A Minor Revelation

It is the evening after a day out in Manchester and I am sitting at home spending some time with the new objects I returned from my trip having purchased. I slowly turn the pages on the Callum Innes catalogue for his 2013 exhibition History held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, which the gallery were selling off cheap in a sale, whilst listening to my new Biosphere album Shenzhou, when I am struck by a minor revelation. Callum Innes is known primarily for large minimal oil paintings in a high modernist style, but this exhibition was of a series of watercolours, a medium for which Innes is not normally associated. The twenty watercolours follow the familiar style of Innes, being comprised solely of large blocks of colour, in this instance squares where two colours have been applied one on top of the other and scraped back to create a semi transparent plane. The two colours used are visible around the edges of each piece where they have not been scraped back. The series as a whole acts as an extended colour study, exploring the results of combining different pairs of colours. The title of each piece tells the colours used, for example Cobalt Blue Tone / Quinacridone Gold or Red Magenta / May Green. The Biosphere record is a 2017 vinyl reissue of a 2002 album, named after a Chinese spacecraft. Every one of the twelve tracks on Shinzhou takes as it’s starting point a small section of music by Debussey, which Geir Jenssen has removed from it’s context, looped, and put through various electronic filters and reverbs to create a series of minimal ambient sound pieces, which serve as a musician’s study of Debussey. The minor revelation was my realisation that these two art works, although made in completely different media, are the same.

Both the watercolours and the music are, to first appearances, very plain. They both follow, and do not divert from, the application of one or two simple rules. Some may describe them as quite empty. They are flat. Pick any point and compare it to any other and it may well look or sound the same. Their tone does not change across each piece’s entirety. But, upon closer inspection, both the watercolours and the music share a deep and rich texture. The more time spent with the work, and the longer one looks, or the deeper one listens, the richer and more subtly diverse the texture becomes. This revelation of the similarities between these two art works led to another revelation about my own taste when it comes to art, music, books, film, culture generally, and even perhaps people. I don’t like work that shouts, or demands attention, which unfortunately is the majority. I like work that quietly goes about it’s business, seriously, attentively, with an open curiosity and pleasure in enquiry; work that does not immediately reveal it’s depths and richness, allowing the viewer/reader/listener the opportunity to peel back the layers slowly, over an extended period of time; art and music that gives more with every listen or view; art and music one can live with, that grows and develops with the viewer/listener’s ongoing interaction with it. I am not one for instant gratification. I find the greatest pleasures are to be found in quiet and continued contemplation. 

John Stezaker, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Words I associate with the work of John Stezaker as I walk round his current exhibition in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, include: cool (by which I mean contrary to hot, as opposed to fashionable, although some would say cool is fashionable), subtle, precise, calm, quiet (possibly silent), still, deeply-moving, considered, serious, wry, funny (especially the Marriage series). For those who don’t know his work, Stezaker creates collage in several growing series, and has been doing modestly for decades, usually by combining two images, sourced from promotional photographs of actors or scenes from old black and white films, postcards of landscapes and waterfalls, or simply cutting shapes or figures out of an image. Having the appearance of extreme simplicity, the work shows the artist’s hand and mind to be wholly present, although his physical intervention is minimal. The placement of one image over another is so precise it is clear that the vast majority of the work involved is in the looking for the right combination of images and the absolute correct placement, before very quickly sticking them down. There is an almost nostalgic visceral pleasure in the physicality of the work, the photographic prints, the postcards, the clear evidence of scissors and glue. Although you can understand Stezaker’s work from a digital reproduction, you get more from seeing the original physical work. 

In the Mask series, where postcards obscure the faces of film stars, the forms in the depicted landscapes and waterfalls subtly mirroring the forms in the obscured face, Stezaker reveals to us the hidden depths behind the masks we present to the world, the existential anguish lying just beneath the facade we project, the turmoil under the thin and fragile surface. In the Waterfall series, where a postcard of a waterfall separates a leading man from his leading lady, we witness the impenetrable distance which separates us all from each other, even lovers. Stezaker tells us we are all inherently unknowable, yet intimately connected, islands. In the Tabula Rasa series, where one character in a scene is obscured by a white rectangle cut out in perspective to show the direction of the obscured individual’s scrutiny, the attention of everyone else in the scene being on the white rectangle, Stezaker demenstrates we are each a blank screen onto which it is others who project their ideas of who it is we are, or who we appear to be in relation to them. Or, conversely, is it only I that can’t see the real me? Am I in fact revealed only through the gaze of others? I only exist because I am seen by others. Through John Stezaker’s work I feel I know him, I feel a connection to him, I feel I understand how he thinks and how he feels, but, of course, I don’t. I know only his work, which is his mask, his projection, his tabula rasa. 

