displacement
"...images shift tense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic..."
Burroughs, W. The cut-up method of Brion Gysin in Re/Search #4/5 San Francisco 1982(ii) prelude : who is i.k.bonset
i first started producing work as ik bonset as an undergraduate student at art school in sydney in 1988 and the need to use a pseudonym at all came about to deal with output which was not intensely personal which some of my work had been and some of which was not - it was not so cool to make intensely personal "expressive" work in the late eighties and it was not until well after i left art school that i found a way of making art works which were about myself by using computers (some of these stills and "(hyper)postcards" were later collected together as angelus novus 1.0 and were made using hypercard macpaint macvison and a security video camera on a variety of 68000 macs mainly a powerbook 100 and a mac plus)
yes no the cool ironic gaze was the thing and i was always running hot i hated with a passion those soulless bastards who were in charge at sydney college of the arts with their arrogant smile and slightly raised eyebrow masks and expensive shoes and their gratuitous use of flower and angel references and i had no wish to lick their arses and/or jump on that particular bandwagon but i could see value in making work which was more objective somewhat removed from the self and funny and i was talking about the new subjectivity then
it was not until later doing my postgraduate (at a regional art school away from the forced cool of sydney) as dan zero that i more fully realized a way to make work which was self-expressive without being "expressionistic" - work which was emotive but clean unsentimental - now ten years later discovering the writings of anais nin i discover a kindred soul-sister half a century ago struggling with the same problem and my first and foremost task is now to read all of her diaries
but back to art school where i discovered the art historical medium of the pseudonym like duchamp (with r.mutt and rosie selavie) and because he was born and raised in my own hometown of utrecht i was intrigued by de stijl's theorist theo van doesburg's alter ego dadaist i.k.bonset and i wrote my major art history paper in second year about him - i was more satisfied by my work in art theory and history at this time than my practical work - i was interested to find out to what extent it was generally known that van doesburg and ikbonset were the same person and to what extent he tried or intended to conceal or reveal it - also what was his strategy in creating ik bonset which was much more than a simple nom de plume but an identity complete with photograph (in a ridiculous pilot's hat with those flaps covering the ears) (he also had a less worked out italian futurist identity) - but what impressed me from the point of view of my own practice was that this normally serious art theorist was able to completely let his hair down and engage with the totally absurdist methodology of the dadaists and to write some of the most interesting poetry ever written in dutch
when i used the sound of my own voice reading one of bonset's poems in an installation work for a sculpture minor i thought it would be amusing to borrow or adopt (perhaps kidnap turned out to be a more accurate term) doesburg's bonset identity which had lain fallow since his death in 1935 the same year my mother was born - as a result i did a significant amount of writing and text experiments and made a number of art works as ik bonset and i found i could be a lot more playful and experimental in my work when i was free from the liability of having to put my own name to it
i realize now the tremendous burden of the dogmatic interpretation of postmodernist theory which those of us who thought of ourselves as real artists laboured under in the photography department - our problems were no doubt partly of our own making and a result of our perceived historical competitive relationship with the painters - i am sure the painters were far less interested in the photographers
in the sculpture department they didn't seem to be worried about postmodernism or much else at all for that matter since they weren't making 2 dimensional images i guess and they were more easily able to include "real" things in their work and able to work with time space and experience either that or they were a bunch of hippies and they didn't give a hoot but they were having a ball and i admired them envied them their freedom (and fancied their women) but the whole experience of being in their department even for that slither of time unfroze something in me and once i'd found bonset i was off and my tutor juliet fowler-smith was wonderful unconditionally supportive of my work and she introduced us to yves klein and joseph beuys artists who have always continued to be a major inspiration to me
my installation untitled (cave) was tremendously successful and satisfying - i had never worked with space or in a space before and i had also found a very real connection with art history then i felt like van doesburg would have approved and i imagined i felt something akin to the liberation he would have felt when he started being bonset and after i went back to europe in 88/89 and visited all the major european modern art museums and saw all their work (this is going to sound trite) i felt that does mondriaan schwitters arp and dadaists were my friends i felt connected to a tradition i felt part of a continuum
from the paris diaries 1988-1999 :
we have dinner at a brasserie called chartres which has been operating from the same place in the montemarte for a hundred years and it is quite cheap and the surroundings are incredible all dark wood and glass and mirrors real old style paris and i am sure benjamin and tzara and breton all ate here and talked about ideas for projects and it would have looked exactly the same - i share some snails with john for an entrée and i have escalope milanesi which turns out to be served with spaghetti and chestnut puree with chantilly cream and a couple of glasses of roughish house red - the food is great and the whole atmosphere is very relaxed and unpretentious
afterwards we walk around some in the area where all the arcades are which benjamin writes about and once again i am amazed at the never ending surprises that paris has to offer - this sounds like a travel brochure but incredibly the cliches are true - mind you it wouldn't be half as fun if you had no money and you weren't interested in art and you had no one to let you in on a few secrets :)
but for example what i love about paris is the fact that you can just pick up a magazine that someone has discarded when you sit down to have coffee in a café and leaf through it find an absolutely crucial idea for your phd research - or it really happened in two parts finding a postcard one day (a few days ago) with a picture of baudelaire and the quote : the beautiful is always bizarre and i thought that was great and then today finding the rest of the quote in a magazine about design : (unfortunately i don't have the whole text in french) : the beautiful is always bizarre because the bizarre is born from the un-natural union of the eternal and the transitory
he is talking about that quality which ten years later i would call the sublime in my phd research proposal
one of the first things i did when i got back from europe was to send blank pieces of paper in envelopes to all the early modernists whose old addresses i could find and over the ensuing months watches some of them come back with retour and zuruck stickers and stamps all over them so at least i knew for sure they weren't there anymore and i would have to find my own way but this is how i found my feet as an artist under postmodernism
(ii) who is dan zero?
