My motel room (Culver City Travelodge) is just like the stakeout motel rooms of crime thrillers, with its own front door off a common balcony. It’s got several ‘room dividers’ for you to hold your breath behind, trying to avoid the immanent shootout.

The television is the size of a dining table. (I read on a bus shelter advertisement that Americans watch an average of 13 years of TV in their life.)

I arrived into LAX after a reasonable flight from Heathrow, having taken a risk on seat 33K. Bulk head. A little extra legroom but this is where bassinettes are fitted. The screaming infant was on the other side but it still required my most zen-like ‘letting go’.

Everyone told me: you will need a car. Even after the first day I could see that this was wise advice. However, I wasn’t looking forward to driving an automatic for the first time, on the wrong side of the road, in a hire car, in one of the most traffic heavy cities on the planet, in the dark, tired from an 11-hour sleepless journey. I couldn’t believe it when I was presented with a Nitro four by four SUV, hilariously described by some online retailers as ‘compact’. It feels like I’m driving a small bus.

There is no induction. They just tell you which lot the car is in and that the keys are in the ignition. It was already completely dark by the time I got there and in the unlit carpark I was at a loss even to find the, erm, light switch. I had to keep opening and shutting the driver’s door for 20 seconds of illumination in order to try and locate the relevant controls. But after a jolty start and a kind (although rather loud) explanation from some random guy that my jerking was probably due to the fact that I had my foot on the emergency break (it’s not a clutch Joshua, this is an automatic car) I managed to follow the sat-nav to aforesaid motel.

I’m in LA for just 5 nights. The main reason is to visit The Museum of Jurassic Technology and interview the Founder Director David Wilson for a research project I am making into artist leaders. As the conundrum of its name would suggest, The Museum of Jurassic Technology is something of an anomaly. How to describe what it is? Well, from the outside it looks a bit like a, well, I’m not sure it looks like anything much other than itself. Here it is:

Located in the historic Palms district of Culver City, Los Angeles at a the busy intersection of Venice Boulevard and Main Street, this easy to miss exterior hides a tardis of expertly detailed glass fronted vitrines, holographic film projections, audio guides and scale models. The themes are diverse yet connected (the connections are themselves part of the wonder to be untangled and discovered). Memory, the history of the museum, miniaturisation, the common man, the wonder of discovery, the art of science: a particular favourite of mine was the authoritative film on the life of Hagop Sandaldjian who developed an innovative method for the ergonomics of violin fingering and was a miniaturist in extremis. The film is screened next to several of his ‘sculptures’, which include a detailed anatomically accurate figure of Napoleon in the eye of a needle. You can only view it through a microscope.

You are never entirely sure of what you are looking at. In this way The Museum of Jurassic Technology proselytises the value to be found in doubt, and asks us to question institutional authority more generally. But this is not a museum of fairytales. It is not depicting fiction. It’s more that fact is always presented, in Wilson’s own words for describing the museum itself, as more of a “grey area”.

For nearly 30 years David Wilson has been adding to the museum displays with painstaking dedication and has developed an international following. It has the same status in the museum (and art and science) worlds, as cult movies do in film. It was a pleasure and a privilege to talk with him and the fulfilment of a long time aspiration to visit his museum.

(If you are interested in finding out more about The Museum of Jurassic Technology, then get hold of a copy of Lawerence Weschler’s 1995 book Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. It is amusing and accessible. It still feels fresh and remains in print.)

Five minutes walk from The Museum of Jurassic Technology are The Culver Studios, where some of the greatest films of all time have been shot, including Citizen Kane and Gone With The Wind. Although its umpteen ‘stages’ are still used for shoots, as I walked past, it was the studio building itself that seemed to be the star of a giant film rig, with enormous camera crane.

Today, my one and only full ‘day off’, I decided to leave Los Angeles by the famous Highway 1, through to Malabu (home to half of the Hollywood A-list) and up the coast to Santa Barbara. It’s amazing that in just 45 minutes on leaving one of the most urban of all conurbations in the world, you can be in wilderness. This hurriedly taken photograph by the side of the road is unfortunately a poor representation of the scenery, which is epic. The Pacific is on one side and Los Padres National Forest on the other.

Oh, and I forgot to mention 21 degrees. Back to scarf and hat tomorrow.

Gallery Tour
A tour of the work from the Liverpool Biennial 2006 at Tate Liverpool in entirely fake national languages of the artists themselves. This performance tour plays out the stereotypes we ascribe to language and shows that meaning exists beyond dictionary definitions.

Acoustiguide City Tour
An audio tour of the Liverpool Biennial public artworks and beyond, where you select a character to tell you what’s what, all in entirely fake national languages of the artists themselves. Pick up an Acoustiguide wand and the extensive catalogue of voice options and hear the city like you’ve never heard it before.

Liverpool: A world in one city?
In 2008 Liverpool will be the European City of Culture. In their bid for this title the committee promoted Liverpool as ‘The World in One City’.

With expanding international trade, global communications, and shifts in patterns of migration, this claim could be made for many cosmopolitan centres. You only have pop down to the supermarket and read the labels, or switch on the television, to be opened up to the ‘produce’ of another culture or country. But can we really say that Liverpool is the world in one city? Does the international focus of the biennial really offer us a glimpse of the wider world? Is Liverpool really a manifestation of all other cultures and countries in miniature?

English speakers are notoriously bad at learning other languages. The take up of foreign languages at GCSE level in the UK is declining so fast that it has “reached the point of no return” according to Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers. All this in a time when speaking in someone else’s tongue might well help us to find common ground. In his opening address to the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Peter Stein pointed to a moment in Free Zone, a new film by the controversial director Amos Gitai, in which a Palestinian businesswoman says to an Israeli counterpart: “It’s a pity Israelis don’t speak Arabic like Palestinians speak Hebrew. If they do, I think perhaps things will change.” Later, the Israeli woman pleads into her mobile phone: “I speak Arabic, I speak English. What language are we speaking? Can you help me?”.

It is to my great regret and shame that I have not yet learnt a language other than English with any fluency and skill, and it is my hope that the world of possible choices will somehow narrow and that I will dedicate some serious time to learning a language properly.

Each character presented in this Acoustiguide city tour was created by computer software which randomly selected the age, gender, temperament, desire and feeling of each person. Apart from gender, no characteristics were repeated. Two characters were assigned to each language: one male, one female. These templates were then used to create each scenario.

A key milestone in the study of human characteristics was Charles Darwin’s 1872 publication The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin categorized human emotions into eight main categories of expression: suffering (and weeping), low spirits (anxiety, grief, dejection, despair), high spirits (joy, love, tender feelings, devotion), reflection (meditation, ill temper, sulkiness, determination), hatred (and anger), disdain (contempt, disgust, guilt, pride etc.), surprise (astonishment, fear, horror), and self-attention (shame, shyness, modesty). Contemporary theorists have drawn on these classifications for their own analyses. Some have added further categories. Stuart Walton in his book A Natural History of Human Emotions for example, gives jealousy and embarrassment their own chapters but on the whole Darwin’s classifications have stood the test of time.

It is these bio-anthropological studies that have underpinned the development of character acting. Character acting has been understood in terms of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ techniques. While external techniques consider the body’s relation to space (in for example mime, ballet, and some performance art practices) internal techniques (propounded most famously by Constantin Stanislavski in Taking a Role) demand the actor understand the motivation of the character, through the creation of sociological and psychoanalytic templates. In his workbook on character development, In Character, Christopher Vened combines external and internal approaches to give six main areas that an actor should consider in the development of a character, all with sub-categories to be explored. They are:

THE CHARACTER IN TRAITS OF THE BODY: appearance, the center, movement
EMOTIONS: temperament, will, desire, volitional gesture, feelings
THOUGHT PATTERN: point of view, attitude, kinds of thought patterns
EXTERNAL CHARACTERISTICS: space, object, relationship
INTERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES: inner image, inner voice, inner motive
CHARACTER CHOICE: choice, conditioning

That’s quite a lot for the actor to think about. This is what Michael Kirby, in his essay ‘Acting and Not-Acting’ would refer to as ‘complex acting’: “Acting becomes complex as more and more elements are incorporated into the pretense.”

Those elements which manifest themselves most forcefully in the voice are the emotions. Out of those Vened delineates it is the temperament (the underlying emotional state of the person), desire (the emotional urge), and feeling (the immediate involuntary response) which have been considered in these character formations.

The characters, like the languages they speak, are inventions based on archetypes, tropes and imaginings. Just as Liverpool’s caption ‘The World in One City’ claims you do not need to visit other countries to experience them, so auditors choose whether or not to journey to each of the ten destinations described by these invented characters and their invented languages.

Joshua Sofaer, September 2006
[Excerpted from World in One City booklet.]

Standing at the urinals in Rygge Airport, I was greeted by this chewing gum and sanitary grill chap. Fellow passengers were unimpressed as I reached for my camera.

Norway is a very long country and you are never very far from the coast. Fredrikstad is in the bottom right.

The Norwegian Theatre Academy is a small school. There are only ever two years at a time. Students study under ‘acting’ or ‘scenography’ (although there is a lot of blurring of boundaries and in many ways it is akin to an art school training in the UK). The entire group of 3rd year actors that I have been teaching comprises 7 students. Their resources are exceptional. Courses are taught in English. Modules are often delivered by a slate of international visiting artists. As there is a strictly limited series of recreational activities in this quiet city, especially in the long winter months, students work hard and form strong bonds.

