Artist-Placed Public Document Art as Compelling the Visibility of Institutional Judgment and the Character of Actors
May 2025 —- The following is an article based on some additional notes about an area of post-theory art known as Artist-Placed Public Document Art as a mechanism for compelling institutional actors—not necessarily to confess, change, or rectify—but to own their decisions—and to be rendered visible in their power. Or, Artist-Placed Public Document Art as a way to document how institutions and actors respond to matters involving issues of public importance. This article uses references including to sports — when a referee or an umpire makes a bad call, it is expected that they “own it” or even “wear it” — meaning, they accept responsibility and they do not try to pretend it did not happen.
Abstract
This essay explores Artist-Placed Public Document Art as a unique intervention in the domain of institutional visibility and moral accountability. Positioned at the intersection of conceptual art, legal theory, performance art, activist art, and text-based art, this form of Post-Theory Art does not merely critique systems of power from the outside-looking-in—rather, it compels public institutional systems, such as the public courts, to respond from placing art within the institution pursuant to its own rules. Drawing from intellectual traditions including procedural justice, institutional critique, literary moral witness, and political phenomenology, the artist emerges not as passive observer but as initiator of a process that will result in actions, reactions, and, in the court context, some form of judgment or decision about an issue of public importance. The artist has an opportunity to be the citizen who ensures that power must reveal to the public whether it is willing to speak with transparency, whether it is willing to decide pubic issues with reason and fairness, and, perhaps most importantly, whether it is willing to publicly own—or “wear”—each and every of the calls it makes along the way to its ultimate decision. Whether the institution acts justly or not, and whether the actors involved show character or not, the art creates a public inscription that cannot be undone—unless the institution at issue decides to hide its own decision, rather than making it accessible to the public citizenry, where “power” in this sense refers to pubic institutions, including public courts.
1. Introduction: Artist-Placed Public Documents and the Power of Forcing a Response.
Power often hides in its ability to remain silent. In bureaucratic systems, evasion is not a failure but a function. Artist-Placed Public Document Art intervenes in this logic—not by demanding that institutions be just, but by ensuring they are seen being what they are. Good, bad, or ugly, what powerful actors do, or do not do, in the context of public issues, can be made visible to the public by the artist whose practice encompasses artist-placed document art.
By filing a formal institutional document—often legal in form but theoretical in content—into a court or institution, the artist activates procedural rules that compel a response by both the institution and he actors involved. The court and the actors may deny the claim, dismiss the theory, or reject the premise—but the actors must file papers to so attempt, and the court must issue a ruling. In doing so, the institution writes itself into the artwork, and into the performance art, exposing its character not just as structure but as actor.
This essay explores the philosophical, artistic, and ethical implications of this. In the context of public courts and artist-placed document art, the courtroom is not just the site of potential justice—for injustice may occur for any number of reasons—but, either way, the courtroom is now also the site of an art performance, or an art happening, in which it is a forum and venue not only for law and ethics, but also a forum and venue for institutional authorship and transparency. When the institution acts, it does so in public, and must record it in its public docket, and thereby is made to wear the call—take ownership for not only its ultimate decision, but each decision impacting the public that occurs along the way.
2. The Court and the Institution as the Referee: From Chief Justice Roberts to Sports, and “Wearing The Call.”
The American Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, once likened judges to umpires: they do not make the rules, he claimed, they merely “call balls and strikes.” His words spoke to the American and perhaps even global—even fundamentally human—legal and justice ideal of neutrality, objectivity, and restraint.
But as legal scholars and historians—from Derrick Bell to Catharine MacKinnon to many others—have shown, this is, or can be, a fiction. Judges do not just interpret the rules; they shape them, apply them selectively, and bring their worldviews to bear. In baseball terms, the strike zone moves. In the context of all field sports, the field is, or can be made, uneven.
In sports, when a referee makes a controversial call, they must own it, and are said to be responsible for “wearing it.” The fans see it. The commentators dissect it. The call is part of the record. Games work because their rules are visible, agreed upon, and followed—owned and accepted, without gaslighting or duplicity—even when violated.
Artist-Placed Public Document Art activates this same condition and dynamic in the public legal, public interest, and public civic space. The artist, perhaps somewhat like a coach issuing a challenge, forces the referee—here, the court, the institution—to make a call about something that now cannot be ignored or looked away. And once made, the institution must wear that decision: it is on the record, docketed archived, and subjected to public reflection and public debate. Unless, as with some courts, they use their rules to avoid decisions and make public knowledge of the docket difficult or impossible to see.
