Hey,
You There!
Thoughts about Ed McGowin’s project Name Change
I stand in the middle of a thousand plateaus, where there are a thousand
possibilities. I cannot even say that I am standing, because, firstly,
it is not I who is standing, and secondly, I am not even standing.
I am movement but I am not in the movement. The movement is only lines,
trajectories, digressions, stops, intensities, procurements, and departures.
I am not me, because I have no center. This oedipal one, where a name
and a signature attach forever to what should be my life. I have a
thousand names and a thousand lives and a thousands deaths. I say
no, in order to yes a thousand times!
Apparently nowhere else does the repression of names appear as clearly
as in the art world and in its history. Names are the elementary particle
of subjectivization, which one attempts to press onto our bodies like
seals, in order to have them “limit our entire system”,
and which in turn, is interpreted as a confirmation of “authenticity”
and “purity.”
Hello, my name is X. What is your name? ? My name is Y, nice to meet
you. These are the everyday banalities we exchange not even acknowledging
that we are reproducing the ideological network we are in. We use
them as polite formalities, paying not too much attention to them.
But according to Louis Althusser, exactly these kinds of small insignificant
situations and cases of identification are the elementary core, the
molecules of the ideology. For Althusser the ideology is total, there
is no escape from it. He himself uses an example from the street corner:
When somebody calls us: HEY YOU THERE? And we react to that call;
we are already entering the realm of ideology. It doesn’t even
have to be the name we react to, the act of recognizing oneself within
that call is quite enough. Althusser calls these subjectivisations
acts of interpellation, where the ideology approaches and catches
us. These acts manifest the identity; they recall the Self and the
social ideological network. We recognize ourselves and are thus immersed
in the ideological framework. Ideology points a finger at us like
Uncle Sam on that notorious poster one can find in almost every pub
in the world: We want YOU for the U.S. army!
From 1970-1972, Ed McGowin legally changed his name twelve times,
and completed works of art under all these names. As Renato Denese
then wrote, “At the very heart of McGowin´s thinking,
however, is the idea of change. An artist’s will to change,
he believes, has been denied him throughout history by the repressive
demand that his work develop in a sequentially logical, linear progression.
A condition of art history has been that the artist should present
us with a “consistent body of work”. This facilitates
the critical process: everything is neat; theories develop apace;
annoying inconsistencies are rare and easily discarded or ignored;
and the continuity of art history remains intact.”
Ed McGowin’s Name Change project from1970-1972 belongs edgewise
into the same group with all types of conceptual gestures, which since
the beginning of the sixties, following the example of Marcel Duchamp,
have questioned all the attributes of being an artist such as authenticity,
signature, relations between works of art and artists, the aura of
an artwork, etc. We only need to recall Bruce Naumann’s work,
Art Make Up, Orlan’s Artist’s Kiss, Piero Manzoni’s
Artist’s Shit and Artist’s Breath or Yves Klein’s
patented blue. In the context of this earlier conceptualism, it would
have sufficed for McGowin to complete his official name change and
the project would have been relevant and timely. However, it is very
clear, that such a one-time act would not have satisfied him. Having
created 12 different identities for himself, during time he has also
developed their work. Despite some setbacks, one has died and some
have given up artistic activities, he has lived all twelve of his
lives. McGowin established an entire identity network: a system that
would be perfect, if it could not be traced back to it starting point,
that is, to McGowin. It is quite clear, that McGowin’s act is
not actually equivalent to the aforementioned ones, because what did
they actually want to show with their gestures? It was necessary to
cite that the identification mechanisms determining and accompanying
being a modernist or pre-modernist artist are no longer valid, and
they need to be redefined. These artists did cite the invalidity of
the identity packet, but they never started to play with that packet.
McGowin started up a mechanism that became the rhizoid network permeated
these twelve lives and their creations.
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari never really shared the pessimism
of Althusser about the impossibility of escape lines from the total
realm of ideology. I believe that from the very beginning of their
collective writing “Anti-Oedipus” which, by the way, was
published in 1972, they developed their schizoanalytical method as
a contra-project to the unifying principles of psychoanalysis and
ideology.
They saw the desire of becomings and microrevolutions of identity
as a possibility to deterritorialize and revolutionize one’s
everyday practices. This was also acknowledged by Michael Foucault
who wrote in the foreword about this book as a manual for coming to
grips with everyday life rather than dead-serious anti-psychoanalytical
theory. For him it was a guide for freeing the political activity
from all the totalizing and unitary paranoias, to develop thoughts
and actions through shifts and multiplications rather than through
pyramidical hierarchizations; one should always have preference for
mobile connections and floating by neglecting everything that is uniformed
and systematical. There is a need to intensify and de-individualize
via shifts and multiplications, while the individual is a product
of power.
McGowin’s twelve artists are not just pseudonyms. The name changes
were more a beginning rather than the final goal of the project. They
merely started up the machine of desire, which, at that moment, did
not know in which direction it will start to move. McGowin has referred
to the linearity of art history as his basic motive for starting the
project. Actually, what is this linearity? In the case of an artist,
it means eternal loyalty to him/herself or rather to his/her approach.
Only this loyalty, which in itself is nothing more than obedience
to ideological repression, guarantees diligent artists a place on
the stage of art history. At the same time, the world in the 1970’s,
neither in art or elsewhere, was no longer the same. Moreover, McGowin
must have felt this change very personally. He wanted to be free to
make cardinal turnarounds, to change his approach, and creative position,
as he felt was right, and to play with “twelve packets”.
But he himself did not regard this as the main reason: The Necessity
arises not merely from my periodic desire to reform my art; it is
there because occasional and unpredictable change in method and insight
has become a more intelligent way to make art than to hold to a rather
uncomplicated and long-term linear elaboration of a single idea”.
Therefore, he values it primarily due to the possibilities for the
opportunities that it provides: “I must be free to let my intuition
guide me, ready to move in any or every direction, keeping my balance
and shifting attention as the situation changes.”
Anders
Harm
May, 2006
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