During my time here, we have been thinking about ‘audience’ and students have been encouraged to explore, examine and create innovative ways of working with audiences. This has included the discussion of performance ethics and personal limits in stagecraft. Here Maja Clemensten Hansen responds to the question of whether or not she would kill an animal during a performance, a pet shop goldfish in hand. She didn’t. The fish was returned to the shop.

The students have been setting each other challenges, which they accept or refuse. Performance experiments that explore what is risked when an artist meets an audience.

I am staying in a small apartment about 2 minutes walk from the Academy. Located in the roof of a barn conversion, my temporary home is on land that was owned by Edvard Munch’s Aunt. Apparently, when he came to Fredrikstad during what turned out to be influential years, Munch stayed in the ‘ginger bread’ building just across the yard.

More immediate to my local environment, is the fact that my next-door neighbour really, really likes Coca Cola.

Given that they pay you 1 krona for every aluminium can that you return to the supermarket here, she is hoarding quite a lucrative stash. The cigarette butts might fetch less.

I know it is really puritanical to publish this photo on my blog but it is so genuinely strange to me that someone would not empty the ashtray at their own home. I find myself drawn to it as a kind of cultural oddity.

The Academy moved to a new building last year. It was purpose built. The spaces are great but I still have a soft spot for the old site in Gamlebyen, the old town of Fredrikstad, which is built on an incredible star-shaped island and is one of the oldest surviving fortified towns in Europe.

The most convenient way to get there as a pedestrian, is by ferry across the River Glomma (the longest river in Norway at 598-kilometres with a drainage basin that covers a full 13% of the country). I decided to go back for a stroll there on my day off. Twilight on the water. There was always something that gave me a kick by arriving to work by boat.

Last Saturday I took the (expensive) 1 hour 15 minute train journey to Oslo and spent the day with the former Head of Acting, Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk and her family. In the centre of town, in view of the Royal Palace, some guy was creating one of his own.

We took the tram up into the mountains to witness and partake in some sledge action.

It was good fun but freezing. Camilla and Per Gunnar’s ridiculously cute son Viktor had pronounced earlier in the winter, “I like summer”. I found myself agreeing.

Afternoon Panel:
How to write in the slippage between roles such as ‘character’, ‘self’ and ‘other’? Reflecting upon a multifaceted society, different notions of identity formation, and how these aspects are treated in writing for contemporary stage arts.
Contributors: Kim Atle Hansen, Claire Hind, Kai Johnsen, Kristian Lollike, Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk
Moderator: Karmenlara Ely Seidman

The symposium is conducted in English.

This one-day performance workshop for young people explored everyday performances through exercises, nonsense games, and by referencing the works of contemporary artists, Marina Abramovic, Bobby Baker, Marcel Broothaers, Sophie Calle, Erwin Wurm, Joseph Grigley, Michael Landy, On Kawara, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, and Panamarenko.

Performance and the Everyday led onto the development of the publication Perform Every Day and also The Daily Grind, a workshop outline for delivery to school children, to introduce young people to concepts of performance practice in everyday life situations.

’1. Rapists – Fiction. 2. Sex crimes – Fiction. 3. Pedophilia – Fiction. 4. Victims of violent crimes – Fiction. 5. Children – Crimes against – Fiction.’

Hogg is explicitly and violently pornographic. Delany takes his readers to the limit of readability – but as long as you keep reading, you repeatedly face up to some of the darkest and most carefully hidden parts of your own desire. Presented in a similar format to the conquests of Walter in My Secret Life by Frank Harris (1890) and the narratives of de Sade, Hogg follows the encounters of the boy-narrator-protagonist in a catalogue of sexual and violent acts which he witnesses, or more often participates in, particularly in relation to the dirt-encrusted trucker come hit-man Hogg.

Delany forces his reader through page after page of violence and abuse. As a reader I found myself varying between arousal and disgust (and occasionally disgust at my arousal), between groping my throbbing erection and plunging my hand into my crotch the way nervous children do, trying to find my shrivelled cock, which had withdrawn in horror at the narrative. Reading Hogg makes you viscerally complicit.

‘I heard him grunt. He smelled like a stopped toilet-stall, where somebody had left six months of dirty socks, in the back of a butcher shop with the refrigeration unit on the blink, on fire. The tube under his dick filled, retreated, filled again; and spilled enough spunk for three guys. “Pissin’ in you now boy….” Not like Pedro’s or his pop’s shotglass leakage. I swallowed five times (he was still pumping into my face), and I couldn’t hold no more. Piss spurted all over his fly – I could see pee between the zipper teeth. Piss ran down my chin. He got my head – like I saw this really big-handed nigger hold a basketball, once, and turn it upside down without dropping it – and with his other hand wiped hard around his chin and face, smearing piss. He rubbed his balls with wet fingers, pulled at them, while I leaked piss out of my lower lip. “Yeah… I’m gonna drown you, cocksucker!”’

Written in San Francisco in 1969 and revised over the next four years, Delany did not find a publisher for Hogg for over twenty years after its completion, despite a backlist of popular successes as a writer of fiction, science fiction and non-fiction. Even the editor at Olympia Press, who first published Lolita, said that Hogg was the only novel he’d ‘ever rejected solely because of its sexual content.’ When it was issued by Black Ice Books and FC2 in 1995 it was published in an edition of just five-hundred. The current reprint by FC2 is the first time Hogg has been issued to a wider readership.

Although Hogg is not autobiographical, the unnamed child protagonist and narrator would appear, in part, to be Delany. The racial ambiguity of the narrator-protagonist (he slips between a black/white identification) could very easily be Delany himself, who has described elsewhere his ability to ‘pass’ as white. Hogg is an autobiography of the pornographic imagination. Related works by Delany include the memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988), the novel The Mad Man (1994), and the graphic novel Bread and Wine (1999). Even where there is no ‘resemblance’ to be found, the extreme nature of the content brings us back to the life of the author; we inevitably ask: what kind of guy would write this stuff?

My own boredom with much of gay fiction in which the older, educated, usually white author-narrator-protagonist recounts his predilections and fantasies for a usually younger, less educated, often racially or ethnically othered working class ‘boy’, makes Hogg a radically refreshing read. Here it is the kid who not only offers himself up as an object of the abject desirable, but it is he who actually embodies the corruption the other characters perpetrate. The unnamed boy-narrator is always one step ahead of his ‘master’ Hogg; a dynamic which is made explicit only in the brilliantly conceived ending, when he makes his desire clear.

Because none of the sex acts in Hogg correspond to the body-minded gay aesthetic we have come to expect in gay fiction, and because of the integration of heterosexual sex into the narrative, Delaney’s novel is more un-gay or anti-gay fiction.

‘His cock, hanging wet from his fly, was wormy with veins. So were his big, big hands. His broad nails were bitten so far up they were three times side-to-side as from thickened, dirt-lined cuticle to bulging, grease-rimmed nub – which, on his thumb at least, went on another horny half inch. His fingers were immense and chiselled, the upper joints clouded in yellow. He was a big man, with the start of a gut. Yellow hair tufted between the missing buttons at the bottom of his shirt, and all up around a neck thick as a scrub pail. Watching him, I got the thought that maybe a month ago he’d been on his back under a car and hadn’t bothered to wash since. His hands and forearms, under the gold fur that burned in the four o’clock sun striking up the alley, were grease-gray. His face was like sunburned brick, smeared and streaked over.’

But while Hogg still feels incredibly fresh in the way it turns the expectations and tropes of gay fiction on their head, especially in the way it positions the locus of desire, more troubling is the depiction of the female characters. While men are subject to the same kinds of abuses as women in the book, it is men (or boys) who are empowered as the perpetrators of abuse and it is their story that we follow. We see the male characters in their ‘downtime’; they are more rounded; somehow we find ourselves identifying with them; but with the exception of the girl Maria, who giggles while she is being fucked by her drunken father, women are portrayed as passive victims of abuse.

Along with other sexually violent fictions (like Dennis Cooper’s Frisk and Try) Delany takes you on a purgative journey. You face some of your darkest fears and desires, and are brought out the other side, somehow cleansed. What marks Hogg out from other such fictions, is that it is narrated by a boy, and not a man. This conceit of the child-narrator has the effect of reminding us that what we are reading is a fiction, it is literature. The vocabulary is not that of an early adolescent street kid. Although Delany makes use of the vernacular, Hogg is clearly the work of a dexterous novelist rather than a corrupt pubescent boy. Recognition of this acts as a distancing device, a constant reminder that we are reading a story.

Unlike sex itself, Hogg is not more-ish. I was relieved to get to the end. But the relief was not that of dutifully completing a novel I got no pleasure from, rather it was the relief of a challenge accepted and fulfilled, an exhausting journey that made me want to consider what I had discovered along the way.

‘All In A Day’s Work’ is a chaired conversation between the ResCen artists which focuses on issues which pertain to the daily practice of creation. Richard Layzell’s ‘Form and Function’ is integrally related to ‘Friction of Forms’ by Caroline Bergvall and ‘Return of the Repressed’ by Adrian Rifkin; these three short texts are conceived as part of the same piece, playing with fictional voices and working methods. Mark Vernon’s essay ‘Plato and the Creative Life’ looks to Plato and his philosophy as a way of reflecting back on the creative process. ‘Expectant Waiting’ by Rosemary Lee considers the importance of waiting as an active creative process.

