Nick Modrzewski recently spoke with COMA director Sotiris Sotiriou about his current exhibition with the gallery, The Plaintiff’s Third Face. In the conversation the two unpack the presentation and its roots in medieval history, absurdism and the theatricality of the legal system.
Sotiris Sotiriou: Your exhibition text states “to exist in the legal system, a series of ‘faces’, disguises or masks must be worn”. In this context, can you expand upon the actual title itself – The Plaintiff’s Third Face?
Nick Modrzewski: Sure. The title is taken from a pretend judgment that I wrote for the show, called Beckshire v Handleman. The full judgment, by an imagined Judge called “Justice Ortold”, appears in the form of a long scroll that hangs above the mantle in Gallery 2. At one point in the judgment, the judge is describing the way in which the Plaintiff’s face keeps changing during the court hearing. The Plaintiff starts by wearing “The Face of Credibility and Reliability”, which has a smooth and generally pleasant appearance, before shifting to “The Face of the Wronged Complainant”, which likewise appears to be a rustic and noble face. However, the Judge observes that neither of these two faces fit the Plaintiff very well. When the Plaintiff is eventually cross-examined by the Defendant’s barrister, the Plaintiff starts sweating and both faces slip down the Plaintiff’s forehead, revealing a “third” face. This is what the Judge says about it:
“What lay beneath was a very different face indeed: the shape of the eyebrows appeared to be carved out with a hacksaw, the nose was elongated and covered in what appeared to be boils and the mouth was crinkled into something of a contrived hole. I will refer to the Plaintiff’s third face as the Face of the Unveiled Fraudster. The Plaintiff’s entire appearance seemed to shift with the revelation of the Face of the Unveiled Fraudster. His voice became shrill, unpredictable, looping in on itself and crying out at unexpected moments.”
So, the title of the show, The Plaintiff’s Third Face, speaks to this experience of appearing before the law and the way that different guises are either intentionally worn, or imposed on us by legal processes. And the law can cast us as a host of different characters. For instance, if you’re the defendant in a court case and you lose the case, you’re likely to be ordered to pay a sum of money to the plaintiff. So, the court classifies you as a “judgment debtor”, meaning that you owe a debt to the plaintiff. You literally become this “judgment debtor” character in the eyes of the law. And this “character” has a history – it has appeared for hundreds of years in legal textbooks and judgments and courtrooms across the world. There is a whole universe of intertextual legal and cultural references that establish who this character is. But there are also real-life consequences of being a judgment debtor – there are coercive measures that the court can take to force you to play your “role”, like ordering the sheriff to seize your assets, or ordering that a portion of your income is re-directed to the Plaintiff.
The centrepiece of the show is a wall of 56 sculptural masks, each one referencing different legal faces. You can see the Plaintiff’s third face, The Face of the Unveiled Fraudster, up there. There’s also The Swamp-Mucked Face of a Junior Associate (Magistrates’ Court), The Face of Executive Government and The Leather Tongued, Multi-Layered Face of an Onion Grower During Evidence-In-Chief. And then there are other faces with more abstract relationships to law, like the Face of a Small Gathering of Noses. Justice Ortold makes an appearance too.
