Heteronym - Peter Rostovsky

Heteronym
“We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without need of an author,”
Foucault wrote in 1969, envisioning a society where “discourses, whatever their status, form, or
value and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.”1
A year earlier, Roland Barthes extolled a similar heteroglossia famously declaring the death of
the author and unweaving the text into “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash.”2 Although such a model of indeterminate, polyvocal
production is the familiar one still taught in art schools and now experienced online, it is
remarkable how little traction it has in the mainstream art world’s arena of singular authorial
practices. Certainly, there are notable exceptions as in Gerhard Richter’s once diverse categories
of painting, or in the work of conceptual tricksters like Martin Creed, Urs Fischer or Olav
Breunning. Yet in these instances, too, the discourse overtakes the object and the work frequently
succumbs to the logic of the series.
While for Barthes the work gave way to the polysemy of the text, today it gives way to a
stultifying imposition of a signature style or a discursive armature that could ostensibly account
for all aspects of an artist’s work. For us viewers, this often entails a joyless if convenient affair.
Tracing the familiar journey from the object into the assuaging comforts of commerce, biography,
and press release, we lose that encounter that first disarmed us and prompted us to investigate in
the first place. Yet the schism between object and name may still have its moment. It may reveal
itself, for instance, in feints of production—in counterfeits and heteronymic experiments—that
test the viewer’s connoisseurial competence and show that all our aesthetic comforts are merely
contingent fictions, born of invented personas living imagined lives. This otherness also asserts
itself in moments of idiomatic failure, in those illegitimate ‘transitional’ works that offer windows
1 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-­‐Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Donald F. Bouchard ed. (Cornell University Press, 1980), 139. 2 Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author” Image-­‐Music-­‐Text, Stephen Heath trans. (Hill and Wang/New York, 1977), 146. to a more disheveled and perhaps more honest life of the mind. How many voices populate this
cluttered space and where do they go in the process of professionalization and artistic maturity?
Do they live out their lives in subterranean basements, in works hidden in closets and under beds,
scribbled in notebooks and then abandoned? Or do they, instead, return as some repressed version
of the self, speaking in a forgotten tongue and demanding reconciliation?
Such specters of the possible are not surprisingly by-products of less permissive times. They
emerge, for instance, in Goya’s black paintings, which birthed by his inner demon, decorated his
home into an ominous theatre of cannibalism and witchcraft. They are equally embodied in the
fabled abstract paintings of Norman Rockwell, which after being rejected by his editors were then
consigned to historical darkness. (Who among us has seen these?) In art school, they are
encouraged at first, but by the end, and certainly by graduate study, the student is “finished,” and
this experimental promiscuity is narrowed into a fidelity mandated by the professional market.
This market’s demands are simple: supply the object to which one can attach faith translated into
fiscal investment. For how else to express conviction in the work’s assigned meaning and to
celebrate this meaning’s only source of origin: the artist? But what if the artistic project was to
run counter to this logic and produce things only for themselves, for the pleasure of making, or
perhaps even the pleasure of releasing something monstrous and chimeral into the world?
Such would be a project of a sustained heterogeneity and schizophrenic production only achieved
in fragile breaks of discourse and lapses of causal reasoning. Is such a thing still possible, one
may ask? Perhaps, but only momentarily, since too often even these oases succumb to narrative
and are colonized by the critic’s or historian’s craft. Moreover, such artistic ambitions belie a
fantasy as well—one of escaping and establishing a space outside the self. Or worse, the dream of
polyvocality may sync all too well with the larger story of today’s consummately diversified
production, as what product line does not dream of opportunistically embracing all things? An
Apple clothing line, an Apple car, a BMW vodka? Indeed, today a heterogeneous artistic practice
aligns quite neatly with our generalized logic of pluralism, where the perfect unmoored sign is the
commodity itself. In the end, even a heteronymic carnival of production still has production as its
focus, and the counter to a world that demands production of all people (even fictional ones) may
be stasis, not work.
Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized long ago, while capitalism deterritorializes, it also
reterritorializes. The pressure on production is still to establish frames, re-inscribe narratives and
supply provenance. Those orphaned products that exceed this anchoring—counterfeits—are in
turn tightly policed as illicit and illegitimate mutations of productivity. In this context, the project
of artistic heterogeneity may still be a cogent one in its attempt to outpace the fixing of a work,
or, by exposing the fiction of the name, to leave the object naked as a thing of pure immanence.
In art, such focus on atomized creation and idiomatic shifting exposes the blasphemies and
artificiality of all artistic production. What Barthes called the “rhetoric of the image” is also the
costume play of artistic persona learned in school and affirmed through various rungs of
legitimation, until the artist, like the fabled infant in Lacan’s mirror phase, takes his constructed
reflection as himself.
However, what if one resists this imposition and gives in to the internal bundle of drives—to the
heteroglossia that underlies this sutured and assumed persona? What if one focuses on raw
production in its ruptures, on the product outside of provenance? The work emerges as a
proposition, demanding only discrete and individualized scrutiny. Each project becomes simply
the performance of a rhetoric with its own pressures, its own meaning and “biography effects.”
Each voice tells of a different country and a different life lived in the way all life is lived before
the pressure to narrate overtakes it. That is, it becomes a series of distinct moments and many
lives that evade closure but only add to a rubble of experience. So finally, when the artist
approaches his critic or collector and is asked his name—his true name—he can reply like the
possessed man in the Gospels: My name is Legion for we are many.
David Geers
2014