This introductory essay seeks to draw out common strands and contextualise them within a wider social, cultural and artistic framework. The three main strands identified are: the dramatisation of creative thought as a way of producing knowledge, in other words performance itself as knowledge; collaborative practice as a kind of alternative family; and, the power of negative preference, where not knowing and not doing are forms of productive engagement.

On the journey that an artist makes in the creation of contemporary performance, from the initial idea or commission to the manifestation of that work in a public engagement, a series of choices are encountered and a set of decisions are made. This ‘tying yourself to a particular choice,’ as Shobana Jeyasingh conceives it, is ‘always a moment of suffering’ [1]. This suffering arises from the what might have been and the if only, a kind of retroactive configuring of the future possibilities of the work that isn’t about to be made, that results from the decisions that were discarded. This is the theme taken up by Peter Howitt’s 1992 romantic comedy Sliding Doors where we watch parallel storylines in which the central protagonist catches and misses a tube train, two radically different narratives played out as a result of a split-second decision to run for an embarking train or to wait for the next one.

But the suffering engaged by the creative decision-making process is not just about the what if; more prosaically, it is about the act of making the decision. How do you make choices?

A recurrent theme in this section of the book, ‘Navigating’, is the dramatisation of creative thought. Not necessarily (often and often not) as performance product, which is to say the staging of ideas to an audience, but rather the dramatisation of creative thought in the creative process itself, where the staging of a ‘position’ gives life to ideas. Graeme Miller articulates this in terms of ‘Spock and Kirk’ work:

‘I’m an addictive problem solver, so sometimes I divide my work between Spock work and Kirk work. […] Captain Kirk and Mister Spock. It means to do with whether you’re in the driving seat or whether you’re in the Spock role, which is about problem solving. ‘Captain, have you thought of this?’ And you can do that for yourself. It throws up constant material. […] The detachment is really useful. When it’s somebody else’s work it’s a lot easier to have opinions, and to solve their problems, than it is your own.’ [2]

Graeme Miller’s dramatisation of thought is for his own purpose. He is the audience of his own performance [3]. The Spock/Kirk dynamic is not merely a metaphor for the struggle to make decisions but rather a practical creative strategy engaged to determine solutions. The dramatis personae who take up the challenge are selected for their personal characteristics and their designated roles. Captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise – the man in the driving seat – embodies the ideal ‘doer’. According to his official biography he is ‘an independent whose success couldn’t be argued even though he often bucked the system’ [4]. He is the man of valour, the patriot who sacrifices his personal freedoms for the greater good, acknowledged by many awards and commendations including the Starfleet Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry and the Karagite Order of Heroism. Mr Spock, First Officer and later Commander – the problem solver – is, on the other hand, the cultured scientist, and embodies the ideal ‘thinker’. Half human (his mother Amanda was a school teacher) and half Vulcan (his father Sarek was a diplomat), Spock’s role is to pose questions and offer suggestions. Torn between his emotional human side and the strict (genetic) discipline of his Vulcan heritage, Spock is in the prime position to offer many potential readings of a particular situation. The generosity of his purpose is exemplified by the fact that prior to his death he ‘mind-melded’ with his Starfleet colleague Dr Leonard McCoy, to transfer his ‘katra’ (his spiritual essence) so that it might be put to future use.

This mind-melding is, perhaps, a useful way to think about what is happening in the staging of Graeme Miller’s creative process. It is the intervention of somebody else (albeit a fiction) and the detachment from self, within self, that produces solutions.

While I do not want to suggest that Miller sits in his studio muttering to himself in Vulcan (he may, or may not, be so literal in his application) the Spock/Kirk ‘method’ works partly because the characters’ voices are already so well developed in their on-screen performance. By imagining what they might advise him to do, metaphorically or otherwise, Miller taps into a kind of predetermined performance script that is handed to him already written.

Another Spock, not the Vulcan scientist but the American doctor, usefully comes into play here. Dr Benjamin Spock was an American Paediatrician who first published his child rearing manual in 1946, under the title The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care. In subsequent years the book sold over fifty million copies, was translated into more than thirty languages and to date is the best selling book in the world after the Bible [5]. Given that millions upon millions of children have been raised under the auspices of his guidance, the impact of Benjamin Spock on the lives and lifestyles of those born in the west in the second half of the twentieth century should not be underestimated. Dr Spock’s manual acts as a performance script for the interaction of millions of parents and children. At the time of his death in 1998 aged 94, Spock’s influence on Western child rearing was acknowledged in the tribute paid by the then president of the USA, Bill Clinton:

‘Hillary and I were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Dr Benjamin Spock. For half a century, Dr Spock guided parents across the country and around the world in their most important job – raising their children.’ [6]

What is so striking about Dr Spock’s text is the way it overtly encourages performance on the part of the parent. The first chapter of Baby and Child Care is titled ‘The Parent’s Part’, as if parenting was literally a role or character to be studied and subsequently enacted. This actor/character methodology is extended even to encompass a performance of the child itself by the parent, as in, for instance, this account of why urging a child to eat is unreasonable and likely to cause problems.

‘Put yourself in the child’s place for a minute. To get in the mood, think back to the last time you weren’t very hungry. Perhaps it was a muggy day, or you were worried, or you had a stomach upset. (The child with a feeding problem feels that way most of the time.)  Now imagine that a nervous giantess is sitting beside you, watching every mouthful. You have eaten a little of the foods that appeal to you most and have put your fork down, feeling quite full. But she looks worried and says, “You haven’t touched your turnips.” You explain that you don’t want any, but she doesn’t seem to understand how you feel, acts as if you are being bad on purpose. When she says you can’t get up from the table until you’ve cleaned your plate, you try a bit of turnip, but if makes you feel slightly sick. She scoops up a tablespoonful and pokes it at your mouth, which makes you retch.’ [7]

The parent is thus asked to act not only in the role of parent but also as the child they parent. This staging of multiple positionality is similar to the Spock/Kirk dynamic that Graeme Miller describes, where the different sides of an argument are played out.

The everyday as performance is not something unique to the raising of children nor to the creative process, and of course it would be possible to read practically all actions of daily life as interpretations of pre-set performance scripts.

In his analysis of social reality, configured as a series of frames of reference, Erving Goffman defines the relationship between the individual and the performance of the everyday as the ‘person-role formula’:

‘…whenever an individual participates in an episode of activity, a distinction will be drawn between what is called the person, individual, or player, namely he who participates, and the particular role, capacity, or function he realizes during that participation. And a connection between these two elements will be understood. In short, there will be a person-role formula. The nature of a particular frame will, of course, be linked to the nature of the person-role formula it sustains. One can never expect complete freedom between individual and role and never complete constraint. But no matter where on this continuum a particular formula is located, the formula itself will express the sense in which the framed activity is geared into the continuing world.’ [8]

In this way we are always both ourselves and the roles we play, be it captain, scientist, artist or mother. The terms on which we are read by others oscillates between person and role, but often focuses on role:

‘Interestingly, in everyday affairs, one is not always aware of a particular individual’s part in life, that is, his biography, awareness often focusing more on the role he performs in some particular connection – political, domestic, or whatever.’ [9]

With regard to parenting it is useful to think of how the child, even the adult child, sees its parents precisely on these terms, which is to say as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ (with the concomitant expectations of their performance that such roles inevitably bring) rather than as ‘people’ in their own right. The child understands the parent in relation to themselves.

The role of ‘mother’ particularly, occupies a position of performative expectation where the compulsory heteronormative matrix – gendered as ‘mother’ – is enforced. The mother’s role has been defined (and redefined) from culture to culture and epoch to epoch; it has, nevertheless, been defined.

After the publication in 1990 of her seminal book critiquing compulsory heterosexuality, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler spent considerable space in subsequent essays refuting a misreading of her argument that gender was somehow radical choice. The misreading of Gender Trouble stemmed from Butler’s example of drag as a way of critiquing the ‘naturalness’ of gender, and misunderstood the performance of the gendered body as one which was optional. In an interview with Artforum in 1992, Butler says:

‘…my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way – that gender is not to be chosen and that ‘performativity’ is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism. […] Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom….’ [10]

The performance of gender, of which motherhood must surely be the ultimate representation, is one where women are asked to play particular roles in order to enforce certain ‘norms’. Motherhood demands that the woman produces her child not only biologically but also socially [11]. Her performance gives rise to that of the child.

But whereas the social performance of the person-role formula in our everyday actions has, as Butler conceives it, to do with the repetition of oppressive and painful norms (and not just gender norms) to force them to resignify, the use of performance as a technique in the creative process is precisely about the radical choice that is denied in the social context. Performance itself, or the enacting of roles, is an engagement which gives rise to knowledge. It is this understanding of performance as a form of knowledge which is at the heart of the ResCen project.

