What’s The Buzz ?
Corner of Grand Ave and Byington Road, Iowa City, April 19, 2012
And so I look out from a poster at Iowa Law School, next to a poster of Professor Nicola Lacey http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/profile/nicola.lacey with whom I crossed paths at a reception in Berlin by a lake one evening after a talk on identity, citizenship and belonging. Professor Lacey talks about a biography she wrote about H.L.A Herbert Hart http://www.amazon.com/Life-H-L-Hart-Nightmare/dp/019920277X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335712369&sr=8-1 as part of a faculty lounge presentation and then gives a lecture after which she has to leave, which I regret; affinity is hard to come by. I am invited into the faculty lounge where I present a paper on Exploring Law and Legal Cultures through Performance Art. I outline some ideas drawing from what I have written, published, experienced through teaching and just generally, the life lived when you regain and retain as many of your senses as you can muster to observe the life inside out of the law, as well as when the law passes by in silence. I show some of the films from Were you with Me? People are paying attention, they ask good questions, they offer up comments that I later push even further as I write them up in my hotel room to set out a critique of what I am trying to do. Some of us go to dinner. We talk about law, human rights, teaching, art, moving house, television and writing. We also laugh whole heartedly. And another thing. People are extremely kind, courteous, and helpful. This unnerves me as I try not to get too used to it as I leave for New York the next day, which is when I wake up early, to draw the curtains before sitting down to retrace the borders of a territory for which there are no maps for where it is that I need to go.
Read more from Miriam Aziz – The Artist is at Large http://miriamaziz.wordpress.com/