Alex Hamlin Reclaims Contemporary Art for the Common Man

A man sits on a chair in an exhibition space in an art gallery. There is nothing remarkable about the man - he is tall, Caucasian, mid-to-late 20s. There is nothing special about the chair - it is the same as the chair on which the gallery invigilator sits at the entrance to the exhibition space. There is a white circle with a three metre radius marked with duct tape on the floor around the unremarkable man sitting on the ordinary chair. This circle denotes the limit of the audience’s physical relationship to the man. The invigilator ensures this boundary is not crossed. The man sits there for six hours in two three hour sessions, from 10 to 1 and 2 to 5, with a one hour break in the middle for lunch, where he is whisked off to an undisclosed location to keep him away from the influence of his audience. Every so often the man picks up a piece of paper from a small pile by his feet, looks at his watch and scribbles something on the paper, the invigilator then walks over to take the piece of paper from him, at which point a second invigilator enters the exhibition space to take the piece of paper from the first invigilator. The first time I witness this I follow the second invigilator to inquire about the paper. I am told it is a Certificate of Authenticity signed and with a note of the time by Alex Hamlin, the man sat in the chair, to prove that he was thinking about art. I ask how Alex decides when to sign them and am told they are signed when Alex has a particularly inspirational thought about art. I am then told the Certificates are for sale for £10 each. I buy the one I have just witnessed Alex signing - it has a number one written on it in the same handwriting as the note of the time. After the event I discover Alex has signed a total of twenty one Certificates at an average of one every seventeen minutes or so, although he signs more in the first half of the day than the second, which suggests he is maybe tiring towards the end. All twenty one Certificates are sold, the money raised going towards the costs of promotion for the event and the subsequent production of the catalogue, of which this review is to be a part. Over the course of the day I would estimate approximately two hundred people witness Alex Hamlin thinking about art.

Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art is a complex work, there is much more to it than initially meets the eye. It is terribly important to the piece to stress that Alex Hamlin is not an artist. He doesn’t like art, or, rather, he doesn’t really ‘get’ it. It frustrates him. He is a layman struggling to make sense of an, in his view, elitist and exclusive preoccupation. He finds it confusing, purposefully obfuscating, and, to be honest, largely irrelevant. The remarkable thing about Alex Hamlin is that, after several conversations with his friend, the artist Christopher Robinson, who is the curator of this work, Alex agreed to expose his struggles to the public in a cathedral to the very institution he felt challenged by. By performing this courageous act Alex Hamlin has reclaimed art and the art gallery for the common man.

Alex Hamlin will be, I imagine, unaware of the pedigree of his action. As the First World War raged nearly a hundred years ago dada declared that art was to be for all and by all, an unrealised ambition which has lasted throughout the history of the twentieth century avant-garde. Alex Hamlin is only the most recent in a long tradition desiring to wipe the slate clean in order to begin afresh. His innocence is certainly refreshing as is his authentic curiosity and desire to understand.

Alex may well be right in his honest critique of contemporary art - too much of it is needlessly obscure - too much of it has its metaphorical head up its metaphorical backside (less art for arts’ sake more arse for arse’s sake), and with Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art Alex uses the favourite weapon in contemporary arts’ arsenal, irony, and reflects it devastatingly back on itself.

How do we know Alex Hamlin is thinking about art? He could be thinking about that cute girl who just walked into the gallery. At some point we, as viewers, must abandon our disbelief and willingly enter into the game of the piece, and if we do we find more layers and more depth. But did the work create that depth or have we invented it in our own minds? What does inspiration look like? Is it as banal as a man sitting in a chair? What makes a work of art? What, for that matter, makes an artist? These are huge questions and Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art forces us to ask them again.

Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art complicates the understood relationship between artwork, artist, viewer and the institution delivering the artwork to the viewer (the gallery). If Alex is the artwork, it asks, who is the artist? Is there an artist? Does Alex become the artist through his performance of the piece? At what point? Before? During? After? But if Alex becomes the artist doesn’t that undermine the whole premise of a non-artist reclaiming the gallery space for the common man?

