How to Do Things with Names and Signatures

Abstract

It was Matisse who once said that artists should periodically change their names; Slovenian artists Žiga Kariž, Emil Hrvatin and Davide Grassi have been actively working on materialization of that idea since 2007 when they officially changed their names to Janez Janša (a name which a majority of inhabitants of Slovenia automatically associate with the president of the strongest right-wing party and so far two times Prime Minister of Slovenia). Although the artists insist that they had strictly ‘personal reasons’ for this act of a radical intervention on their own personalities, it is quite obvious that in this case a ‘real name’ is actually being ‘pirated’ by them and turned into a kind of multiple name. Their new name is no longer a pseudonym, rather, it starts to function as homonym – it is shifted into a more complex net of meaning. This complexity can be examined on numerous examples accumulated as a series in the last ten years of the ‘Janša Project’. This article is devoted to two examples of that ‘series’: Signature Event Context (2008) and Signature (2010). In the first part of the text the author discusses a theoretical context of the signature and then, in the second part, he comes to the main point – the performativity of (re)naming by the three Janšas’ interplay of signatures and identities. Finally, he offers possible answers to two questions provoked by the three Janšas’ attempt to do things with names and signatures: first, how the performance Signature Event Context and the exhibition Signature are related to other projects in the ‘series’, and second, does the signature still serve as a guarantor of the authenticity of a work of art or is it rather a product of the method of name-creation?

Notes

1 Under Fascism, nearly all Slovenian and Croatian names were Italianized in Eastern Italian provinces. In the Province of Trieste alone, approximately 3,000 surnames were modified and around 60,000 people had their surnames amended to an Italian-sounding form. First or given names were also Italianized (Darovec 1998; Mezulić and Jelić 2005). On frequent Croatization of Serbian names as an individual strategy of hiding ethnic origin in post-independent Croatia see Hedl (2016).

2 ‘Did not … the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom’ (Henri Matisse cited in Hawkes 1983: 75).

3 As I paraphrase John L. Austin’s famous book How to Do Things with Words (1976) in the title of this article.

4 For the first time in his lecture delivered in 1971 and published a year later under the title ‘Signature Event Context’ in his book Marges de la philosophie. In 1977, after the publication of the English translation in the journal Glyph, Derrida’s theses were refuted by John Searle (1977), who argued that Derrida did not understand Austin’s theory of performative and, for this reason, his critique of Austin would be completely misguided. Derrida answered in the next issue of the journal (reprinted in Derrida 1988). I have developed a more detailed discussion on this controversy between Derrida and Searle in my book Teorije sodobnega gledališča in performansa (Theories of Contemporary Theatre and Performance) (Milohnić 2009: 65–71).

5 Jacques Derrida has strongly influenced the architectural work of Peter Eisenman, the author of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Eisenman belongs to a group of American architects, usually called ‘deconstructivist architects’. He exhibited together with others from this group at an important exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture in 1988 in New York (Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)). When in the mid-1980s Eisenman prepared an architectural project for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, he repeatedly met with Derrida and the transcript of their conversations was later published in the book Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (Kipins and Leeser 1997).

6 There are several facts that confirm the authors’ version of the story, for instance, an announcement of the performance published in the catalogue and on the website of Transmediale.08 as well as the contract between organizers and the producer stipulating that Signature Event Context is included in the programme of the festival.

7 Lacan’s formula of intersubjective communication reads: ‘The sender receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form’ (1972: 72).

8 Historically, during the regime of former Yugoslavia, this was the tactic for radical criticism of the political system. Invented by the Slovenian art movement Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), the basic principle of the over-identification method is embedded in reasoning about a political system as an internalized cynicism. The most effective way to break through this ideological barrier is not to take the ‘classical’ dissident position (as that is precisely what is expected and even desired by the system itself), but to do the opposite, to engage in a fanatic struggle for the (criticized) Idea in its ‘purest’ and the most ‘authentic’ form. In the case of the three Janšas, the paradigmatic gesture of subversive affirmation is their oxymoronic identification with the motto of Janez Janša (the politician) and his party: ‘The more we are, the faster we will reach the goal!’ (See my detailed linguistic analysis of this sentence from the perspective of the three Janšas’ project in Milohnić (2008).)

9 ‘By its very nature, the crime of genocide will inevitably involve conspiracy and conspirators’ (Schabas 2000: 259).

10 Besides numerous interviews (for example, Kreft (2008)) there is also a film My Name Is Janez Janša (Aksioma, 2012) featuring short statements by experts, the three Janšas, their parents, friends, professional colleagues and so on.

11 In these words one can hear the echo of the famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (1963) by Hannah Arendt, in which she collected her reports from the trial of this Nazi criminal; this book is best known for Arendt’s thesis about the ‘banality of evil’ of Nazi crimes against the Jewish people and other nationalities, political opponents, homosexuals, patients in psychiatric clinics and other victims of the Nazi terror.

12 Quoted from the press release that was circulated by e-mail on 28 January 2008. Eisenman’s interpretation of the Holocaust memorial as a place where we learn about the past through its manifestation in the present and through the individual experience, is shared by Vivian M. Patraka (1996: 99): ‘A Holocaust museum, in particular, can be a performance environment where we are asked to change from spectator/bystander to witness, where we are asked to make our specific memory into historical memory.’ See also Young (2000).

13 Reporting of the German press on these objections of Roma organizations is summarized in the BBC Monitoring (2005).

14 ‘The moment of the artist signing the work of art determined the moment of the work of art being finished and ready for public presentation’ (Grafenauer 2010: 17).