Art Chasing Law: The Case of Yoko Ono's Rape

In 1968, Yoko Ono and John Lennon directed Film No. 5 (Rape or Chase), a 77-minute-long color film based on Ono's Film No. 5 Rape (or Chase), a set of printed instructions directing readers to chase a girl on a street with a camera. Often known simply as Rape, the film made a compelling case to the law, calling upon its interpreters, practitioners, and enforcers to reconsider the assumptions on which it stands. The film asks how the ethical predicament an artwork generates can sometimes be powerful enough to function as a call for legal intervention into situations yet to be officially recognized by the law. I argue how the experience generated by the film makes concrete ideas that, when expressed in the language of the law, can be unduly abstract despite the law's idealization of semantic clarity. Similar to forms of legal judgment that call jurists to interpret written instructions, Rape entailed translating written procedures into a combination of sound, image, and time. The film subsequently offers the law a critical opportunity to recognize situations in need of its attention, but only after it recognizes the importance of slow and close looking.