The element of detachment when dealing with somebody else’s work that Miller internalises through the Spock/Kirk role-play device, is embodied by Richard Layzell’s collaboration with Tania Koswyckz. Responding to a commission from the firstsite gallery in Colchester to create an installation which would ‘reveal artists’ practices’ Layzell invented a group of four artists and made their work for them [12]. In this way Layzell deconstructed the creative process through the creative process; a kind of making while being detached. Back in his studio after the exhibition had closed, Layzell found himself missing the method and ease of making Tania’s work, and so he decided to continue fabricating work as Tania. This process gave rise to a relationship in which Richard and Tania provoked each other precisely because they had differing points of view. Richard would ask Tania what she thought about something and found her advice useful and provocative. These ‘process’ conversations eventually became an integral part of Layzell’s ‘product’. In performances Richard began to speak directly to Tania, later their conversations were published [13]. In other words, one of the solutions which Layzell found to answer the challenge of making decisions, that is the dramatisation of creative thought through the creation of a dialogue with an invented collaborator, became the very stuff of which the decision-making process was set up to answer.

In this publication the published conversation Richard ‘has’ with Tania, in which they discuss their working relationship, has been given over to two other writers who take up the baton of the fictional voice and not only rethink it but also fictionalise its creator. Caroline Bergvall subtly critiques what might be sociologically at stake in the relationship between Richard and Tania, especially with reference to the implied gender dynamic, by interrupting their dialogue with the ghost of a fictionalised Ana Mendieta. Ana Mendieta was the wife of the sculptor Carl Andre (a sculptor to whom Layzell makes allusion in his dialogue with Tania). Mendieta was a performance artist who came to an untimely end. In 1985 she fell to her death from the window of her 34th floor apartment. Andre was tried and acquitted of her murder but the circumstances of her death are still (seen as) mysterious. The story of her ‘disappearance’ – a terrible ending – has, in many discourses, eclipsed the importance of her work as an artist; as her work as an artist was eclipsed by that of her husband when she was alive. By raising her ghost and implicitly citing the discourse of her disappearance, Bergvall talks to this power dynamic between artists and sexes. This ghosting of Layzell’s text, and also of him (Bergvall puts words into Richard’s mouth) doubles the fictive narrative by engaging with the process of Layzell’s art practice as Bergvall’s own. Bergvall tests not only Richard’s relationship to Tania and Layzell’s relationship to the text, but also Bergvall’s relationship to Layzell. Richard Layzell worked ‘in dialogue’ with Caroline Bergvall on the development of his conversations with Tania. They too have a history of a working relationship.

In an open-letter come telephone-call monologue (a deliberate ‘fluff’) from his own invention Davida Pendleton to both Richard and Tania, Adrian Rifkin both contextualises this device of staging a fictional voice and parodies its effects. Subtitled ‘The Torment of Davida Pendleton’, Davida’s rant on behalf of her creator (or is it his rant on her behalf?) reveals her jealousy of Richard’s attachment to Tania and the collaborative partnership they have developed, in contrast to her infelicitous relationship with Adrian whom she sees as promiscuous. Rifkin resituates Bergvall’s critique of the gendered relations between Richard and his creation Tania, by giving voice to the disgruntled dissatisfaction of his own creation, who perceives Tania’s relationship with Richard as one to aspire to. By sending up the absurdity of these literary encounters, in part through the multiplication of confusion (for instance, we discover halfway through the ‘invented’ Davida’s diatribe that her name ‘Davida Pendleton’ is in fact an invented ‘pen name’) Rifkin points to the fact that it is in the absurdity of the encounter that the creative use and productivity is to be found.

It is in the very context of this publication then, that the techniques employed by an artist to navigate through the creative process, in this case the invention of an artist to collaborate with, has the potential not only to become the ‘work’ itself, but to be incorporated as a provocation to other artists and writers for work of their own.

The process of handing over his dialogue for reinvention that is enacted by Layzell to Bergvall and Rifkin recognises another important theme of this chapter: artistic collaborations. Although always a necessary part of even the most solo of performance practices, collaborations are often at the forefront of the practices described here. Richard’s collaboration with Tania, although physically manifest in one corporeal body, nevertheless underlines the creative potential of working relationships. This is something that is played out when Layzell hands his text to Bergvall and she hands both hers and his to Rifkin. There is a certain risk involved in this strategy of handing over and giving up; risk of authorship, risk of censure, risk of the unknown.

Ghislaine Boddington has made collaboration central to the development of her creative strategies. As she makes clear in the conversation which follows this introduction, for her it is through confrontation with colleagues and the direct sharing of material that the most productive working methodologies are to be found. As she says: ‘If you decide to share material as a group, then you own a set of content which can be used in multiple ways…’ [14]. This sharing is manifest literally in a virtual holding space, where members can give or take ideas, as need or desire dictates.

This process of ‘interauthorship’ [15] is a provocative counterpoint to the sociologically ‘normative’ understanding of family. As the artist Barbara Kruger comments:

‘I think that the hallucination of an ideal family is becoming more and more difficult to perpetrate. People can no longer believe it….’ [16]

The suspension of disbelief in the family theatre no longer carries its force. And it is, interestingly enough, in the family unit that Judith Butler sees the most progressive subversion of compulsory heterosexuality. In discussing the documentary film Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingstone, a film which documents the dance form ‘vogueing’ in the New York underground drag scene, it is not so much the performance of gender which Butler finds subversive (which merely mimes the heteronormative model) but rather the performance of family: mothers and children:

‘…the subversive part of what [Livingston’s film] documents, for me, is in the ‘house’ structure, where there are ‘mothers’ and ‘children’, and new kinship systems, which do mime older nuclear-family kinship arrangements but also displace them, and radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship, or that turns kinship into a notion of extended community – one whose future forms can’t be fully predicted. What is a ‘house’? A ‘house’ is the people you ‘walk’ with. I love that that’s a house.’ [17]

Captain Kirk and Mr Spock also operate in a kind of alternative to the traditional nuclear family. Neither can form lasting relationships because of their focus on ‘career’ and the USS Enterprise is not just a metaphor for the domestic space of ‘home’ but literally embodies the physical place where social dramas are played out. The creative process of collaboration often involves the setting up of an alternative family, whether that be the ‘company of performers’, a partnership between a choreographer and a musician, or even the group of ResCen artists themselves. It is no surprise then, that Shobana Jeyasing describes the trauma of making work as ‘like giving birth’. [18]

This alternative family as a creative way of life is explored in Mark Vernon’s essay ‘Plato and the Creative Life’. Vernon gives us an account of some of the issues at stake in Plato’s dialogues which very usefully reflect on the creative process. At the heart of Plato’s idea of philosophy is the idea of collaboration. Plato himself, as Vernon points out, only ever writes in other people’s voices and ‘never once unequivocally signs off a single sentence as his own definitive belief’ but rather ‘insists on attributing what he writes to other people’ [19]. Vernon argues that vital to the navigating process itself, for both artists and philosophers alike, is the formation of a creative way of life. That way of life is one in which the collaborative process amongst friends and colleagues is situated outside the conventions (Plato might also say the distractions) of family life.

For Vernon it is in the dramatisation of creative thought through the dialogues, what he calls ‘philosophical dramas’, that philosophical thought is produced. In other words, as in Miller’s Spock/Kirk method and Richard’s conversations with Tania, the very staging of an idea brings it into being.

Plato’s philosophical premise is the limit of his knowledge: his ignorance. It is his search for wisdom in relation to ignorance that offers the potential for ‘self-transformation’, which Vernon sees as one of the goals of philosophy.

In her essay ‘Expectant Waiting’, choreographer Rosemary Lee writes about the potential for transformation in the devising and rehearsal process, through the act of waiting. Waiting might common-sensibly (at least to this lay writer) be understood as the opposite to dance, as everything that it was not. Waiting in this context is not an aesthetic consideration as John Cage might consider silence in music, but rather waiting as an active process of reception (‘…rudderless but not lost…’ so that things can ‘creep up unawares’). This is active waiting, engaged to effect some kind of transformation. It is not aesthetic but strategic. As Lee writes: ‘This state, though, is far from passive: it is a state of acute attentiveness and relaxation’. It is a negative preference for movement without rejecting the power of movement.

Negative preference without outright refusal and the notion of waiting for something to appear is embodied in the ‘I would prefer not to’, which is the repeated answer of Bartleby, Herman Melville’s character from the short story of the same name. Bartleby is a scrivener: a writer, a copyist, a scribe. His logic of preference, a negativism without outright refusal, leads to the paradox that he is a writer who does not write [20].

In his essay ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, Gilles Deleuze argues that while Bartleby’s phrase ‘I would prefer not to’ is grammatically and syntactically correct, it has the affect of being agrammatical, that ‘it has an anomalous ring to it’ [21]. Linguistically its affect is neither constative nor performative; it neither describes something nor performs an action.

A word always presupposes other words that can replace it, complete it, or form alternatives with it: it is on this condition that language is distributed in such a way as to designate things, states of things and actions, according to a set of objective, explicit conventions. But perhaps there are also other implicit and subjective conventions, other types of reference or presupposition. In speaking, I do not simply indicate things and actions; I also commit acts that assure a relation with the interlocutor, in keeping with our respective situations: I command, I interrogate, I promise, I ask, I emit ‘speech acts.’ Speech acts are self-referential (I command by saying “I order you…”), while constative propositions refer to other things and other words. It is this double system of references that Bartleby ravages. [22]

Bartleby’s logic of preference places his speech not only at the limit of social convention but also at the limit of understanding.

‘I would prefer not to.’
‘You will not?’
‘I prefer not.’ [23]

The core of Bartleby’s negative preference is his preference not to write.