Alex Hamlin Thinks About Art forces us to conclude that as soon as we think we have it nailed, a definition of art or the purpose and meaning of art, someone, usually an artist but in this instance unusually and refreshingly a non-artist, comes along and does something to throw it all up in the air again. The word ‘art’ it would seem (and the thing it signifies) is permanently malleable, forever in flux, and will always remain so. To think about art is to think about our relationship with the world and our understanding of reality and to consider what it is to be a conscious being who thinks. For a human being these are the biggest questions one can ask. As is: “I wonder if that cute girl wants to go for a drink when I’m through here thinking about art?” 

Richard Hamilton: the Late Works – National Gallery, London

To enter the world of Richard Hamilton’s late works is to enter a self-contained closed world of reflections and mirrored fragments. Endlessly self-referential, works reappear in other works, which themselves refer back to yet other works. To view them is to participate in a post-modern game through art history. And it is a thoroughly enjoyable game to play.

The first works we see are paintings where the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing has been transformed into a vast cathedral, sparsely populated by female nudes and tiny reproductions of earlier Hamilton works. These two paintings (The Saensbury Wing (1999-2000) and Charity), like many in the exhibition, reference a painting in the National’s collection, Pieter Saenredam’s The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem (1636-37). And with these paintings we are introduced to all of the main themes of the exhibition: interiors, paintings in the National Gallery, the female nude and other works of Richard Hamilton.

In Lobby (1985-87) a hotel lobby is painted with unwavering verisimilitude, the planes within fragmented by carefully rendered mirrored surfaces. It is a meticulously measured photo-realistic painting. The only ‘painterly’ marks are to be found on the flowers in the foreground and the painted paintings reflected in the two large mirrored columns. Lobby reappears in a later work, Hotel du Rhone (2005), where it hangs prominently on a wall in a digitally rendered collage of a hotel room being hoovered by a naked chambermaid. The contents and layout of the room bring to mind Hamilton’s most celebrated image, probably the most famous collage in art history, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956).

Other than Lobby and The Saensbury Wing not many of these works could be described simply as paintings, although Hamilton did refer to them as such. They are mostly digital mash-ups incorporating elements of painting, collage and photography and finally printed onto canvas.

Hamilton’s nudes are always beautiful young women and it is in two more of these nudes that we find the final preoccupation of this exhibition, and a major preoccupation of Hamilton’s career. Descending Nude (2006) shows the same woman four times, three times reflected in a mirror walking down a flight of stairs, and the fourth facing the mirror. In The Passage of the Bride (1998-99) the female nude is reflected in the glass of a section of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), otherwise known as The Large Glass, which is seen hanging on the wall of another domestic interior. In the nineteen sixties Hamilton played an important role in the rehabilitation of Duchamp’s reputation in the art world, not least by remaking many of Duchamp’s works and bringing them to a new and wider audience. Duchamp blessed this project, even going so far, in typically Duchampian manner, as to sign Hamilton’s versions of his work. Another Duchampian aspect to Hamilton’s work is the delight he takes in replicating his own work on a smaller scale, as in Duchamp’s Box in a Valise (1935-41).

The clumsiest aspect of Hamilton’s work on show here are the titles, bad puns and unsubtle allusions, as if he hasn’t got the confidence in his audiences ability to ‘get’ the references. And one or two of the works are considerably weaker than others. I wasn’t entirely convinced by The passage of the angel to the virgin (2007), Hamilton’s updating of a Renaissance favourite, the Annunciation, for example. But these are minor quibbles. The exhibition is worth a visit alone for the opportunity to view Hamilton’s last work, Le Chef – d’oeuvre inconnu – a painting in three parts (2011 – printed 2012), which will probably pass into Hamilton legend as his last, great, unfinished, masterpiece.

Hamilton was working on Le Chef… for the final eighteen months of his life and he described it, according to this exhibitions catalogue, as his Etant Donnes. This is a slight exaggeration. Duchamp worked on his final piece in secret for twenty years when everyone thought he had given up art, releasing it only after his death as a way of upsetting Duchampian scholars from being able to sum up his life’s work into a neat little Duchampian shaped compartment. Hamilton’s final work doesn’t really deviate from the well-trodden Hamilton path. It is a nude, a particularly beautiful one. It references, and indeed collages, a number of old masters. And it is a digital mash-up of photography, painting, and collage. Based on a short story by Balzac, Le Chef… tells of a young painter trying to paint the perfect nude, produce the epitome of beauty and desire, but when he shows his work to a couple of other painter friends all they see is a mess of paint except for one beautifully rendered foot.

