Daumier and replacing the king's body
pp. 421-443
in: Anne Wagner, Richard K. Sherwin (eds), Law, culture and visual studies, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
This chapter follows a politico-theological approach to the law, which also includes among other trappings of theology, icons. The law's image is based on command, authority and sovereignty and relates to the order of the Lacanian big other, or the symbolic order. Subjects, however, respond to this symbolic order in different ways: some may hysterically call out to be recognised and some may follow blindly. This chapter looks at art in early modernism when the authority of the law and particularly sovereign power is still effective. We will explore early modernism as the original attack against the State's right to make and control images. On the cusp of monarchical control and the birth of democratic freedom, a particular challenge was mounted by Honoré Daumier's paintings and caricatures. His battle and jailing for his terrible indignity against the king's body marks the birth of an emancipated space for the modernist artist (outside the power of the court). His freedom is guaranteed from some other sovereign body outside the frame. This chapter suggests a new approach to the modernist canon and the avant-garde. It suggests that modern art's seminal attack was an attack against the sovereign (monarchical) effigy and its replacement by the republican effigy or Marianne. In this way even in democracy the effigy is persistent; democracy was still imaged in relation to the monarch and an alternative sovereign body.