‘Why, how now? what next?’ exclaimed I, ‘do no more writing?’
‘No more.’
‘And what is the reason?’
‘Do you not see the reason yourself?’ he indifferently replied. [24]

The reason – that he would prefer not to – while comic, ostensibly robs Bartleby of his vocation and thus his identity; he is after all, a scribe who has stopped writing. But as Giorgio Agamben argues, it is paradoxically the arresting of his vocation which offers its potential and identifies its power.

‘As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet.’ [25]

Writing, like creation itself, issues from nothing. Bartleby’s immobility, his silence, his putting down of the pen, performs him.

As Bartleby is a writer who has stopped writing, so Rosemary Lee is a choreographer – a movement specialist – who, as a key part of her creative process, prefers not to move. Movement comes out of nothing. As the scrivener becomes the writing tablet, the dancer becomes stage.

There is another negative preference that has, at different times during the ResCen project, been relevant to all the artists involved; the preference not to ‘talk out’ the navigating process during that process, for fear it will disappear. Part of Lee’s waiting for an idea is the ‘…hoping it will appear more fully formed if I touch it less with my mind’. While psychoanalysis has taught us that the ‘talking cure’ will rid us of our demons, these artists have all expressed, at some time or another, the concern that intellectualising the creative process, while useful and important when separated from the process, offers the danger of intellectualising it away; that the magic will disappear and the work become worthless.

In the discussion which follows, the ResCen artists talk about how they get started, the relevance of money to their creative drive, collaborations, commissions, what happens when they get stuck, and what constitutes a good day. At the end of the creative process pertaining to a particular work or project, they acknowledge a moment of amnesia. As Errollyn Wallen puts it: ‘The thing is, a terrible thing in a way, is that the second you finish making those choices, amnesia sets in.’

Ultimately, the journey that an artist makes in the creation of contemporary performance, from the initial idea or commission to the manifestation of that work in a public engagement, seems to be about erasure and forgetting. Perhaps it is only through amnesia that the creative process can be renewed to move on.

[1] See ‘All In A Day’s Work’ which follows this essay.
[2] ‘All In A Day’s Work’. References to Spock and Kirk are to characters from the long-running television series Star Trek which spans over 726 episodes since 1966 and ten feature films, to date.
[3] Elsewhere Miller has described the imagined audience for his work as ‘an audience of Graeme Millers’. See ‘Outside Looking In’, transcript of seminar at Conway Hall, London, 15 June 2005 at http://www.rescen.net.
[4] See http://www.startrek.com [accessed 8 December 2005] from which this quote and other biographical details about Kirk and Spock have been taken.
[5] See Lynn Bloom, Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972)
[6] Excerpt from statement by President Clinton from White House Daily Briefing 16 March 1998. See Mike McCurry, ‘White House Daily Briefing March 16, 1998’ (1998) http://usembassy-australia.state.gov/hyper/WF980316/epf101.htm [accessed 12 August 2001]
[7] Benjamin McLane Spock, Baby and Child Care illust. by Dorothea Fox (London: Bodley Head, 1969) p.449
[8] Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience (London: Penguin, 1974) p.269
[9] Ibid. p.129
[10] Judith Butler, ‘The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler’ Artforum, November 1992, 82-89 (p.84)
[11] For detailed arguments on the social construction of motherhood and childrearing see Donna Bassin and Margaret Honey and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan eds., Representations of Motherhood (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1994); Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (London: Yale University Press, 1996); and Patrice Di Quinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood (London: Routledge, 1999)
[12] See Richard Layzell, ‘Tania’s Space’ in Digital Creativity Vol. 5, No. 2. for an account of this process and also Richard Layzell’s ResCen Pages at http://www.rescen.net.
[13] A range of different conversations between Richard Layzell and Tania Koswyckz are published at http://www.rescen.net.
[14] See ‘All In A Day’s Work’
[15]  ‘Interauthorship’ is a term used by Boddington to describe collaborative process creations. See http://www.rescen.net.
[16] Therese Lichtenstein, ‘Images of the Maternal: An interview with Barbara Kruger’ in Donna Bassin and Margaret Honey and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan eds., Representations of Motherhood (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1994) p.199
[17] Butler p.84
[18] See ‘All In A Day’s Work’
[19] Mark Vernon, ‘Plato and the Creative Life’ in this volume.
[20] The phrase ‘logic of preference’ is used by Gilles Deleuze in ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, in Essays Critical and Clinical by Gilles Deleuze trans. by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998).
[21] bid. p.69
[22] Ibid. p.73
[23] Herman Melville, Bartleby (London: Penguin, 1995) p.17
[24] Ibid. p.27
[25] Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (California: Stanford University Press, 1999) p.254

[T]he proper name is only ever supposed to refer and not to mean.
Julian Wolfreys [1]

When I first got your email I thought: hey, that’s me!
Joshua Sofaer, New York

One cannot help having a slightly disagreeable feeling
when one comes across one’s own name in a stranger.
Recently I was very sharply aware of it when a Herr S. Freud
presented himself to me in my consulting hour.
Sigmund Freud [2]

Travelling up the Finchley Road in North London, soon after I had arrived in the capital in the early nineties, my eye stopped on a shop front which read: Jews for Jesus. It is possible that I had heard of the organisation before, but the fact that here there was a concrete registration of this seeming contradiction struck me. I crossed the road and gazed into the window. There were a few ceremonial objects used in the Jewish household – I seem to remember a Hanukkiah, the eight branched candelabra used during the festival of Hanukkah – and a Seder plate, used at the Passover meal. There was also a selection of books, often with a graphic incorporating both a star of David and a crucifix. I was a bit perplexed. I wrote down the telephone contact number clearly printed on the window and went on my way.

A couple of days later I phoned up the number and asked the person at the other end, “what is Jews for Jesus?”. After a lucid but almost blunt reply (“We are Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah,”) I could practically hear the pen poised over the paper ready to take down my contact details in preparation for my indoctrination. When I announced (and spelt) my name – Joshua Sofaer – S-O-F-A-E-R – Sierra, Oscar, Foxtrot, Alpha, Echo, Romeo – there was an awkward silence. It was the kind of silence that comes when someone thinks that they misheard, or that you are taking them for a ride, but then realise that no, you really are telling the truth. “Oh,” came the eventual reply, “you know there is another Joshua Sofaer in New York who is very involved with Jews for Jesus.”

The call finishes and I am left feeling uneasy. There is another me (at least one other). But not only that, he is an active member of what I take to be a weird Messianic cult. Oh dear.

In May 2002 I went to visit Joshua Sofaer USA, the New York based evangelist in his early thirties, a full-time proselytizing ‘Jewish believer’ who preaches for the acceptance of Jesus, as a member of the Messianic Judeo-Christian organisation Jews for Jesus [3].

By spending time with another Joshua Sofaer and recording our conversations, I hoped to better understand how names function. My hunch was that in our lives we live our names, that our names act as scripts given to us at birth which we then go on to perform. Observing the similarities and differences in our attitudes and understanding of what it meant to be in the world as ‘Joshua Sofaer’, how we lived our names – both exactly the same and completely different – a wider picture evolved.

In May 2004, two years after my initial visit to Joshua Sofaer [4], I presented Namesake: The Story of a Name, a live performance with soundscape in collaboration with the composer Jonathan Cooper at three venues in London. They were: The Jewish Museum (the London Museum of Jewish Life), Home (an art gallery and performance space based inside a family house in Camberwell and noted for its commitment to live art practices), and The Swiss Church in London (which has a growing programme of cross-cultural and intercultural arts activities). Each of these three venues and their audiences, the Jewish venue and audience, the Art venue and audience, and the Christian venue and audience, contributed to the resonances of the piece and underlined the need for tolerance through religious and national exchange in the current climate of tense international relations. These concerns were filtered through the telling of the story of my meeting with my namesake, and our understanding of the meanings of our name.

The personal proper name designates its referent. We hail another with their name and we respond to our own name being called. But even the fact of this trip alone, that it was made at all, forces the conclusion that names are not simply designators but activators which affect, alter, produce and even dictate life narratives. The personal proper name offers a proliferation of significations outside and beyond its referent.

The problem of the name is one that has long been acknowledged. Plato’s Cratylus is a Socratic dialogue dedicated entirely to the subject and concludes with a provocation to Western socio-linguistic and philosophical thought: ‘…it’s one thing to be a name and another to be the thing it names.’ [5] As early as the Fourth Century BCE the designator and the referent were being separated. 

For Dead History, Live Art? I rehearse some of the implications of the performing of a namesake. Here performance research and the creation of the performance piece Namesake: The Story of a Name, leave the stage and enter the academy. The research for both outcomes – performance and critical writing – find themselves reliant on each other; the writing quotes the performance and the performance quotes the writing.

S

It can be bad luck to have a namesake. It can be a matter of life and death. For Deepak Patel it was fatal. Admitted to Northwick Park Hospital in London on 24th April 2001 and diagnosed with meningococcal septicaemia, his life saving medicine was given to somebody else with the same name [6]. He died.

Deepak was neglected for a namesake; he was passed over in favour of a non-identical identical. This is the nightmarish stuff of Kafka made real; the horror of mistaken identity; deselected or selected by accident.