Thomas Schutte: Faces and Figures - Serpentine Gallery, London

Thomas Schutte has been producing a wide variety of art, from architectural installations and mixed media sculptures to ceramics and drawings, for more than three decades. This current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London concentrates on one of Schutte’s major preoccupations, the human face and figure, drawing on work from the last fifteen years. It is perhaps surprising then, due to the eclectic nature of his practice, that this show has such a traditional feel, being made up as it is primarily of sculptures in bronze, steel and aluminium, and drawings in ink, pencil and watercolour.

It is to the drawings that I am most drawn. There is a quiet, calm seriousness to them, a misleading simplicity. They do not shout for attention. They quietly, calmly and seriously get on with what they do. Often Schutte will draw the same subject many times over a period of months or years, modifying his materials aloing the way, some in ink, some in pencil, some with crayon added, some with watercolour added, with the result that his drawings frequently appear in series. On show here are Luise (1996), Mirror Drawings (1998-99) and Paloma (2012). It’s as if through repetition Schutte is acknowledging the ultimate futility of drawing, it’s inherent failure to capture the true and complete spirit of a subject, as well as his own limitations as an artist, and by use of repetition he can somehow get closer to that unobtainable absolute truth.

In some of the drawings there is a real delicacy of touch. Henri (2012) for example is a very simple and beautiful line drawing in pencil, which has two occurrences of red crayon. Untitled (2006) is an ink drawing of a male face where the ink is thick and black on the right of the picture but the lines, and consequently the face, on the left disappear into the whiteness of the paper. And in another Untitled (2006), the subtlety of the line and delicacy of the face, this time female, is contrasted by a thick block of bright orange on the neck.

The majority of the sculptures on display, I’m afraid to say, fail to move me. They include a series of expressionistic bronze heads, Wichte (Jerks) (2006); an imposing armless figure with solemn deep cheekbones cast in dark rust coloured steel, Vater Staat (Father State) (2010); a long haired and bearded sunken faced bronze, Memorial for an Unknown Artist (2011); all beautifully executed with expressive features, but failing to move me in the way, say, the sinister figures of Juan Munos do, a comparison most explicit in the two large sculptures outside the gallery, United Enemies (2011), two pairs of figures, again armless, with poles for legs, bound together and uselessly straining against each other desperate to pull themselves apart. (When I was viewing these I was delighted to find them both crawling with ladybirds, an unexpected incongruity and pleasing unintentional addition to the work, the bright red dots against the pale blue of the bronze.)

My two favourite of Schutte’s sculptures, Walser’s Wife (2011) and Frauenkopf mit Blume (Woman with Flower) (2006), are both female heads, both resembling the heads of buddhas with smooth Asiatic features and rough textured hair tied up in a bun. Walser’s Wife is upright whereas Frauenkopf… is lying on its side. Walser’s Wife, the most striking of the two, is aluminium painted with gold and purple lacquer, which plays tricks with your eyes reflecting different colours depending on the angle of view. Frauenkopf… is the more familiar and traditional green and brown of bronze. But it is detail that makes these sculptures compelling. Both contain intentional imperfections around the eyes. Walser’s Wife has two small tears, solidified drips of lacquered aluminium, falling uncannily from her upper eyelids. Frauenkopf… has a lump underneath the left eye and a dent underneath the right. Her whole face sags ever so slightly in the direction of gravity’s pull, giving her features a barely noticeable yet  unnerving asymmetrical skew. Both pairs of eyes, in representations of an otherwise idealized yet realistic style, are just deep grooves, devoid of eyeballs or pupils and therefore of emotion. It is in these minor deviations from verisimilitude that we are apparently purposefully separated from the same truth that Schutte seems so eager to obtain in his drawings.

A Cut Through Time

In 1964, two years before a chance encounter turned her into an instant celebrity and altered many people’s perceptions of her art, Yoko Ono performed for the first time what has probably become her most famous work. In Cut Piece Ono sat on a stage in a traditional Japanese female pose with a pair of scissors next to her and invited members of the audience to step forward and using the scissors cut parts of her clothing from her. She repeated the performance in 2003. The films of these two performances are currently on show at the Serpentine’s Ono retrospective facing each other in a small room alone. It is striking when viewing these two films together how time and circumstance can alter a performance as outwardly simple as this.

