Art Provoking Law: Uncivil Obedience and the Unsettling of Immigration Law

Abstract

In 2009, Nuria Güell organised the Barcelona-based exhibition ‘Offside’, wherein she sought out and contracted an illegal immigrant to play a game of hide and seek with viewers inside the gallery space. Supplied with an official employment contract, this unnamed figure was thus able to attain legal immigration papers, allowing him to cross a seemingly insurmountable legal boundary. Scholars and artists have long been interested in creative practices intersecting with notions of belonging, citizenship and statelessness, and political protest and civil disobedience (conscientious law-breaking as a means of expressing dissent). Güell’s hiring of an individual to shift his status to ‘legal’ resident builds on an increasing trend in art after 1970 wherein law itself functions as the foundation for creative expression, as a frame within which one might work for progressive purposes. This unorthodox strategy of working within the law – complicit with the letter of the law but defiant of normative rule-following – activates a strategy of uncivil obedience. Uncivil obedience is a looking-glass version of civil disobedience comprising a hyperbolic acquiescence to established regulations, becoming a means of protesting the very rules that are being followed. Through socially engaged projects, Güell, as well as artists such as Ricardo Dominguez and Tania Bruguera, have frustrated and called attention to various countries’ strict immigration laws and the problematics of citizenship and statelessness. Their projects are grounded in a form of literalistic rule-following, demonstrating how an art practice comprising bureaucratic antagonism might express dissent ironically through radical compliance rather than defiance.