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Abstract
Rafael Cauduro’s mural The Seven Crimes of Justice, situated in the Supreme Court of Mexico, speaks to the old problem of the relationship between art, politics and the State. In Mexico City, the birthplace of modern muralism, Rafael Cauduro confronts its ambivalent legacy and offers up new solutions. And at the same time, at the very heart of the legal system, Cauduro presents a critique of law and justice almost unprecedented in its uncompromising determination to lay bare the brutality of contemporary legal phenomena, not just in Mexico but around the world. This essay examines how Cauduro’s aesthetic choices address the history of modern muralism, and how his thematic choices address the history of modern law. But above all, how do these two modes of representation, the visual and the legal, actually relate to one another? Murals and law have something in common—a belief in the force of walls. The Seven Crimes of Justice binds this common thematic together in a remarkable work that has to date attracted little critical attention. This essay gives it the attention it deserves, focusing on questions of time and memory, and of the relationship between the force of law and the force of art.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See David Craven, “Recent Literature on Diego Rivera and Mexican Muralism,” Latin American Research Review 36 (2001): 221–37; Mary Katherine Coffey, “Muralism and the People: Culture, Popular Citizenship, and Government in Post-Revolutionary Mexico,” The Communication Review 5 (2002): 7–38; Rick Lopez et al., eds., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Octavio Paz, “Re/Visions,” in Labyrinth of Solitude (London: Allen Lane, 1967); Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley, eds., Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Mary Coffey, How A Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Art and Revolution in Mexico, (2014) 28 (3) Third Text.
2 Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics in our Epoch,” letter published in Partisan Review, June 18, 1938 reprinted in Fourth International, 11, no. 2 (March–April 1950): 61–64.
3 The PRI has had three different names. It was first known as the National Revolutionary Party (PNR, 1929–1938), then as the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM, 1938–1946). It officially became the “Party of Institutionalized Revolution” in 1946. At the time Rivera painted his first murals, the PNR had not been founded yet, although its oxymoronic self-image as a party that was at once institutional and revolutionary was already clearly in evidence. Certainly the ideal of a mestizo nation emancipated from the yoke of imperialism and capitalism was forged before the foundation of the party through the aesthetic program of los tres grandes and the intellectual program of los siete sabios (“the seven wise men”), both under Vasconcelos” patronage.
4 See Desmond Rochfort, “The Sickle, the Serpent, and the Soil: History, Revolution, Nationhood, and Modernity in the Murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros,” in Rochford, The Eagle and the Virgin, 43–57. See in particular critical discussion in Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution; Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art; Vaughan and Lewis, The Eagle and the Virgin.
5 Quoted in Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art, 1.
6 See extended discussions in Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution; Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art.
7 David Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-Revolutionary Road,” New Masses, May 29, 1934. See also David Siqueiros, Art and Revolution (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 332–4; Hurlburt, Laurance Prentiss, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, David Alfaro Siqueiros: The Quest for Revolutionary Mural Form and Content, 1920-1940 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1976). See Jennifer Jolly, “Siqueiros’ Communist Proposition for Mexican Muralism,” in Mexican Muralism – A Critical History, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Leondard Folgarait, and Robine Adele Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 75–92; Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art, 38–42.
8 Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico from the Conquest to the Future, Staircase Triptych (Mexico City: Palacio Nacional, 1929–35) (including The Ancient Indian World [north wall], History of Mexico [west wall], Mexico Today and in the Future [south wall]). Hereinafter, Rivera, History of Mexico. See also From Pre-Hispanic Civilization to the Conquest, Eleven Patio Corridor Murals (Mexico City: Palacio Nacional, 1942–51).
9 See, also in the Palacio Nacional corridor murals, The Marketplace, Tlatelolco; The Great City of Tenochtitlan.
10 Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution, chapter 4.
11 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: WW Norton, 1971), 113.
12 The story remains largely untold but much seems to hinge on the personality of the Supreme Court justices themselves; the committed enthusiasm of a few more progressive judges and, perhaps, the aesthetic indifference of the rest. A similar tale might be told about the formation of the Constitutional Court Art Collection in South Africa, where the figure of Judge Albi Sachs bears a disproportionate influence.
13 An extended analysis see Desmond Manderson, “Cauduro’s Crimes,” in Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chapter 7. This chapter is based on that research but has been rewritten and incorporates substantial new research and discussion. A brief discussion of the murals is in Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 364–6. See also John Ross, “In the Basement of Mexican Justice, No One is Innocent,” Counterpunch, July 16, 2010; José Ramón Cossío Díaz, “Las conditions del juzgar,” Letras Libras, October 2009 (http://www.letraslibres.com/revista/artes-y-medios/las-condiciones-del-juzgar). See also Miguel Ceballos, “Pinta Cauduro siete crimenes,” El Universal, November 15, 2006; Angel Vargas, “Inauguracon del mural,” La Jornada, July 15, 2009, 5; Erika Bucio, “Hace critica con mural,” El Norte, August 21, 2007, 3; Erika Bucio, “Lleva Cauduro mural,” Reforma, August 21, 2007, 8C; Carmen Gonzales, “Historica fin de semana,” Reforma, December 3, 2006, 16. None of these articles is adequate to the depth or meaning of the work.