The 1964 film is black and white and has the look of being filmed by a (talented) amateur. The woman seated on stage is young and beautiful and looks vulnerable and unnerved. She gazes blankly into the mid-distance passive and immobile. To view the film is an uncomfortable experience. As a viewer (voyeur) we are complicit in the sexualised violation of a young woman. The glee with which some of the male participants literally cut strips off her is incredibly disturbing. Cut Piece (1964) is a powerful work of feminist propaganda. Ono once said of it: “this is what all women go through every day.” It discusses sex, gender and power relations brutally and explicitly. It is a stunningly successful work of art.

By contrast, Cut Piece (2003) is a very different performance. Professionally filmed and in colour the subject is a completely different woman. Ono is now old, famous and very powerful. The vulnerability has all but gone. Only through the strange transgressed taboo of seeing an elderly woman being stripped nearly naked does the work retain any emotional power. Ono is at all times strong and in control. The performance is more a celebration of Ono’s celebrity than a radical work of art. It has become the equivalent of an aging rock band playing their greatest hit to a stadium of devotees. You can take nothing away from the artist for having written such a classic song, but you really wish you’d seen it performed in a small club back when it was fresh and exciting and youthful.

Constellations - Gathering Dust

Constellations, an exhibition on at the Cornerhouse in Manchester until 11^th September, brings together four artists who all deal with the ephemeral and the transitory. The exhibition is split over two galleries with two artists in each gallery. The first gallery shows the work of Kitty Kraus and Takahiro Iwasaki. Kitty Kraus shows one piece and Takahiro Iwasaki shows four.

The piece by Kraus, Untitled, is a repetition of a previous work first shown in Berlin in 2008. It comprises of a light bulb encased in ink filled ice which over the course of the exhibition melts to leave a black inky trail on the floor. It sits somewhere between sculpture, intervention, installation and drawing, where the artist controls the initial parameters and leaves the work over time to make itself. Although in itself quite pleasing and fitting the mood of the exhibition it is the least interesting piece on show.

The works of Iwasaki are all mini landscapes constructed from everyday objects. In Out of Disorder (three of Iwasaki’s works are so named) tiny towers and buildings rise out of landscapes of socks, towels, dust and hair utilising the threads and fibres of each material. And in Differential/Integral Calculus the landscape is made up from carved erasers and electrical tape while it is filled with telegraph poles made from technical pencil lead. The works in their materials and subject matter are a metaphor for the human struggle to construct solid objects of permanence in an ever changing natural wilderness. But the fragility of the works and their towers is a reminder that nothing human beings will construct is ever going to last forever, except for maybe the detritus, the socks, the towels, the dust and hair. Just consider the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, an incident which the work of Iwasaki rather abstractly and unexpectedly brought to my thoughts.

It is in the second gallery of Constellations that, to my mind, the best work is contained: two works by Katie Paterson and one by the best known artist in the show, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In Earth-Moon-Earth an automated piano plays an altered version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. For this work Paterson translated a portion of the Sonata into Morse code and transmitted this translation to the moon. The signal was then reflected by the moon back to earth losing some of the information on the way. The version of the Sonata played by the piano in the gallery is the result of this process, with gaps where the information is missing. With this process of reduction Paterson has composed a new piece of music. Watching the ghostly player-piano I found myself wondering: where did the missing notes go? Is there somewhere individual musical notes floating through space waiting to be intercepted by someone or something? How far will they travel? Our picture of the universe is incomplete, just like Paterson’s Moonlight Sonata.

In 100 Billion Suns Patterson replicates a Gamma Ray explosion with a confetti canon and thousands of small coloured circles of paper that look like the residue of a hole-punch. The array of paper on the floor of the gallery resembles a star map with a mixture of dense and thinly distributed patches of colour. The precise physical force of the canon results in a random dissipation of matter resembling the seemingly random dissipation of stars in our galaxy. Paterson succeeds in her use of simple recognisable objects to make us consider the cosmic.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ posthumous contribution to Constellations is a re-showing of his 1991 Untitled paper stack, large scale reproductions of a photograph of the surface of water, an ephemeral moment captured and mass produced, which visitors to the gallery are invited to take away. This work balances perfectly with Paterson’s with its uses of reduction and again random dissemination. The paper is disseminated depending on who goes to the gallery, where they live or choose to exhibit it - if they exhibit it at all. There could be many copies of this image rolled up, sitting in corners, gathering dust. For those that take one, the image is a physical embodiment of memory, a reminder of their visit to this exhibition.

