The work of art, beside and beyond rights

Abstract

ABSTRACT How does the work of art mediate the recognitions we give one another in a rights-based order when that order cannot guarantee the rights it promises? What does an account of the open-ended, norm-mediating, performative and socio-aesthetic complexity of the work of art offer this ‘After Rights?’ inquiry? In addressing these questions, I draw on the insights of Jacques Ranciere, Fiona Jenkins, Jean Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, and Sylviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost to argue that the work of art, as a creative and interpretive aesthetic locus, ethically constitutes its practitioners (artists and audiences) as participants in an open-ended norm-mediating risk relation. The argument is that the work of art is an encounter-event practice for performing our commonality beyond power, violence, hierarchy, reason, and rights – even as that work also lends itself, as a beside-rights practice, to the mediation of hidden and discriminatory rights-abusing practices and norms. I do so via a consideration of the work of South African artists which mediate and contest misogynistic, heteronormative and racist discriminations beside and beyond the rights guarantees of the 1996 South African Constitution.