14 Prefatory panel, Cauduro, 7 Crimenes.
16 See José María González García, The Eyes of Justice: Blindfolds and Farsightedness, Vision and Blindness in the Aesthetics of the Law, trans. Lawrence Schimel (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2017); Resnik and Curtis, Representing Justice; Peter Goodrich, Legal Emblems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
17 See in particular an interview with Rafael Cauduro conducted by Dr Luis Gomez Romero as part of this research, on file with the author. Dr Romero’s great generosity in organizing, conducting, and translating this interview is deeply appreciated and was of immense value to my understanding of this work.
18 Cauduro has used various titles over the years: “Seven Crimes” is one, as well as “Seven Major Crimes” and “The Crimes of Justice.”
19 José Ramón Cossío Díaz, “Las conditions del juzgar,” Letras Libras, October 2009 (http://www.letraslibres.com/revista/artes-y-medios/las-condiciones-del-juzgar).
20 See for example Francisco Goya, El Tres de Mayo, oil on canvas, 2.66 × 3.451 m (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1814); Los Desastres de la Guerra, 82 aquatints (Madrid: Museo Reina Sophia, 1810–1820).
21 See Desmond Manderson, “Klimt’s Jurisprudence: Sovereign Violence and the Rule of Law” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 35 (2015): 515–42.
22 Nuno Garoupa and Maria A. Maldonado, “The Judiciary in Political Transitions: The Critical Role of U.S. Constitutionalism in Latin America,” Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law 19 (2011): 593; Stephen Zamora and José Ramón Cossío, “Mexican Constitutionalism after Presidencialismo,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 4, no.2 (2006): 411–37.
23 Hans Kelsen, “The Pure Theory of Law,” Law Quarterly Review 50 (1934): 474; HLA Hart, Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). On the dominance of legal positivism across the 20th century, see Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice (Oxford: Hart Publishing), 140–61.
24 Douzinas and Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence, 4.
25 Garoua and Maldonado, “The Judiciary in Political Transitions,” 609.
26 For seminal texts, see Roscoe Pound, “The End of Law as Developed in Juristic Thought” Harvard Law Review 30 (1916): 201; Karl Llewellyn, “Some Realism about Realism,” Harvard Law Review 44 (1931): 1222–64; Karl Llewellyn, “A Realistic Jurisprudence: The Next Step,” Columbia law Review 30 (1930): 431. For surveys of the literature, see Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); William Twining, Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
27 Key examples include Duncan Kennedy, “The Structure of Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Buffalo Law Review 28 (1978): 205; “Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication,” Harvard Law Review 89 (1975): 1685; Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Roberto Unger, “The Critical Legal Studies Movement,” Harvard Law Review 96 (1982): 561; Robert Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” Stanford Law Review (1984): 57–125; Allan Hunt and Peter Fitzpatrick, eds., Critical Legal Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). A useful review of anti-positivist legal scholarship in this period is to be found in Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice (Oxford: Hart, 2005), esp. 229–57. See also Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); W. Brown and J. Halley, eds., Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
28 Douzinas and Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence, 64–70.
29 As Douzinas and Gearey note, this development is reflected in the parallel philosophical movement of deconstruction which likewise experienced a notable political “turn” after 1989: ibid 70; Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996). Significantly, this turn which is evident throughout Derrida’s later work, first occurred in the context of an invitation to speak about deconstruction and justice at a Faculty of Law: see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919; Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992).
30 Zamora and Cossío, “Mexican Constitutionalism after Presidencialismo”; Miguel Gonzalez Compean and Peter Bauer, “Jurisdiccion y Democracia: Los Nuevos Rumbos del Poder Judicial en Mexico” [Jurisdiction and Democracy: The New Courses of Judicial Power in Mexico] (Cal y Arena, 2002).
31 Pilar Domingo, “Judicial Independence: The Politics of the Supreme Court in Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 32 (2000): 705–35.
32 Karina Ansolabehere, “More Power, More Rights? The Supreme Court and Society in Mexico,” in Cultures of Legality: Judicialization and Political Activism in Latin America, ed. Javier Couso, Alexandra Huneeus, and Rachel Sieder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 77–111. See also Karina Ansolabehere, La política desde la justicia: cortes supremas, gobierno y democracia en Argentina y México (Mexico City: FLACSO, 2007).
33 Ansolabehere, “More Power, More Rights,” 79.
34 See Compean and Bauer, “Jurisdiccion y Democracia,” 394–5, quoted in Zamora and Cossío, “Mexican constitutionalism after Presidencialismo.”
35 Ansolabehere, “More Power, More Rights,” 87.
36 Ibid., 93.
37 Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601, at 1601, 1629.
38 See also Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, eds., Law’s Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992).
39 For key examples in the development of the field, see Sally Falk Moore, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study,” Law & Society Review 7.4 (1973): 719–46; Clifford Geertz, “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective,” in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983); John Griffiths, “What Is Legal Pluralism?” The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 18 (1986): 1–55; Sally Engle Merry, “Legal Pluralism,” Law & Society Review 22 (1988): 869; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Law: A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Conception of Law,” Journal of Law and Society 14.3 (1987): 279–302.
