Excerpt: ‘On 18 February 2007, three days after the Madrid train bombers’ trial commenced, another court convened in the same city, this time swapping the heavily guarded confines of the courthouse for an annexe room at the ARCO art fair. Inspired by the mock trials organised by avant-garde movements in the 1920s and 1930s, the artist Anton Vidokle and the curator Tirdad Zolghadr ‘turned themselves in’, assigned the roles of Prosecution,Defence and Judge to their peers and delineated the charges ‘Collusion with the Bourgeoisie and Other Serious Accusations’. Captured by three sets of cameras, footage from The Trial was later used as the basis for the documentary DVD, A Crime Against Art (2007), directed by the curator, Hila Peleg.
That the terrains of art have continued to tremor in the early years of the twenty-first century can be in little doubt; the multifarious impacts of globalisation and the re-emergence of art as a social practice are just two of the processes through which established definitions and structures of authority have been discarded. But, beyond Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘social interstice’ and Grant Kester’s ‘dialogical exchange’, relatively little attention has been paid to what constitutes the artwork under these circumstances.In identifying the extreme form that a contemporary artwork can take, the case of A Crime Against Art illustrates the limitations of extant theories. Writing in the pages of this journal in 2004, Stephen Wright offered one possible route forward, discussing an emerging strain of artists who do not necessarily label their activities as art. Though his text seems to speak directly to A Crime Against Art’s resistance to attribution and classification, by using the video as a case study this analysis will show that, even when it appears to slip into the maelstrom of actual life, the artwork perseveres. By examining the process of constitution, this text will elaborate on the ways in which the radical artwork of today draws in the historical avant-garde to institute itself not only in a contemporary economy but as an economy. As Wright’s proposals begin to intimate, the fundamental question facing contemporary art is whether such experimental approaches and activities are capable of establishing a parallel economy or whether they remain embedded within the existing order. […]’