Abstract

Since at least the late 1960s, artistic creation has increasingly called upon its audiences to consider the acceptability of certain actions in ways that law cannot. Based on four examples carrying especial weight in international artistic circles due to their reliance on animal actors—Kim Jones’s Rat Piece (1976), Yukinori Yanagi’s World Flag Ant Farm (1993), Xu Bing’s A Case Study of Transference (1993-1994) and Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993)—this article reflects upon the notion of sovereignty as an unstable contest between competing views of acceptability, permissibility and enforceability. Inflected by counter- or non-anthropocentric views, I consider how artworks serve as augmented para-legal cases accountable to both legal and art historical interpretation. Predicated on the belief that we consider artworks as sources of critical action rather than as products of human expression or examples of property, I explore how live animal participants initiate active reflection upon the misalignment between existing laws and proposed standards of human behavior towards animals. What common justices are imaginable for humans and animals? A corollary aim is to explore how such questions are inflected less by universal-versus-local dichotomies and more by the contingency of bodies moving across legal jurisdictions that both reinforce and undermine the structuring forces of globalization.

摘要

至少从 1960 年代后期开始，艺术创作越来越多地呼吁观众以法律无法做到的方式考虑某些行为的可接受性。基于四个因依赖动物演员而在国际艺术界具有特殊重要性的例子——金琼斯的老鼠片（1976）、柳由纪纪的世界旗蚁农场（1993）、徐冰的移情案例研究（1993-1994）和黄永平的世界剧场(1993)——这篇文章反映了主权概念是可接受性、可允许性和可执行性的竞争观点之间的不稳定竞争。受到反人类中心论或非人类中心论的影响，我考虑艺术作品如何充当对法律和艺术史解释负责的增强型准法律案件。基于我们将艺术作品视为批判性行动的来源，而不是人类表达的产物或财产的例子的信念，我探索了活体动物参与者如何主动反思现有法律与人类对动物行为的拟议标准之间的不一致。人类和动物可以想象哪些共同的正义？一个必然的目标是探索这些问题如何较少受到普遍与地方二分法的影响，而更多地受到机构跨越法律管辖区的偶然性的影响，这些法律管辖区既加强了又削弱了全球化的结构力量。