3. The Action of an Artist-Placed Public Document, Causing Visibility as a Moral Act of Citizens.
Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, argued that public action is where truth gains reality: it is not enough to think or feel—we must act in the presence of others. For Arendt, public space is not just physical but ontological: it is where meaning is confirmed.
This theory and worldview may also be seen throughout the work of James Baldwin, who argued that America’s institutions must be seen doing what they do. Baldwin did not demand perfection from courts or presidents—rather, he demanded that they own their decisions, and that the own the consequences of their actions. Perhaps if reduced to the simplest of terms, it could be said that both Arendt and Baldwin, and many others, have asked first for the right call, but, if nothing else, honesty and visibility about the call that was made. “You made the call,” they and others might have said. “Now wear it.”
Artist-Placed Public Document Art performs this function precisely in part by bringing an aesthetic of art into a new space, and also in part by making action an aesthetic in and of itself: An artist creates a theory of public importance, places it within a text-based artwork (such as a legal complaint filed in court), and, by the institution’s own procedural and substantive rules, the artist and the artwork create the condition of required action. The artist’s work as a causal catalyst — in response to it, the institution must act, by its own rules, and say, publicly, right or wrong, just or unjust, what it has chosen to do about the theory the artist has raised, and placed. So too all the other actors involved. Even if that action is rejection of the theory, whether for sound or unsound reasons, that rejection now lives in the public sphere. For example in American federal courts—the federal courts of the United States—there is PACER, the public access docket available to anyone in the land. But not so with the dockets of some of the non-federal courts—that is, the courts of many of the states.
This may be seen as truth, trust, and verification not by substantive outcome but as transparent exposure. As the philosopher Michel Foucault understood and argued, as just one among many thinkers across cultures and times, “truth” is often limited only to what power is forced to admit under pressure. Perhaps for the first time, at least in some areas of art, Artist-Placed Public Document Art can be an actual, real-world mechanism and catalyst of that pressure—applied in the very way most acceptable by all cultures and countries, at least in name: The proper filing of a proper complaint in a public court. Almost every nation across time has had the public courthouse to address and resolve disputes, including about rights, in the shadow of concepts such as justice and equity. Artist-Placed Public Document art is not just about issues of public importance—it is an exercise of one of the most important things a citizen can do—the calm and measured bringing of a dispute before a court to have the court—the public institution—adjudicate what the outcome should be. This may be seen as a core part of the social contract that has been the theory of many countries since the time of the Enlightenment.
4. Institutional and Actor Evasion in Relation to the Aesthetics of Denial.
Another view on this arguably comes from Max Weber, who, in condensed form, described modern bureaucracy as a system built for depersonalization. Meaning, in this context, as an over-simplification, if a person is denied justice or fairness, that person was denied not by a person, but by a process. Among other things, this results in an ability for power to escape not just accountability, but even visibility as to their decisions, be they just or unjust.
From this perspective, this may be where the post-theory art practice of Artist-Placed Public Document Art is most important: In some ways, it can be interpreted as this— it re-personalizes the institutional process. A particular identifiable court must respond. Identifiable actors must respond. The filing must be entered into an identifiable, traceable docket with a timestamp and a case number. The bureaucratic void becomes not just visible, not just research-able, but also it beomes legible.
In the context of art history in the past century, this act and accomplishment of Artist-Placed Public Document Art can be traced in part to Adrian Piper’s confrontational performances, where she inserted herself into uncomfortable social spaces, forcing others to confront race, gender, and their own gaze. It can also be traced to Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here…, which brought housing policy into gallery spaces, exposing policy as performance. It can also be traced to the bodies of work of many other artists beyond the scope of this brief paper.
Here, however, the art is not symbolic—it is a valid legal document placed into an actual public institution—the court itself—where it must be addressed one way or the other. As such, the law becomes both site and material, and the actors, including the court as well as the persons or companies who must respond as parties, becomes part of the performance, which is the demonstration of how the institution and the actors comport themselves on an issue of public importance—both the substantive public interest theory as well as the manner in which the institution and actors participate—ethically, unethically; following the rules,breaking the rules—all for the public to have documented so that it may be seen. By institutional rules, such as court procedural rules, the participant must, for the public’s review, “wear their calls.”
5. Artist-Placed Documents as Protecting Public Memory, the Public Archive, and the Public Record of how Law, Society, and Humanity Do and Do Not Evolve.
Even if the court rules against the public interest theory placed by artist, that ruling becomes part of the artwork. As the philosopher and theorist Jacques Derrida explored in Archive Fever, the archive is not just a storehouse—it is an instrument of power, in part because of this (as over-simplification): What is archived for the public becomes what is remembered—or what can be remembered—by the public. What is remembered becomes what is real—if it is not hidden, and if the public, or some part of the public, choose to find it and consider it.