40 Susan Edelstein et al., Barroco Nova: Neo-baroque Moves in Contemporary Art (London: University of Western Ontario, 2012); Monka Kaup, Neo-baroque in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Mary Ann Frese Witt, Meta-theater and Modernity: Baroque and Neo-baroque (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013); Nigel Wheale, ed., The Postmodern Arts (London: Routledge, 1995).
41 See Shoshana Felman, “A Ghost in the House of Justice,” in The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 2002), 131–69; Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Tatiana Flessas, “A House Haunted by Justice,” in Legal Spaces, ed. Desmond Manderson and Richard Mohr (Law Text Culture, Volume 9), 215–44.
42 Henry James, Ghost Stories of Henry James (Ware: Wordsworth, 2001); M.R. James, Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1987); M. Night Shyamalan, dir., Sixth Sense (1999); George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (New York: Random House, 2017).
43 Amongst a wide literature, see for example Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Peter Ramadanovic, “From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche’s Active Forgetting and Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster,” Postmodern Culture 11 (2001); Anne Whitehead, “The Past as Revenant: Trauma and Haunting in Pat Barker’s Another World,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45.2 (2004): 129–46.
44 See in particular P.A. Levine, Trauma and Memory (North Atlantic Books, 2015).
45 See, e.g. Rivera, History of Mexico; José Clemente Orozco, Hidalgo, The Phantasms of Religion in Alliance with the Military, and Carnival of the Ideologies, Murals (Guadalajara, Mexico: Palacio de Gobierno de Jalisco, 1937).
46 Shyamalan, Sixth Sense.
47 See Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo.
48 See Dolly Young, “Mexican Literary Reactions to Tlatelolco 1968,” Latin American Research Review 20 (1985): 71–85; Elena Poniatowska and Helen R. Lane, Massacre in Mexico (New York, 1975).
49 Rivera, History of Mexico [west wall].
50 Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995); R.J. McNally, “The Science and Folklore of Traumatic Amnesia,” Clinical Psychology Science and Practice 11 (2004): 29–33; S. Boag, Freudian Repression, the Unconscious, and the Dynamics of Inhibition (London: Karnac, 2012); Peter Madison, Freud’s Concept of Repression and Defense: Its Theoretical and Observational Language (Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1961); Michael Billig, Freudian Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
51 See e.g. “The Ghosts of Mexico 1968,” The Economist, April 24, 2008.
52 Octavio Paz, Postdata (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1970), quoted in Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art, 144.
53 Ibid., 128.
54 Ibid., 179.
55 Ibid.
56 Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-Revolutionary Road.”
57 David Delaney, The Spatial, the Legal, and the Pragmatics of World Making (London: Routledge, 2010); Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (London: Routledge, 2014).
58 Of course it should be noted that the monumental Carcel, or prison, with its Escher-like excesses, is an exception to this list.
59 See Bruno Latour, La fabrique du droit (Paris: La decouverte, 2002).
60 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). There is a voluminous secondary literature.
61 Ibid., 1–31.
62 Ibid., 32–40.
63 Ibid., 31.
64 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Art and Literature 4 (1965): 193–201, in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, eds., Modern Art and Modernism – A Critical Anthology (London: Harper and Row, 1982), 5–6.
65 The wall has become a recent subject of scholarly interest: see Elizabeth Vallet, Borders, Walls and Fences (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Reece Jones, Violent Borders (London: Verso, 2016); Michel Warschawki, On the Border, trans. Levi Laub (New York: Pluto Press, 2005); Ronald Rael, Borderwall as Architecture (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017).
66 Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2001; Ray Dolphin and Graham Usher, The West Bank Wall: Unmaking Palestine (London: Pluto Press 2006).
67 Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program (London: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007); Anne McClintock, “Imperial Ghosting and National Tragedy: Revenants from Hiroshima and Indian Country in the War on Terror,” PMLA 129 (2014): 819–29; Leila Nadya Sadat, “Ghost Prisoners and Black Sites: Extraordinary Rendition Under International Law,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 37 (2005): 309.
68 Cossío Díaz, “Las conditions del juzgar.”
69 See Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
70 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Vintage Books, 1977) is the classic work on the transition from antiquity to modernity in law’s relationship to the seen and the unseen.
71 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 473, esp. at 474–6, 495.
72 Charles Epp, The Rights Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Bruce Wilson, “Institutional Reforms and Rights Revolutions in Latin America,” Journal of Politics in Latin America 1 (2007): 59–85.
73 Ansolabehere, “More Power, More Rights?” 82.
74 Ibid., 105.
75 For further works in this emergent interdisciplinary field, see Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead, eds., Law and the Image: The Authority of Art an the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Resnik and Curtis, Representing Justice; Desmond Manderson, ed. Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, Critique (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
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Desmond Manderson
Desmond Manderson is jointly appointed in the ANU College of Law and College of Arts & Social Sciences. He is director of the Centre for Law Arts and the Humanities. His most recent book is Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (Cambridge 2019).