibition documentation.
Kaprow, Allan. Assemblages, Environments & Happenings. Harry N. Abrams, 1966.
Kosuth, Joseph. Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990. MIT Press, 1991.
Piper, Adrian. Calling Card. 1986–1990. Various iterations. Adrian Piper
Research Archive Foundation Berlin.
Raad, Walid. The Atlas Group (1989–2004). Walid Raad, 2004. Exhibition documentation.
Rosler, Martha. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems. 1974–75. Printed portfolio.
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition ‘CARE’. 1969. Available in Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, Prestel, 2016.
Weiner, Lawrence. Statements. Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968.
Wilson, Adam Daley. Federal District Court Complaint filed February 18, 2025, accessible on (a) PACER, the federal court public filing system; (b) here; and also (c) here.
Young, Carey. Declaring Independence. 2003. Performance documentation.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 12. Available at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_12
United States Courts. “Access to Court Records.” Available at: https://www.uscourts.gov/court-records