The fear of being falsely accused, being the right actor in the wrong part, is something we all live with. One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is that the wrong person might be convicted. This fear is not restricted to the weight of the law. As Benzion Kaganoff discovered:

‘It was a widespread folk belief among Jews during the Middle Ages that, confronted with two individuals of the same name, the ministering angels were as likely as not to choose the wrong one. Therefore, some maintained that several families with a common name should not reside in one dwelling. People went so far as to avoid entering the home of a sick person who bore their name, lest the Angel of Death arrive during the visit and take the wrong soul.’ [7]

This ‘folk belief’ is a superstitious recontextualisation of the fear of false accusation, manifest in a conception of the administrative order of heaven. However far from other belief systems it may be, this kind of conviction identifies the threat to one’s ‘individuality’ that is made by the presence of a namesake.

The misrecognition that takes place in the encounter with a namesake is not quite the same as that which takes place with the double, the false twin, or the doppelganger: the mistaken identities which span cultural narratives from Esau and his twin brother Jacob, to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. The difference is that whereas the misrecognition by Isaac of one son for another, or the witnesses and law enforcement officers of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero for the real culprit ‘Daniell’, are based on false assumptions, the encounter with the namesake is based on a truth: two players have identical nomenclature.

In Michael Waldron’s Nineteenth Century farce A Slight Mistake or Mistaken Identity the action (and consequently the rather outmoded humour) arises from a newly employed servant’s confusion between the master she has not yet met and an unemployed valet who is looking for work, both of who happen to have the same name. In a narrative world where names mean (the servant in question is called Belinda Cookwell, the police-officer Constable Catchem) it is no surprise that the namesakes are both called Thomas Thompson. ‘Thomas’ from the Hebrew word meaning ‘twin’ (Didymus being the Greek version which means ‘double-minded’). Thomas Thompson, Thomas son of Tom, a twin name, doubled, then doubled again by the namesake; eight names in one. The semantic properties of this name would not have been lost on the Sunday School educated Victorian audience.

While Waldron’s comedy maybe slight and pivot on a reductive and essentialist class-based politic which we now regard as unacceptable upper-class privilege  (servant treated as master, master denied ‘proper’ respect) the encounter of the namesake is one with which we keenly identify. Two people, the same yet different, who swap places momentarily, and offer us an insight of what might have been, throwing back the questions: who are you and what legitimates you?

Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story William Wilson is the tale of the title character’s conflict with his namesake. Ostensibly William Wilson is Wilson’s deathbed confession of his lifelong struggle against the dogged interference of his namesake – William Wilson – who follows him from Preparatory School to Eton to Oxford and beyond, mimicking him, bringing him down and exposing him. The story ends with Wilson’s account of the ‘last eventful scene of the drama’ in which he finally challenges his namesake to a duel and murders him [8].

But right from the epigraph, Poe indicates that Wilson’s namesake is parabolic. Underneath the title, the caption reads:

‘What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?’ [9]

Wilson’s namesake is his own conscience, which plagues him throughout the narrative of the story, and throughout his life; he makes his appearances conveniently just at the moments when Wilson is in the process of committing a crime against his own moral code. The epigraph makes it clear enough that the namesake is a metaphor, but there are repeated clues within the text.

‘…I might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised.’ [10]

William Wilson’s namesake is his better self, his conscience, which doggedly follows him around, checking and commenting on his actions: a conscience which he finally destroys.

In William Wilson, Poe employs the use of a literary namesake. It would be easy then, to understand William Wilson as simply a parable: the namesake as a literary conceit. Even within the narrative world of the story however, both name and namesake are presented as an invention, as being self-willed.

‘Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.’ [11]

and again later:

‘In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson, – a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real.’ [12]

As Daniel Hoffman points out:

‘The chosen disguise reveals that its bearer is, in his own view, self-begotten: he is William Wilson, William son of his own Will. He has, that is, willed himself into being – willed the self we meet, the one that survives its murder of its double.’ [13]

The name is, like Thomas Thompson, in and of itself a namesake, doubled and then quadrupled. William Wilson and his namesake William Wilson – the four wills, the force of will. The namesake is acknowledged as a fake, as the creator of its own fiction. This fabrication forces the question of the identity of William Wilson. Who, in fact, is he?

Poe tempts us to a conclusion with the inclusion of several autobiographical references. For a start, Wilson shares a birthdate not only with his namesake, but also with his author. Poe was born on 19th January 1813, so was Wilson [14]. Poe went to Preparatory School at Dr Bransby’s, so did Wilson. Poe had to leave the University of West Virginia because of misadventures in gambling, Wilson must leave Oxford for the same reason [15].

William Wilson thus becomes a literary namesake for his author Edgar Allan Poe. A namesake in all but name. That ‘William Wilson’ is not the ‘real’ name of the character, even within the narrative, is made possible by the text itself and allows for our indulgence that William Wilson is an autobiography of its author – or at least an autobiography of the author’s struggle with his conscience.

In this context William Wilson is less a literary conceit than the struggle to represent self in writing; an acknowledgement of the self that is other – existing solely as a namesake – in the published name of the author. Jorge Luis Borges acknowledges the fictive autobiographical doppelganger of the writer in ‘Borges and I’.

‘The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me.’ [16]

Borges separates himself out from his published namesake, who plays at being Borges. The namesake is an actor, which is to say he pretends to be something which he is not. In this context, Poe’s story of a namesake (one which is eerily contemporary in its formulation and the complexity with which it approaches the relationship of an author’s life to that of his fiction) usefully articulates the struggle of self-judgement and the gap between the internal self and that self’s public performance.

Poe’s short-story William Wilson is his progeny, verified by the published attribution ‘by Edgar Allan Poe’. This mechanical reproduction of his name – his printed namesake – articulates his life (his life’s work, his work as his life).

To read about oneself, to write about oneself, to see one’s name printed and reprinted, to hear one’s name in conversation, is often to read or write or hear as if it was the name of another. In this context – the context post industrial revolution – our personal proper name becomes our namesake in written and spoken language. Mechanical reproduction – printing, photography, film – offers us the same kind of estrangement that we feel when we look in a mirror: it is both us and not us.

The mechanical reproduction of our name (a kind of printed namesake) validates us as subjects. Just as the verbal appellation hails us into the social space, even if (as Judith Butler has observed [17]) that appellation is based in hate speech, so too seeing ones name in print, be it praise or slander, accords us the status of social subject. For the narrator of Á la recherche du temps perdu the publication of his article in Le Figaro newspaper allows him to perform within a social context wider than his immediate self or surroundings. His understanding of this operation rotates specifically around the reproduction of his name in print.

‘I saw at the same hour my thought – or at least, failing my thought for those who were incapable of understanding it, the repetition of my name and as it were an embellished evocation of my person – shine on countless people, colour their own thoughts in an auroral light which filled me with more strength and triumphant joy than the multiple dawn which at that moment was blushing at every window.’ [18]

The narrator is caught up not with the success (or more pertinently for this particular narrator, the failure) of his writing, but rather the literal fact of its multiplication.

‘I made up my mind to send Françoise out to buy more copies – in order to give them to my friends, I would tell her, but in reality to feel at first hand the miracle of the multiplication of my thought and to read, as though I were another person who had just opened the Figaro, the same sentences in another copy.’ [19]

The narrator’s desire to read ‘as though I were another person’ his own article – his own name – is his desire to witness first hand his existence in social space. Again the analogy of the mirror is useful: we look in the mirror to check that we look OK, but also to check that we still exist.

The narrator of Á la recherche du temps perdu separates himself from his printed namesake, a namesake whose printed presence then validates his own existence. But while there are two namesakes in this model – the name of the narrator and the printed name – there is only one corporeal body. The self-validation offered by the name in print is problematised as soon as the uniqueness of the name is lost. The acknowledgement of a namesake – a corporeal other with identical nomenclature – invalidates, or at least destabilises, the referential function of the personal proper name through the multiplication of the referent. Put simply: it is no longer necessarily clear to whom the name refers.

S

It becomes apparent that Joshua Sofaer really is well in there with Jews for Jesus. The promotional literature of the organisation entitled ‘Not Ashamed’ describes him as  ‘one of the next generation’ who ‘has a key role in charting the future of the movement’.

So there is this guy who is stands over there looking back at me with my name. He has me intrigued and he leaves me feeling a bit uneasy. I send him a long rambling email, arrange a time to visit, and fly out to New York to meet him.

I hadn’t really a clue what we were going to talk about (despite the fact that I had sent him an eight page document of questions which covered everything from nicknames he was given as a schoolboy to what his career goals were). When I get out the family tree, pretty soon we realise that we are related. We share a great-great-grandfather in mid-Nineteenth Century Baghdad. Our great-grandfathers worked together in the Sofaer grocery store in Rangoon.

We are family!

There are (at least) two ways in which we might live our names. The first is in terms of the etymology of our names – what our names literally mean – the second is the intersubjective meaning, which is to say the assumptions or understandings we make when a name is introduced to us. ‘Joshua’ and ‘Sofaer’ both have their etymological roots in Hebrew. Joshua means salvation – literally ‘salvation from God’. It has the same root as Jesus. Sofaer is the Hebrew for scribe. The Sofaer is the person who writes and repairs the Torah, teffilin and mezuzah, the holy texts of Judaism.

