What is an “Artist-Placed Document in a Public Institution”? — It’s Activist Art, Text-Based Art— And Public Interest Impact Litigation

2023 — Documentation of the artist’s first Artist-Placed Document in a Public Institution as Performance Art and Activist Art. This first time, in 2023, it was a state court complaint — a text-based artwork made by the artist, which contained a new legal theory created by the artist. The author-artist formally filed the artwork in a State Court, and, later, appellate briefs filed in the State’s Supreme Court, also artworks. The public issue activism was about an issue of first impression: When attorneys have a client with a mental illness disability, may those attorneys misuse mental illness stigma for their own-self gain?

What is Artist-Placement of Documents as Text-Based Activist Performance Art? Is it Art? Is it Law?

First, a proposed definition:

A definition of “Artist-Placement of Documents in Public Institutions” is a text-based performance artwork that has these elements:

(1) an artist’s intentional and formal submission; of

(2) an artist-created text-based legal document;

(3) containing an artist-created theory within the document;

(4) into a formal public institution system, such as a court;

(4) as both a legitimate legal act; and

(5) a legitimate artistic act of performance, and art activism;

(6) thereby causing, and requiring, the institution to engage and respond;

(7) as a result of the institution’s own procedural and legal rules;

(8) thereby forcing the institution to act, in ways that may now be seen; and

(9) thereby forcing it to document, itself, what it has done, or avoided;

(9) thereby transforming the institution into a public forum for art;

(10) in which the institution, by its own rules, becomes part of the artwork;

(11) resulting in an artist-initiated work of text, activism, and performance;

(12) that explores and documents the behaviors of a public institution;

(13) concerning an issue of public significance;

(14) where both the artist and the institution’s actors are human;

(15) acting not by algorithm but rather by strengths and imperfections that are uniquely human.

More on the Definition of Artist-Placed Document Art.

Here are several points below to help flesh this out.

The first set of points summarize the core innovations in the context of text-based art, performance art, activist art, and public interest impact litigation. The three key innovations are embedding an artwork into the legal process, compelling a response by the legal system and institution, through the activation of the procedural rules of court legal process, and transforming the legal system, including the courts, into both a conceptual and a physical public artistic space.

The next set of points summarize some of the applications of the art practice method, and its implications in law and art — how it expands the goals and options of activist legal advocacy; how it forces public institutions to expose, admit, and document how they act; and by both, it redefines and expands methods of critique of public policy, public institutions, and the human actors who comprise them.

The final set of points summarize some secondary effects that occur when an artist places a document in a public institution as text-based art that is both performance art and activist art.

1. Key Points Arising Out Of The Definition.

1. The legal system itself functions as the artwork’s site and substrate; art is embedded within, and grafted into, real and actual legal procedures, rather than operating externally from the outside looking in.
2. Procedural rules themselves become an artistic medium, compelling courts and respondents to engage and respond, whether they want to or not.
3. Legal institutions are also compelled to create their own record — the court’s docket and the court’s decisions, even if just one unreasoned line — of their engagement, evasion, or refusal, thereby causing systemic acts, good or bad, to be documented by the actor itself.
4. Legal filings and the legal theories within them serve as both performance acts and institutional critiques, compelling participation from courts and defendants not just procedurally but substantively, in response to the theory itself.
5. The legal complaint serves at the same time as both a legal theory and argument and a conceptual and post-conceptual text-based artwork, existing simultaneously in both domains.
6. The courtroom functions as an art gallery — a public art forum and gallery — where legal documents and court responses to them become performative, displayed, text-based, and and archived works.
7. Every act or non-act by the court or the respondents, be it substantive or evasive, as to each step in the legal process, becomes part of the artwork’s possible meanings and interpretations.
8. The art practice and legal impact litigation practice redefines the meaning of institutional critique; now the activist artwork is embedded within the system itself, rather than the art being staged outside or in distant opposition to the system; and now the activist artwork is actually a catalyst that causes, forces, and compels a response by the institution itself, due to its own procedural rules.

2. The Next Most Important Points.

1. This introduces a new model that integrates legal action with artistic intervention, creating an alternative approach to public interest law.
2. Judicial evasions and unsupported dismissals are no longer setbacks or failures, but rather valuable, and with meaning, because they create recorded evidence of the legal system’s failure to engage, which the institution itself must preserve.
3. This offers a new method of public interest litigation that does not depend upon legal victory in the narrow traditional sense.
4. Avoidance, distortion, and bad faith legal responses by respondents are not obstacles to the artwork but instead serve as elements of its meanings, interpretations, and documentation.
5. The responses of legal actors, whether substantive or dismissive, is permanently documented in court records, making systemic bias visible to the public, which, as with any artwork, members of the public may interpret as they wish.
6. The court docket becomes a conceptual and documentary artistic site, preserving a permanent legal and artistic record of institutional behavior, as any piece of performance art would be documented.
7. This work ensures that legal institutions and the human actors who comprise them become participants in an larger activist artwork across places and times.
8. Unlike traditional conceptual art, which may be seen as static, or as unable to create cause an effect, this art process is dynamic; it causes mandatory action by others; it thereby turns a mere text into procedural, legal, and even physical action: Once filed, respondents and the court itself must file subsequent works of text-based art.
9. The approach may be seen as being a type of post-theory art; a human theory is being placed before human actors in a human institution, perhaps the most human institution, the courts, which are of man-made law, not physical laws; and which turn on human strengths and imperfections, and not the algorithms of artificial intelligence.

And Some Points About Broader Implications.

1. This practice empowers artists to use institutional rules creatively, turning rules power into instruments of art, activism, and expression.
2. The legal system is required to document its own behavior through its own official filings, orders, and procedural actions, thereby creating an undeniable institutional record that cannot be disputed or denied.
3. Courts and respondents are not merely participants in a lawsuit; they are participants in an artistic Happening and a documentary artwork.
4. This practice transforms passive legal systems into active participants in an artwork, resulting in possible new interpretations by the human actors in the institution and the viewing public alike.
5. Unlike protest art, which exists outside formal structures, this practice places the artwork inside the legal process itself, and the institution itself must respond to it.
6. This practice represents an expansion of site-specific art, where the legal system itself becomes the site that is the foundation of the structure and form of the artwork.
7. Legal filings now serve as durable art artifacts; unlike traditional site-specific or transient performance art pieces, this practice ensures that the artwork persists over time, and can be seen by the public across time.
8. This practice creates a dual audience: legal professionals processing the filings and the public, including the art public, observing the institutional responses.
9. Unlike traditional legal scholarship, policy reform efforts, or the traditional law review article, this method directly engages the judicial system through compelled interaction.
10. This method challenges the conventional notion that art must reside in galleries or museums, expanding the venues of artistic intervention, and expanding the availability of art to all.
11. This work ensures that even institutions that refuse to engage substantively must still create procedural records of their non-engagement, including their reasons, or lack of reasons, why.
12. This practice highlights how legal procedural mechanisms, which are often used to exclude and to make difficult for the public to see, can be subverted, by the institution’s own procedural rules, into artistic tools for compelled institutional activism and visibility.
13. This art practice encourages public discourse on public institutions by making legal filings not just a legal document but a broader, more accessible thing — a piece of art — that expands the opportunity for public viewing, public interpretation, and public engagement.
14. Unlike many traditional artistic practices, which may often need to rely on external institutions for validation, this approach embeds art within the system itself, and forces a public response by use of the institution’s own rules of procedure and substance.

This brief article has been an attempt to answer “What is Artist-Placed Document Art” by both explaining what it is and by offering a definition of it.