How to Do Things with Names and Signatures
2017; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13528165.2017.1383780
ISSN1469-9990
Autores Tópico(s)Autobiographical and Biographical Writing
ResumoIt was Matisse who once said that artists should periodically change their names; Slovenian artists Žiga Kariž, Emil Hrvatin and Davide Grassi have been actively working on materialization of that idea since 2007 when they officially changed their names to Janez Janša (a name which a majority of inhabitants of Slovenia automatically associate with the president of the strongest right-wing party and so far two times Prime Minister of Slovenia). Although the artists insist that they had strictly ‘personal reasons’ for this act of a radical intervention on their own personalities, it is quite obvious that in this case a ‘real name’ is actually being ‘pirated’ by them and turned into a kind of multiple name. Their new name is no longer a pseudonym, rather, it starts to function as homonym – it is shifted into a more complex net of meaning. This complexity can be examined on numerous examples accumulated as a series in the last ten years of the ‘Janša Project’. This article is devoted to two examples of that ‘series’: Signature Event Context (2008) and Signature (2010). In the first part of the text the author discusses a theoretical context of the signature and then, in the second part, he comes to the main point – the performativity of (re)naming by the three Janšas’ interplay of signatures and identities. Finally, he offers possible answers to two questions provoked by the three Janšas’ attempt to do things with names and signatures: first, how the performance Signature Event Context and the exhibition Signature are related to other projects in the ‘series’, and second, does the signature still serve as a guarantor of the authenticity of a work of art or is it rather a product of the method of name-creation?
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