For Joshua Sofaer there is a dynamic conflict in the etymology of his name, which encompasses his whole cultural identity as a self identified Jew who believes in Jesus. On the one hand ‘salvation’ from ‘Joshua’ corresponds to his work as a missionary, and on the other he has the original order of ancient Judaism in the role of the ‘Sofaer’, the vocation of his forefathers. He lives in two cultural worlds and, by his own reckoning, doesn’t really fit in either of them. He is living his name. Everything he stands for is embodied by ‘Joshua’ and ‘Sofaer’; not only that, he thinks so too.

The way that ‘Joshua’ has meant something to me was by its difference. I was so conscious that my name announced my Jewishness when I was growing up, that I took it for granted that the same thing would be true for my elder sister Joanna. It was only years into this belief that I came to understand that there is no Joanna in the Old Testament at all. The way in which I live ‘scribe’ is through the putting of words on a page. Writing, amongst other things, is what I do.

So there you have it. After our first face to face encounter it seemed like both Joshua Sofaers were performing their names differently and yet, the same.

S

Comedian Dave Gorman and filmmaker Alan Berliner have both made works about their namesakes: Are You Dave Gorman? and The Sweetest Sound respectively. Both Gorman and Berliner go about collecting as many namesakes as they possibly can, using all the contemporary technical search resources open to them (the internet, email, postal directories etc.).

For Gorman, the task of collecting Dave Gormans originates in a bet with his friend and eventual collaborator Danny Wallace. Danny drunkenly bets his mate that he will never meet another Dave Gorman and that there probably aren’t many more in the world anyway. Dave sets about proving him wrong. What starts at first as a laddish jaunt turns into an obsession, becomes a performance routine, a television series on BBC2 and eventually a book [20]. Fifty-four Dave Gormans later, Wallace agrees that his mate has won the bet.

The script of the performance and the book are littered with references to the accumulative nature of the project. Gorman is only interested in racking up the Dave Gormans to prove a point. The imperative rotates around a notion of ‘pride’; he must win the bet.

‘How was Dave treating it now? Self-discovery? A search for identity? To feel he wasn’t alone in the world? That there were others out there with something fundamental in common with him?
Bollocks. He was doing it to prove me wrong.’ [21] [Danny Wallace]

There is a wilful rejection of any attempt to understand what might be at stake in the project beyond the bet.

‘Although they offered us exceptional hospitality, we were men on a mission, and we couldn’t stop for long. We had more Dave Gormans to find today, and a very tight schedule to keep.’ [22] [Danny Wallace]

But what starts as a project pursued for its absurdly obsessive comic value ends up problematising the easy correspondence between a signifier and its identity, that Gorman had once felt:

‘Before all this started I was Dave Gorman. Now, I was only a Dave Gorman. Those two words that had once defined me now merely defined a subset to which I belonged. I was one of many. […] What did Dave Gorman do? Anything. Who was Dave Gorman? Anyone. Where did Dave Gorman live? Anywhere. My name meant everything and nothing.’ [23]

The journey which Gorman undertakes to assert his will and power – that he was right – ends up (albeit within the comic narrative) by robbing him of the unique performative power of his name and thus his self assurance of who he is.

Berliner starts at the conceptual point that Gorman concludes. His imperative is one of existential questioning: ‘What can they be doing with my name? Are they better Alan Berliners than I am?’, will ‘the other Alan Berliners look more like Alan Berliner than I do?’, ‘Who knows if my life would have been different if I’d had another name’ [24].

Berliner’s film is autobiography, psycho-philosophy, social history and investigates the relationship between authorship, performance and the personal proper name. He allows his personal quest to open up a discourse on the ontology of personal proper names and investigates the form and context of names within North American culture. The film revolves around a dinner party he holds for the twelve other Alan Berliners that he has contacted (or Allan, Allen or Alain Berliners). He asks them questions about their likes and dislikes, habits and activities in a comedic, pseudo-scientific (perhaps disingenuous) attempt to find commonalities relating to ‘Alan Berliner’.

But whereas Gorman starts with a banality – a bet – and ends up questioning the currency of his personal nomenclature, Berliner, having started with such questions, concludes with the disappointment of the banal.

‘So if you’re feeling a little let down because you expected some big revelation from my dinner party, imagine how I feel. All that preparation and anticipation… and for what? I still have to share my name with them. I’m probably still going to be mistaken for them. And it seems I’m destined to be the real Alan Berliner in my mind only. But please, don’t think of my experiment as a total failure.’

Berliner hopes for an epiphany in understanding the condition of the namesake but the actuality falls short of his expectations.

Although he never overtly states his imperative in such terms, Berliner hints at the initial source of his enquiry being rooted in a direct confusion between himself and one particular of his namesakes; what he describes as the ‘ultimate embarrassment’: the confusion between himself and another Alan Berliner, another filmmaker.

‘A few years ago someone with my name made a film called Ma Vie en Rose. The critics loved it. I loved it too. That’s when everyone hailed my debut as a feature film director. No one ever did bother to ask why I would suddenly start making films in French. There might even be a few people watching right now who think this is one of his films, or that I’m him or that he’s me.’

Later on in the film he alludes in the voiceover with some irony, to that particular Alan Berliner in shot:

‘That’s the other filmmaker, the one in black. He even looks more like a filmmaker than I do.’

Perhaps the search and research for all the other Alan Berliners in the world (“I can’t stop thinking of them as the competition”) is less about trying to establish his own identity and more about trying to dilute the cultural power and recognition of his most famous namesake: the other filmmaker, the Alan Berliner who has been critically acclaimed for his larger scale, bigger budget feature [25]. By authoring a film about the name ‘Alan Berliner’, by employing the other Alan Berliners as actors in his narrative, Berliner asks his namesakes to perform him. Their doubling, which would ostensibly negate the possibility of any authentic original ‘Alan Berliner’, paradoxically enforces his role as auteur and assures the authorship of his filmic performance as his.

For Gorman and Berliner, both of who are making their respective works at the fin de siècle – a time of massive public interest in personal history and family heritage – the acknowledgement of the multiple existence of their name problematises what is for all of us, the contested and fractured space of identity recognition. The familiar becomes unfamiliar; the unfamiliar becomes familiar. As Hillel Schwartz comments in his extended study of ‘copies’, The Culture of the Copy:

‘Powerful stuff, these namesakes, despite our insistence that individuals make their own waves in the world. Given a culture that reveres originals yet trusts that copies will more than do them justice, the blessing of a name is inadequate to its burden.’ [26]

The multiplication of the personal proper name forces us to question those attributes contemporary western society holds close: individuality, self-determinism and difference.

In his much quoted essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, an essay which continues to provoke a discourse on the relationship between the object and its double, Walter Benjamin argues that the reproduction of the artwork radically affects its aura [27]. Benjamin defines aura as the “historical testimony”, the “authority”, something tied to “presence” and yet also with a ‘unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.’ For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction marks the destruction of the aura of an artwork but he also sees this destruction as ‘a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art’. Aura, as Benjamin sees it, cannot be reproduced. Andy Warhol might ultimately agree with Benjamin that aura is present in the historical testimony of the object, but for Warhol, mechanical reproduction is crucial to the cultural comprehension of aura, insomuch as it is mechanical reproduction (print, photography, television, film) which goes to hype the ‘authentic original’. This is true not only for artworks but for people as well.

‘Some company recently was interested in buying my “aura.” They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, “We want your aura.” I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for it, I should try to figure out what it is.

I think “aura” is something that only somebody else can see, and they only see as much of it as they want to. It’s all in the other person’s eyes. You can only see an aura on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all. I was having dinner the other night with everybody from my office. The kids at the office treat me like dirt, because they know me and they see me every day. But then there was this nice friend that somebody had brought along who had never met me, and this kid could hardly believe that he was having dinner with me! Everybody else was seeing me, but he was seeing my “aura”.’ [28]

Warhol separates seeing and knowing (that is being familiar) through time as the key factors that affect aura. To know someone (well) is to negate the possibility of seeing their aura. Aura for Warhol is eradicated through familiarity [29]. What goes to create aura however is not so much the not seeing, as the seeing but not knowing. And this kind of seeing without knowing, without one-to-one familiarity, is what mechanical reproduction through mass media offers. This is, after all, how celebrity is created.

What happens to aura and the authentication of the original when there is a namesake; not a reproduced copy, but another authentic original? Benjamin says that there is no point in asking for the authentication of the original of an artwork that is designed for reproduction:

‘From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.’ [30]

Following this argument through, it makes no sense to ask who is the authentic Dave Gorman, Alan Berliner or Joshua Sofaer. All subjects with the same name have equal authority to authentication and it is perhaps this that is the most destabilising aspect of the namesake in a culture which places such importance on ‘individuality’.

And yet there are desperate attempts within the artworld to authenticate the original, often for reasons of commerce. To continue with Benjamin’s example of the photograph: particular photographic prints are accorded the status of authentic orginal. Sherrie Levine’s photographic practice of directly appropriating existing images – literally photographing a photograph without any transformations or additions – not only goes to question the authorship of the image, but also further complicates Benjamin’s statement that there is no authentic print [31]. Through limited editions, the inclusion of the artist’s signature, the quality of the paper, there is a hierarchy which is often couched in terms of the original and its copy.

