Towards Law as an Artistic Medium: William E. Jones’s Tearoom

Abstract

Comprised entirely of police surveillance footage initially used to prosecute violators of anti-sodomy laws, William E. Jones’s 2007 film Tearoom embodies the potential value of regarding law itself an artistic medium. The viewing experience it offers contends that when we regard images as artworks, that is, as both a separate, imagined realm and as a specific configuration of materials free of any preordained practical function, we are then most able to grasp law’s dependence on the aesthetic choices of its agents, and in turn, law’s own materiality. Such discernment reflects a more productive relationship between visual art and the law, one founded on symbiosis rather than on decided antagonism or indifference.