Anonymous Authors; Nameless Heroes; Unknown Histories
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THIS TEXT HAS NOT YET BEEN EDITED. ANONYMOUS AUTHORS; NAMELESS HEROES; UNKNOWN HISTORIES (A local historical overview of the strategies and motifs of the variable) by Ana Peraica, Croatia “Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final rarest fiction: the fictive identity.” (Roland Barthes, 1973)1 The unknown, unnamed, anonymous are the pseudo-someone’s; as they can’t be identified, as someone, because they may also be many. The only thing they can’t be is no one. But, they’re closer to being no one than to anyone in particular. Through their intervention in the historical axis they mask what is opposite, or become known, through the process of disidentification. And most of the agents of history are unnamed. They write it, though history doesn’t write them, except in terms of the “mass” or the “crowd”… The theme of this essay is the birth of the continuity of reading at the expense of the author and the history of the author in general. This piece is trying to to go deeper in terms of ‘the proper name’, ‘the institution of the author’, ‘authority’ than just using them as a cliché of narratology, or repeating the preoccupations of film studies.2 The disscussion on the author in the Western theory is extended, though not so much practically investigated in the art itself (except for several of cases that would be mentioned before the neostic practice of the eighties)3. But even before this discussion the topic was already applied practically in Eastern Europe. It had a certain success in the time of the partisans – the graffiti authors with the underlining action of hiding their or their comrades identities. In a variety of ways, the practice of the anti-author was introduced -- starting with the copyright problem (samizdats, tamizdats) and the use of 1 Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text (1973) trans R Miller (Hill & Wang, New York, 1975, p 27) 2 See for example; Theories of Authorship, ed by John Caughie (Routledge, London /New York, 1984) 3 The autheur, as Barthes noted, is a product of the society that emerged in response to the need for the identification of medieval scriptoriums and English romanticism, together with French rationalism and personal belief in Reformation. It is based on the idea of prestige. The New Criticism led to a new consolidation of the issue of the author. Despite the poetics of Mallarme, which attempted to push back the author in the interest of writing, visual theory was especially reliant on a biographical reading. This was despite the turn announced by Proust – who advocated the intervention of the work into life itself3. Despite the de-sacralization of the author, romantic concepts survived in new versions (the Creator, Demiurges, the author as genius). A new standpoint was taken in the visual arts by the Surrealists, not only through automatic writing, but also through the possibility of several people working at the same time. But this development was not discussed until the advent of French theory (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida Etc…). 1 pseudonyms to avoid censorship. But it wasn’t only unofficial history that used a “soft” definition of the author. Official history also practiced this. It was less about a pure use of the pseudonym and more a recipe for an artistic/political practice.4 There is an intrinsic relation between the name and politics; the former was the necessary background for the arts since 1945, whether or not this was admitted in the artwork itself. Since the recent laws on authorial rights were passed, the copyright has suddenly replaced the copy left principle. According to Croatia’s post-socialist law on authorial rights (Authorial work and the author of the Penal law, 1991), not only is the practice of falsification prohibited, but also that of pseudo- speech, a category under which some well-known artists from the not-so-distant eighties would fall, including the Belgrade Malevich (Djordjevic) and the “Virus” project of Svebor Kranjc (Krantz)5. At this point the histories of the illegal and the legal merge, providing grounds for an interpretation that would be unfamiliar to Western European chronology, and as is common, producing a feeling of being constant late with regards to its speed. 4 The intellectual censorship always refers to the author, while material censorship to the proper name (see Sue Curry Jansen: Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1991) 5 “He who under his own name or the name of another publishes, presents, executes, transports or in any other way suggests to the public that the work of another that is according to the law considered as authorial work, or even allows that this be done, will be punished with financial punishment or punishment in jail for up to three years”. (Article 229, Penal Law, Croatia, 1991) 2 1. JOSIP SEISSEL (1904 – 1987) OR JO KLEK (“Happening”, the beach, Brela, Summer 1949) The digressions of history [including art history] are most commonly written in the footnotes. In contrast to the famous footnotes of Derrida, which lead us nowhere or remain curiosities, sometimes-late annotations of works produce new readings of the work. Label “Josip Seissel, or Jo Klek, in the company of Bozidar Tushek and some other people, with one stone on the head and the other in the hand” (Vjesnik July 30th 1999) is a pure biographical curiosity, a kind of blind footnote and annotation to the biography. The author of the text, illustrated with the photo, art historian Josip Depolo, claims it was the first "happening" in world history, one taking place even before the appearance of the term itself.6 But following radical Barthesian methods, one can oppose Depolo's interpretation -- the photograph can’t speak for the “swimmers, stone on the head, stone in the hand”, any more than the ordinary game of the nearby Dalmatinska Zagora “stone from the shoulder” or Mediterranean “headball”. Two historical axes are twining – one terminated, while the other one is invented from foreground to background, and attached to the interpretation. Namely, the artist, a Zenitist (futurist), was the author of the first national abstract painting “Pafama” (1921), a sort of “The Great Nude” of Croatian art, under the pseudonym Jo Klek, but the painting left no trace until the rediscovery of abstraction. Seissel usually takes that paradoxical place in history reserved for dreamers and geniuses; a lonely proto-modernist, making himself alone for a whole chapter, or being attached to the work of even thirty years later – EXAT, the movement that institutionalized abstraction. But even then, he is not a prototype, but an avant-garde, as the movement itself was more influenced by the dynamics of the international art scene7. So, Josip Seissel as a protagonist of history is sliding between different points of historical narration; the story of him if not written biographically, paradoxically ends up in a later time where it hangs as a warning that something had already happened. But still, the question might be asked: did Shakespeare invent Bacon, or was it vice versa? Or perhaps it was another author who invented both. The fact of the existence of Jo Klek is realized through his relation to Jacques Durand (Pierre Dupont) and Stendhal (Henry Beyle), according to the relation of the author to the genre8. Authorization is done under different names, so we can repeatedly distinguish the ‘proper name’ from the ‘name of the author’, the first being the one that “moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it” while the second “remains on the contours of texts – separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence” (Foucault, ibid, p 284)9. There is the chain of ‘the proper name’ equalling ‘the name of the author’ which again is ‘the author of the name of 6 http://www.vjesnik.hr/html/1999/07/30/Clanak.asp?r=kul&c=3 7 This narrative digression includes proto-dadist SHumanović (during the time of his studies at A. Lhote), on whose work Mangelos wrote his thesis, and works on magazines as Zenit, Dada Tank and Dada Jazz D. AleksiCC published in Zagreb. 8 The number of pseudonyms Stendhal used grew to over ninety, which is the most known. 9 V. Michel Foucault What is an author? (Paris, 1967), in: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1977, some very interesting relations are also in “The Order of things” (1966) and Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). The basic theory is in John Searle Speech Acts; An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp 162-74) 3 the author’ being the same as the proper name but filling the other function (or Josip Seissel and “Josip Seissel” as the author of Jo Klek). The situation is more obvious on the biographical axis, where through the use of a pseudonym Jo Klek actually doubles the story, making a kind of pseudo-history.10 The question is always: is the use of a pseudonym actually the result of a wish to make another story that is not limited by time - a story that has no logical starting or ending points, a story with some deeper psychological rhizomes? Fabrication of a new persona, a pseudo-persona, may also, a second point, suggest some interesting broader investigations with respect to schizoanalysis, as proposed by Guattari, the pseudonym representing the historical point of a social splitting. In this case it is a gap between the bio-story (biography) and artifactual-story (arti-graphy), the real and the official history.