This hierarchy is also manifest in the deployment of personal proper names. Celebrity culture might tell us something about the way in which the contemporary west views the interchange of naming and mechanical reproduction. This takes us to Benjamin’s second proposition: that when authenticity ceases to be applicable, the function of art is reversed from ritual to politics. It is the de-politicisation of mass media and what Jacqueline Rose calls the “murderous” [32] culture of celebrity that has re-reversed the equation and  brought ritual into the culture of reproduction. Fans who chant “there’s only one David Beckham” to José Fernandez Diaz’s Guantanamera are not trying to claim that there is only one person in the world who has, or has the right to that personal proper name, but rather they are making a desperate attempt to authenticate the particular David Beckham that they revere. The phrase “there is only one David Beckham” de-authenticates other people with that name. Ironically it is the reproductive industry – mass media – that gives Beckham his status as authentic original. As Ellis Cashmore points out:

‘…the national media ensured that the name “Beckham” made its impress on the public consciousness. Widespread interest in, and consumption of what many took to be, a “wonder goal” guaranteed Beckham an audience.’ [33]

The link here between mass media – the reproductive machinery – and the aura of the authentic original David Beckham is one of cause and effect. No media, no aura. Indeed Cashmore takes this one step further by asking us to consider that the forms of reproduction are in fact the only David Beckham that there is:

‘…is there actually anything apart from the Beckham served up on our tv screens and in print?’ [34]

The religious attention of the ‘fans’ who devote themselves to the Beckham cult, worship the aura which emanates from the icon. It is no surprise that this is the word we use to describe those players who have reached the zenith of celebrity – icon – a word that is both authentic embodiment (the one and only David Beckham) and reproduction (the printed and televised image) simultaneously.

Celebrity is a useful tool for gauging what is at stake in the namesake because of its preoccupation with singularity and uniqueness. The ultimate in celebrity recognition is that of single name signification.

‘Single name fame is probably the zenith of global celebrity. Elvis, Marilyn, Pelé, Jesus: they exist at a level somewhere above the usual layer of celebs where the mention of one word provokes instant recognition.’ [35]

Single name fame is the zenith of global celebrity – the thing contemporary western society rates so highly – because it is a sign of recognition and success. Part of the cachet of the single name fame is the risk it takes in reproduction. There are many fewer Marilyn Monroes than there are Marilyns. By existing as a single name celebrity you raise the stakes by asking people to identify the signifier ‘Marilyn’ with the particular Marilyn: a film actress Marilyn Monroe whose major out put was in Hollywood comedy in the 1950’s etc. etc.. If the single name celebrity can survive the namesake test then they are perceived as having ‘made it’.

Having a namesake then, is a threat, because it forces the question: do we know to whom you are referring?

Perhaps the metaphorical model that Poe articulates in William Wilson is actually the most adequate to describe the literal namesake too. The namesake becomes our social conscience, always there to remind us that our ‘individuality’ is a fragile construct ready to shatter at the calling of another who shares our name.

S

Joshua asks me if I would like to accompany him the following Sunday on a deputation to a church in the Bronx. A deputation is when a member of Jews for Jesus goes out, most frequently to other evangelical churches and organisations, to drum up support; that is financial as well as spiritual support. I stood on the steps to Joshua’s apartment on Sunday morning feeling much less nervous than I had at our first meeting.

“How do we get there?” I asked.
“We’re gonna drive” he said, pointing to a slightly battered jeep with a massive logo emblazoned on the side which read JEWS FOR JESUS.

Why is it that getting in that jeep was so uncomfortable?

We drove due north of Manhattan for some time, me sitting next to my namesake in the Jews for Jesus jeep, nervous again, as Joshua recounted stories of how people have tried to veer him off the road in response to the logo on the side, and I get thinking about the possibility of being mistaken for him by the angels of death if there was to be an accident, and then I decide that actually they are just as likely to come for me as for him and that the confusion could work to my advantage, when finally we end up outside a small brick and wood Baptist Evangelical Church in the Bronx.

After some singing and shaking of hands I glance down at the order of service and in an instant of horror and excitement see that I am due on stage after the next hymn. ‘Sermon – Joshua Sofaer.’ The horror and excitement quickly dissipates. My namesake gets up and talks about the Jewish origins of the feast of Pentecost. He was a good performer, a confident speaker; we certainly both crave an audience. But what struck me more than anything in witnessing my namesake witnessing to this Baptist congregation was how ‘Jewishy’ he was. It was kind of like watching Woody Allen in a Nativity Play. And I realised that regardless of his belief, Joshua Sofaer really was performing in two different worlds.

In the jeep on the journey back to Manhattan we start to talk in more depth about his beliefs. Without the theological knowledge as ammunition it becomes difficult to challenge him on his own terms. I am frustrated that he remains so assuredly unmoved by my arguments. What also becomes clear is that as far as he is concerned it is not necessary that I agree with him. How could it not be imperative for him to need me to agree with him? I really didn’t understand because I did need him to agree with me. It wasn’t enough for me to simply lay out my views on a market stall in case of any takers. And I suddenly realised, and I told him, that maybe, after all, it was me that felt the need to convince, that contrary to the assumption, it was me that was the proselytiser. And I began to wonder: who is performing whom?

[1] Julian Wolfreys, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998) p.17
[2] Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Standard Edition Vol. 6 (London: Vantage, 2001) p.25
[3] Jews for Jesus rose out of the ABMJ (American Board of Missions to the Jews) and was formed in 1973 by Moishe Rosen in the San Francisco Bay area of the USA. Its stated focus is to proclaim Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, to the Jewish people. They do this through on street evangelism, advertising campaigns and educational programmes. It is not a church. They have no religious leader. By 1996 they had an annual budget of over thirteen million US dollars, eighty percent of which came from individual donations. The existence of Jews for Jesus has led to counter-missionary organisations such as Jews for Judaism, which oppose Jewish evangelism. Jewish evangelism is also officially opposed by most mainstream Christian Churches including Lutherian, Methodist and Episcopalian branches of the Church, The Church of England and the Catholic Church. Jewish Evangelism is widely supported by Baptist Churches.
[4] I went to see him a second time and to record further interviews in January 2004.
[5] Plato Cratylus trans. by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998) p.78
[6] Sharon van Guens, ‘Patient died after drugs were given to namesake’ The Evening Standard, 1 November 2001, p.9
[7] Benzion C. Kaganoff, A Dictionary of Jewish Names and their History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) p.112
[8] Edgar Allan Poe, Visions of Poe ed. by Simon Marsden (Exeter: Webb & Bower) p.34
[9] Attributed to Chamberlain’s Pharronida. [This is disputed. See Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1998) p. 212]. Poe. p.24
[10] Ibid. p.28
[11] Ibid. p.24
[12] Ibid. p.25
[13] Hoffman p.209
[14] Or in its first printing 1811. ‘Poe kept moving his birthdate forward, in successive magazine biographies, in order to seem younger than he was. So, it appears did William Wilson.’ Hoffman p.210. The fact that Poe went to the trouble of altering his character’s birthdate alongside his own stresses the importance of the autobiographic reference.
[15] Even the briefest biography of Poe will give these details. See for instance Hoffman p. 210.
[16] Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Borges and I’ in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, A Reader ed. by Seán Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995) p.339
[17] See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997)
[18] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time  Vols 1-6 trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996) Vol.5 p.652
[19] Ibid. p.653
[20] All quotations are taken from the book rather than the television series, which to a large extent repeats the television script.
[21] Are You Dave Gorman? is co-written by Dave Gorman and his friend and collaborator Danny Wallace. This quote is from Danny Wallace. Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace, Are you Dave Gorman? (London: Ebury Press, 2001) p.126
[22] Danny Wallace. Gorman p.222
[23] Dave Gorman. Gorman p.304
[24] All quotes transcribed from the film The Sweetest Sound Dir. Alan Berliner. Cine-Matrix.2001
[25] Perhaps after all, just as the name speaks more of the namer than the named, I betray more about myself than Alan Berliner by this comment.
[26] Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996) p.338
[27] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 211-244
[28] Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Florida: Harvest, 1975) p.77
[29] Familiarity is not the same as exposure. Familiarity depreciates aura but exposure through reproduction is the food of celebrity. Familiarity enables a knowledge not acquired through exposure.
[30] Benjamin p.218
[31] For a discussion of Sherrie Levine’s practice see Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), especially 126-148 ‘Appropriating Appropriation’.
[32] Jacqueline Rose in conversation with Marina Warner, South Bank Talks, The Purcell Room, 28-01-03. Rose described the culture of celebrity as “murderous” because it sets up celebrities only in order that they should later be shot-down.
[33] Ellis Cashmore, Beckham (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002) p.20
[34] Ibid p.44
[35] Ibid p.43

No previous knowledge is required.

Schedule

1. Wednesday 22nd February: Introduction, Performance in the context of Fine Art with Joshua Sofaer
2. Wednesday 29th February: Autobiography and Performance with Dee Heddon
3. Wednesday 7th March: Performance and Popular Culture with David Gale
4. Wednesday 14th March: Activism and Performance with James Leadbitter (the vacuum cleaner)
5. Wednesday 21 March: The Audience of Performance with Joshua Sofaer
6. Thursday 29 March: Performance Documentation and the Artwork (includes visit to Gillian Wearing exhibition) with Joshua Sofaer

In association with Bishopsgate Institute

This short essay forms part of the research conducted as the first Artist Fellow on the Clore Leadership Programme. During course of the fellowship I have been trying to consider how artists can really make a difference in the societies that they find themselves in and the situation of national crisis in Japan offered an opportunity to interrogate cultural value in a society that has been ripped apart by a natural disaster.