In this sense, Artist-Placed Public Document Art performs a form of prefigurative history. It does not ask the court to be just, and it accepts that human courts and human actors are both just and unjust—but no matter the substantive outcome, Artist-Placed Public Document does require this, because the institution’s own rules require it: It requires the court and the actors to be visible. And if visibility is itself a form of memory, it helps ensure not just a public docket recording, but also a part of public memory, and from this it appears that it is also part of ensuring a public reality remains real and not possible to gaslight or pretend away.
Further, in this sense, an artist placing such documents may be similar to this idea: Every ruling is both decision and inscription. The artist ensures that the institution can no longer pretend it never had to choose; the institution and the actors can never pretend that the issue never came before them in the first place.
6. The Artist does not serve as Judge; The Artist Simply Serves as an Initiator of the Public Process of Judgment, by the Proper Public Actor in the Proper Public Space.
Very broadly speaking, in traditional conceptual art, an idea is enough; one idea in isolation can support an artwork, even a long-term body of work by an artist. In Post-Theory Art, theories that link, connect, and relate multiple ideas are the artwork. And then, Artist-Placed Public Document Art takes this a step further: The artist does not stop at single idea or even a single theory or even multiple theories—the artist moves into a real-world act—a type of performance—that causes a mandatory institutional consequence. The artist acts in the world in a way that results in a required real-world response, not only by private actors, but by the most powerful public institution itself—the public government, here in the form of the judicial branch of the government—the public’s courthouse.
Here again, very broadly speaking, this transforms the artist of such a placed document into a figure of civil conscience—but not civil disobedience. The artist is acting within the rules—the theories are not frivolous, but grounded in applicable law—and the artist claims no moral authority, and no authority to judge, but rather only offers a theory—one that is not just of public interest and general public relevance but which may also constitute a valid epistemic disruption. Like some of Franz Kafka’s protagonists, an artist of such placed public documents may confront a system that evades the public—yet they still act. They still place the document. From this perspective, the artist becomes what Václav Havel called a “living lie detector.” The artist’s theory may not succeed legally, for reasons wrong or right, but the theory succeeds ethically, morally, and aesthetically: It draws out the character of power, makes it act, and documents both the outcome and the process of power’s choice.
It is really no different than what each fan in the stadium, or watching at home on television, does every game: Power makes the call, right or wrong, everyone agrees to play on, good call or bad, but there are witnesses to document just what the referee did or did not do, even if we never know why. The artist-placed document simply starts a codified process which prevents the actors, including the institution, from ducking the call (not making a call at all) and from hiding it so that no one can see.
7. Conclusion: Owning the Call as Aesthetic and Civic Imperative.
Artist-Placed Public Document Art does not, and by nature is unable to, create responses or consequences by force or in any other improper way. Rather, it creates public exposure of public acts about public issues through fair use of existing structure. By using the rules of institutions themselves, the artist simply serves as catalyst for institutions to say something clearly, one way or another, that they might rather avoid. And, unless the institution takes improper steps to conceal their decision, once they say it, they must wear it. For all the public—all the sports fans—to see.
In other words, this is not art as protest, nor art as judgment. It does not claim that the artist has standing to judge, disapprove, or approve. It is art as public debate on issues of general public importance. It is art as proper civic confrontation—an argument raised by a citizen in the proper place—the court—where the artist will respect the decision, good or bad. It is art as fundamental constitutional and free speech doctrine. It is, really, a form of proper citizen asking, or requesting. Meaning, the artist asks the proper authority to consider a relevant issue and decide for the public, and then own that decision, rather than trying to look away.
It is also, really, a form of proper citizen responsibility: The artist as citizen refusing to allow the passive from the government, the judiciary, and our fellow citizen, our fellow neighbor. Artist-placed document art recognizes, correctly, that there is a decider—by law and by constitution check and balance; that decider must be visible; that the actors involved must be visible; that the decision and its rationale must be visible; and that, as a result, the citizen discharges the duty to ensure that government “wears its calls.” And so to the actors involved, who will act with character, or without character, in ways to be publicly seen.
When public institutions, and our fellow citizens, are held to the rules, and when they “wear” their calls and their acts, the citizen has performed a duty of civil responsibility: The institution has been made to to take responsibility with transparency. And so too the actors involved. To be made to “wear the call”— this is arguably one of the foundational elements that are needed to reach, and record, public truths. This appears to be a unique power—and profound public beauty—of this area of post-theory art that is called Artist-Placed Public Document Art.
— May 2025.
