User:Lbattich/Proper names

What:

The artist's proper name as an object in encyclopedia/authoritive books in art / art history / the artworld.

The artist's proper name as object: an intervention in existing texts on art and its history (eg. Wikipedia) replacing and altering all proper names

wikipedia

I took Wikipedia's entry on Conceptual art and it became THIS

I also took this and it became THIS

Outcome

Image: Wikipedia entry on Conceptual Art:

• [IMAGE - clik me]

ideas:

• A2 prints of altered article(s)

Background: the artist's proper name as an object

Andrea Fraser on Louise Lawler, 'In and Out of Place' 1985

On museum labels:

Establishing authorship, ownership, pedigree and, ultimately, value, such museum labels are the most conspicuous instance of the institutional exhibition of proper names.

See Lawler's Patriarchal Roll Call, 1972-83, where she uses artist's names, turning them into bird calls.

Sygnifying the essential yet imaginary identity of a unified ego, the proper name, individuals are inscribed within power relations and come to identify with and be identified by positions therein. The conventional organization of art practices around a signature – everything which allows a work of art to be identified as a "Pollock" or a "Warhol," etc. – institutes the proper name as interior to the art object; thus, artists are locked in a structure of institutionalized subjectivity. And the institutional exhibition of proper names, designating the authors and owners of objects, defines that subjectivity in terms of consumption and ownership.

[Art criticism], especially monographic art criticism, which often functions retroactively to inscribe unruly objects within an institutionally acceptable position, to recover from a heterogeneous practice a unified ego – the subject of a signature.

Notes

I'm terrible at remembering proper names (among other stuff, like names of things, works, objects, places, etc.). I even forget the names of people I meet daily and have known for years. But it gets particularly acute when it comes to the proper names attached to cultural works.

This is one of the reasons why I became interested in the function of proper names in art, specifically in the art institution. Another reason, perhaps, is related to Homer's Iliad: I find it interesting that we know next to nothing on the author or authors of the first work in the literary tradition of what could be called 'Western culture,' and that subsequently this culture would develop an almost obsessive cult on the individual creative originator.

In his essay ‘The Forgetting of Proper Names’, first published in 1901 in the book Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud analysed this occurrence by using the case of his own forgetting of an Italian Renaissance painter’s name. He explained that this temporary forgetting of a proper name is not only a case of forgetting, but also of false recollection. While trying to remember the proper name we are after, other substitute names will pop up through a process of displacement.

For all the discourse on the death of the author, the use of proper names in the art institution, and thus in art as such, have occupied a solid position since the Renaissance.

An artwork without a name attached to it is a very uncommon sight. But this is not to imply that there should be more 'nameless' works, nor that the convention of attaching names to artwork is questionable tout court.

What interests me is the use and effects proper names have within the institution of art, and within the relation of art and society in general.

What goes in a name? To what extent our experience of a particular artwork, event, or artistic manifestation, is subjected to the identity of a name-bearer?

What of nameless works, works that lack a proper name attached to them, tagless works?

They are orphaned, like the six characters in Pirandello (PIRANDELLO) - signed.

What else is orphaned?

Warhol is one of those names that refer to the works of art, it is inseparable from them.

Peter Wollen on the Raid the Icebox exhibition, Warhol's 1969-70 'intervention' at the RISD Museum of Art: "It is as if the label 'Andy Warhol' would signify, not a person, in the sense of a human subject, but storage: boxes, reels, spools, Polaroids, all labeled 'Andy Warhol.'" (Raiding the Icebox, 168)

Wollen cites the museum director comments:

"There were exasperated moment when we felt that Andy Warhol was exhibiting 'storage' rather than works of art, that a series of labels could mean as much to him as the paintings to which they refer. And perhaps they do, for in his vision, all things become part of the whole and we know that what is being exhibited is Andy Warhol."

names