ABSTRACT
This chapter puts two artworks into conversation, with each other and with jurisprudence. The first is John Cage’s 4’33” (1952): the notorious ‘silent piece’, his most famous work, and one of the most important compositions of the twentieth century. The other is Saydnaya (the missing 19dB) (2016) by the Turner prize winning artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. The work concerns an acoustic investigation into Saydnaya Military Prison, 30 kilometres north of Damascus, Syria, where an estimated 13,000 people have been executed by the Assad regime since 2011. Both works are centrally concerned with silence. The specific ways in which silence relates to questions of law and politics in each work are, however, very different. Unlike Cage, Abu Hamdan’s work presents itself as already jurisprudential. It works with, on and against legal techniques and idioms; gathers, presents and interprets evidence; stages virtual trials; and makes explicit doctrinal claims; all with a view to intervening in political struggles in which questions of law are directly implicated. Indeed, Abu Hamdan’s work can, I argue, be understood precisely as a critique of the twin conceptions of sound and silence advanced by Cage and taken up by his inheritors. If, in Cage’s thinking, the power relations that produce and mediate sound and silence are systematically elided, for Hamdan, it is precisely these power relations and their material residues that we are asked to listen out for.