I like Kevin Brophy's explanation of Foucault's idea about the author in What is an Author : "Foucault proposes that an author is not so much an origin as a function of discourse. The author is constructed by a set of interpretative acts which are historically specific. The author is a strategy in the play of power relations over a text." p20 and he quotes Foucault: "...given the historical transformations that are taking place it does not seem necessary that the author-function remain constant in form, complexity and even in existence..." p22
Further "...writing creatively can become part of the historical struggle for individuals to find ways to construct themselves both from within and partly outside, or to the side of, those objects our culture tends to venerate: 'What strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?' Foucault, 1986 : The Foucault Reader Ed. Paul Rabinow London Pantheon p.350)" Brophy p239
Brophy also reminds us of Jane Gallop's exhortation "... in response to her recognition of the tendency for any identity or belief to cramp and bind those who hold to it too rigidly: "Identity must be continually assumed amd immediately called into question..."" Brophy p.238 (Jane Gallop,1982: The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis New York: Cornell University Press p.xii)
Historically there are numerous artists and writers who have assumed pseudonyms for part or all of their activities. I like some of their names very much and I admire the creativity of those who thought them up and the way they used their assumed names to confuse and or enlighten : I.K.Bonset, Rosie Selavie, R.Mutt, J.Bernlef
I like the old Jewish tradition of calling a sick child by a different name so Death wouldn't be able to find him or her... (tnx rai)
I like to be able to remove myself from the framing of the work which is what I consider putting the name of the author with the work to be part of. It is something for the audience, which supposedly might help the audience make sense of the work. It is not something which has anything to do with the process the making the execution of the work. In this process there is no artist and no artwork there is only what is happening. Afterward, when the work is complete or is still unfinished but is at at a stage where it can be shown, a name is attached to the work for the convenience of identification, and perhaps the historian.
It is not about wanting to avoid taking responsibility for the work. It is not difficult for a relatively determined member of the audience to discover who, or what, Dan Zero actually is.
(iii) collage and montage
i make no great claims as to the originality of the idea that by moving something ( detaching a fragment from a larger whole ) into a different context and juxtaposing it with something else the artist changes its meaning or rather produces an unfamiliarity which causes an audience to look at it with different eyes (eg collage, montage, assemblage, cut-ups, appropriation)
this idea is as old as modernism itself and can be seen in the very early works of braque and picasso - there are as many justifications and explanations and techniques as there are artists and writers - here are two extremes : in the film sense sergei eisenstein (1943) defines montage as follows :
"...piece a derived from the elements of the theme being developed , and piece b derived from the same source in juxtaposition to give birth to the image in which the matter is most clearly embodied. or : representation a and representation b must be so selected from all possible features within the theme that is being developed, must be sought for, that their juxtaposition - the juxtaposition of thos very elements and not of alternative ones - shall evoke in the perception and feelings of the spectator the most complete image of the them itself..."
for eisenstein working in the early years of film when its creative possibilities were just beginning to be explored it was montage which really set a film as a creative artistic work apart :
"...and now we can say that it is precisely the montage principle as distinguished from that of representation which obliges spectators themselves to create and the montage principle by this means achieves that great power of inner creative excitement in a spectator which distinguishes an emotionally exciting work from one that stops without going further than giving information or recording events..." (ibid)
when i first began working in the digital medium in the eighties a scanner was a rare and expensive piece of equipment and my excitement at eventually being able to access one did not die down for a decade and resulted in my paper the work of art in the age of digital (re)production where i predicted with almost religious fervour the renewal of audience's experience of images - in the present day scanners are very commonplace and as ubiquitous as vcr-s and digitally manipulated images are everywhere and audiences and arists alike are more cynical than ever - yet the wonderful aesthetic and conceptual possibilities to which eisenstein alludes for film and which are increased manifold in the digital realm have only been minimally explored.
for william burroughs "cut-up" is a method for accessing spontaneity rather than the deliberate careful technique of eisenstein :
" The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and across the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 ... one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different - cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise - in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like..." (Burroughs, W. The cut-up method of Brion Gysin in Re/Search #4/5 San Francisco 1982)
main references :
duchamp eisenstein schwitters hoch hains hugnet gascoigne cornell rauschenberg scanner burroughs boltanski
works
| dan zero | minus eleven error | i.j.oog |exegesis chapters :
introduction death decay desire displacement doubt epilogue imperfection innocence love ontroering powerlessness regret unfoldment
appendices :
artists and writers bibliography communications disclaimer glossary history methodology texts