Jolanta Dolewska’s selected works
I close my eyes, 2011 - 2012
Holding, 2010 - 2012
Reservoir, 2013-2016 >>
Exception is the Rule:
Jolanta Dolewska’s
series ‘Holding’
Johnny Rodger
In Kafka’s fable ‘Before the Law’, the citizen is
depicted as having their own particular gateway
to the courthouse and the machinations of
justice, but lacking the strength, the connections,
the insight and political subtlety to penetrate
thence to the interior. Kafka’s exegesis of his own
fable, put in the mouth of a captious and fatalistic
priest, suggests (–somewhat emblematically for
the rest of the novel, The Trial) that there never
can be any sentence that leads to a definitive,
singular and complete condition of justice.
‘Everyone strives to reach the Law’, recounts
the priest in his telling of it; yet ‘the Law’, in
this capitalised and fabulous abstract, is itself
entwined in the endless shifting coils of its
own would-be categorical omniscience.
It is labyrinthine, has sides to it; has approaches,
shades and tones to it; it moves, it traps, it
releases; it reaches around our every endeavour,
but ‘the Law’ has no finite interior: it is never
at home.
We are to understand with Kafka then, that the
operation of ‘the Law’ is aporetic – there can
be no final comprehension or even conception
of its workings and its sentences, other than by
use of metaphor and in fable (viz. poorly, in the
paragraph above). Language is thus improvised
to construct the House of the Law, but ultimately
we are only enabled to peer in the metaphorical
windows from the street, and to be dazzled by ‘a
radiance [that] streams inextinguishably from the
gateway of the Law.’
All of which cultural context makes for a
formidable deal of irony when we come to
consider the photographic work of Jolanta
Dolewska. ‘Holding’ is a series of photographic
images Dolewska made of actual Sheriff Court
interiors. She writes in her short introduction
about the intricacies, boundaries and limits that
surround the law and the legal system, and that
shape the space where knowledge and power
determine validity and truth. How intriguing
that photography – the two dimensional
artistic medium par excellence – should be the
chosen one to explore the interior aspects of
a problematic which the finest literature has
defined as indefinitely impenetrable!
The most immediate and mundane elements of
the implausibility of such a mission to the heart of
‘The Law’, however, must have been encountered
in the general injunction against photography in
the interiors of Scottish courthouses. Naturally
Dolewska must have sought special permission
from the Scottish Court Service to make these
images. On a practical level this would have
entailed examination of Sheriff Court timetables
(most courts are in operation for the full five
day working week), arranging and booking
for an extended period of free time, setting up
equipment, lights and choosing objects and
angles for shots etc. Given that the shots she took
are all of publically accessible areas and views
(i.e. apart from one image of a holding cell, there
are no shots of behind the scenes, none of jury
rooms, of shrieval accommodation, of circulation
etc.), we might wonder what is the nature and
the scope of that injunction on photography
in the courtroom?
The Scottish Court Service, transvested
metaphorically in the fur coat, sharp nose and
long thin Tartar beard of Kafka’s guardian, plays
an administrative rather than a judicial role in the
court system. This secular body allows the public
access to these interiors, to view and enjoy these
furnitures and fittings only while the process –
the engagement of knowledge and power in the
assessment of validity and truth, as Dolewska has
it – is in session, that is, underway and in performance.
A ban on photography while witnesses,
accused and defendants occupy these precincts
might be thought considerate, humane and
prudent given the seriousness of the business at
hand. Yet the ban here normally (i.e. but for the
evident Dolewskan exception) runs to the images
of the empty and silent room too. Just what would
the illicit images supposedly bring to the surface
of the citizen’s consciousness that is undesirable?
What does Dolewska show?
No doubt there is a ‘punctum’, a Barthesian
agenbite of inwit with its sharp, provocative,
unexpected call to our human and communal
sensitivities, in each of these ostensibly banal,
unmoved or unmoving studies. Thus, the telling
stalk of the microphone visible beyond the
concealing curtain; the sag of the taped up hose
pipe as it hangs over the dock; the reflections in
the reinforced glass screens which hint at depths
and distances, compositions and the author’s
pose. But why do the authorities effectively create
a mystique around the otherwise banality of
these rooms by their general imposition of the
ban on photography? Is there a lingering notion
that these secular, civil, public spaces (-albeit
hierarchized in terms of position, height, access,
sound and sightlines appointed to each party in a
trial) somehow contribute to that formation of the
ethical human community, which is the process
of the law, in a way that could be damaged,
devalued or prejudiced by a widespread exposure
of, and familiarity with the nature of their out-ofhours mundanity? It is an idea all the more bizarre when we consider that the taking of photographs in an empty courtroom is not prohibited in some other jurisdictions (eg England & USA), and that Lord Gill’s recent report and recommendations for great changes in the Scottish court system also recommends that filming and broadcasting of Scottish court cases should be allowed.
Dolewska may be inside the building, she may
have special permission to inhabit and capture
on film the interior of the courtroom, but does
this guarantee her - or us, the viewers - any
greater access to the law than the countryman
of Kafka’s fable? She tells us she aims to
‘investigate surfaces’. Those are indeed what the
empty courtroom offers to us with its screens,
its partitions, its curtains, its windows with
blinds drawn, and its timber panelled walls
and doors. In her art, by definition, we are
excluded from circulations with depth. We are
not introduced to the theatre of justice here, but
to an idle processing unit with its pragmatic
and compromised divisions of space. There is
no lightning flash of truth nor ringing bells of
revelation; just fitted carpets, painted cast- iron
radiators and the timber veneer of a vacant dock.
We remember that the doorkeeper had given
Kafka’s countryman a stool to sit on while he
waited for the admittance that never came. In
a similar way Dolewska’s images offer us small
particular reliefs: in the wordless interior our eyes
rest on the patched, haphazard stretch of the
hose, on the reflection on the glass, on the folds
of the curtains and the deliberate setting out of
their hanging frame around the witness box. It
is difficult to conceive how these banal details
can contribute towards the ‘regime of truth’.
For the law surely proceeds by a codification
of the exemplary rather than by a catalogue
of particulars and exceptions? Yet Agamben,
cited by the artist herself here, points out that
the exception and the example are ‘ultimately
indistinguishable’. Under any investigation, he
seems to say, the norm is always manifest as
a long list of both comforting and dismaying
exceptions. Thus, inside Dolewska’s courtroom,
as on Kafka’s judicial threshold, we wait amongst
exceptions that are the rule.
In my dreams we talk. Once you asked me
if I continued to photograph. I do.
Does it suffice though? Will it help me to understand why we are here? Or will it prevent us from disappearing after the inevitable leap into the night?
Glasgow, 2017
Breathless, 2017-2018