Other than Iwasaki’s all the works on display are the result of some random process instigated by the artist. Choosing the initial parameters and the process, the artists have all taken a step back from the work, allowing the process to unfold of its own accord, thus distancing themselves from the result. Only Paterson’s work directly relates to the title of the exhibition, Constellations, although Kraus’ work could be seen as a drawing of the inky black night sky, but the curators Karen Gaskill and Michelle Kasprzak have succeeded in creating a quietly contemplative exhibition from the work of artists who use the small and the everyday to provoke thoughts of the grand and the cosmic.

Either and/or Or?

In the preface to his book Either/Or Soren Kierkegaard, through the name of another, speaks of a deception. Either/Or is a two volume work, written under three pseudonyms, the Either being written by the aesthetic ‘A’, the Or written by ethical idealist ‘B’, and the whole presented to the reader by its impartial and equally pseudonymous editor Victor Eremita. Either is a series of essays extolling the philosophy of a young romanticist, Or is a series of letters written as a critical response directly addressed to the author of Either. Kierkegaard regularly published his aesthetic works under a number of pseudonyms, saving his own name for his religious philosophy.

Kierkegaard says of his use of pseudonyms that they are more than a mouthpiece for his own views, “behind each pen name lies a “subjectively actual personality””[1], a view that sounds very similar to Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s use of ‘heteronyms’. Over the course of his writing career Pessoa utilised over seventy names, preferring the term ‘heteronym’ to the more familiar ‘pseudonym’, “since they were not merely false names but belonged to invented others, to fictional writers with points of view and literary styles that were different from [his own].”[2]

Fernando Pessoa’s most celebrated book, The Book of Disquiet (a series of reflective vignettes, or Texts), was ‘written’ by Bernardo Soares, who, in Text 193 of that book, says: “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write...I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.” Another of Pessoa’s heteronyms, the poet Alvaro de Campos says “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”[3]

One of the reasons Pessoa, an intensely private man, used heteronyms, was to hide, from the public and from life. But it was also a philosophical stance, as he believed each person to be capable of holding many contradictory thoughts and opinions, and he didn’t want his works to be limited to the one self. Each name provided him with a different voice. He wrote, through Soares: “Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.”[4] And again, Alvaro de Campos: “Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!”[5]

Is Pessoa’s deception then more honest than Kierkegaard’s? Kierkegaard’s deception is most clearly carried out in Victor Eremita’s preface: “I, who [has] simply nothing to do with this narrative, I who am twice removed from the original author.”[6] And again, “I am neither an author nor a professional literary man.”[7] But, like Pessoa, Kierkegaard’s work also contains a confession: “During my constant occupation with the papers [of Either/Or], it dawned on me that they might be looked at from a new point of view, by considering all of them as the work of one man...Let us imagine a man who had lived through both of these phases, or who had thought upon both. A’s papers contain a number of attempts to formulate an aesthetic philosophy of life...B’s papers contain an ethical view of life.”[8]

Kierkegaard seems to agree with Pessoa’s view that a self is comprised of many selves, and that each self may carry within it contradictory beliefs. This, surely, cuts to the quick of what it is to be a human being. We are all of us a mass of contradictions. And the ‘I’, this seemingly singular identity we so stubbornly cling to, is the sum of these contradictions. This can be expanded, I believe, to include the creations of human beings, such as the work of art and the text. (Again this can be extended to encompass the whole body of an artists’ work or the entire oeuvre of the writer.) Why should the work of art or the text be considered to be the work of a single author? Surely a large part of the point of a work of art is to explore and expose these contradictions, these multiple selves.

In his seminal essay on authorship and authenticity, Roland Barthes states “…a text is…a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”[9] Our work is the culmination of all we have read or witnessed or lived. It follows that this is an ever evolving process. And the same, I believe, can certainly be said of the self.

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[1] Howard A Johnson, quoted in his Foreward to the Princeton University Press 1971 paperback edition of Either/Or

[2] Richard Zenith, from the Table of Heteronyms in the Penguin Classics 2002 paperback edition of Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet

[3] Quoted in Richard Zenith’s Introduction to The Book of Disquiet

[4] Text 396, The Book of Disquiet

[5] Quoted in Richard Zenith’s Introduction to The Book of Disquiet

[6] Preface to Either/Or

[7] ibid

[8] ibid

[9] Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author