‘ONE’
Paul O’Kane
Why am I lonely without my laptop? Why is it so difficult to wait in a queue? Why, when I sneeze or when I yawn, does it seem like some other creature or force has taken over control of my body, my self? And what does all this have to do with being an artist or a designer?
An artist or a designer is surely some one with a special sense of self, some one who feels they have something special to offer, and some one who nurtures a special relationship with the self, a special relationship that enables them to create, to innovate, to re-shape the world and to displace reality. All this takes a certain courage, an artist or designer needs to be able to take risks without fear of failing or appearing foolish, to change things, including the self, without fear of what that change will bring.
For the 19th Century philosopher Nietzsche, or for philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari who are influenced by Nietzsche, any idea of a fixed, unchanging ‘self’ has to be replaced by some understanding of ourselves as a constant becoming. The uninterrupted flow of time itself is falsely described as distinct, cinematic or photographic moments, seconds, minutes, hours, divided like increments on a ruler, which are surely a misrepresentation of the constant flow of passing time. And, just as time is never a ‘this’ or a ‘that’ so we ourselves, persisting in time, cannot maintain any conviction as to a fixed identity, persona, or one-ness.
‘Subject’ is the word commonly used in a history of debates in which artists and writers have explored what it means, what it is to be a person, an ‘I’, a self, a me, an identity, a ‘One’. There are many ways to refer to and to name the elusive experience we have of the self. In English it is regarded as more sophisticated and polite to use the word ‘One’ in place of ‘I’ e.g. “ when one gives a lecture to students of Central St Martins College, one invariably approaches the task with trepidiation born of the utmost respect for one’s audience.” Or something like that. The Queen of England, meanwhile -who may be thought of as the pinnacle or prime user of what is sometimes referred to as ‘Queen’s English’, can shift this tendency even further by using what is called ‘the Royal We’. Queen Victoria used it most famously, saying ‘we are not amused’, and here the ‘we’ stands for the ‘One’ of the self but it makes the Queen unlike any other person, also awarding her a regal distance from having or being such an ordinary thing as a self. At the same time, the Royal ‘we’ seems to implicate the Queen’s role as nothing if not a representative of others, someone who stands for others, who does not choose their life for themselves but has it thrust upon them, and who represents, not only the whole royal family and its line, but potentially every British subject and every member of what was once an enormous British empire. In the case of Victoria the Royal ‘we’ spoke for many millions.
While we are talking Historically, it is important to also recollect that the 20th Century was defined by the relationship of the one to the many, of the ‘man in the street’, and of the singular figureheads –neither royal nor religious- who arose to divert the uncertainty of new modern masses. The resulting totalitarian states today continue to define us as the legacies of Hitler, Stalin and Mao inform the ethics and designs of our society, if only as negative examples, as all that we must steer clear of becoming. Today, each individual, harnessed as a potential dictator is celebrated as a consumer. Wars are even fought today to defend the right to consume as consumerism and individual liberty are rhetorically fused into one vision of a ‘globalised’ and ‘free’ world. Meanwhile, the planet has developed a personality, a subjectivity, a unique-ness and a vulnerability that increasingly diverts our attention from the one of the self towards the one of the planet. My ‘one’ has become a guilty consumer, recycling my cartons and ‘staycationing’ out of respect for the ‘One’ of the planet.
Ambiguously, technology seems to connect us, instantly, to potentially everyone else, while, at the same time, increasing our isolation. The old joke about two people bumping into each other physically while speaking to each other on mobile phones is still poignant because we haven’t fully understood these new ways of being a self, that is increasingly a ‘one (a ‘one’ that can of course be convinced to pay to be ‘One-to-One’). The more I can connect with others, the more time I spend alone facing a screen. I summarise myself each day in the little Haiku of my ‘status bar’ on Facebook and feel I know so many people. Meanwhile traditional bars are closing at a rate of 5 per day perhaps because we are increasingly discouraged and diverted from traditional forms of social activity.
To ‘Be’ on line, is of course to pay to be, and also to spend a kind of private time no-less sprinkled with advertising while complying with the will of others to be connected through their site, their network. It is as if making a phone call and watching TV had conspired, combined, and become, not occasional diversions or interruptions but our way of life and the site of identities. To be myself I need Myspace, to have a face I need Facebook, to be together, I must first make myself alone, log in, to a single screen, then use a password to escape my isolation and enter the technological privilege of freely connecting to others (OTAKU).
But let’s get back to art, to art and the artist, and to that special self or ‘One’ that makes ‘One’ an artist. According to the understanding of Romanticism, we continue to inherit an idea of the artist as creative genius (Born Under Saturn, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist) responsible for exceptional bursts of productivity which raise the self above the ordinary idea of what a human can be and do. This is an idea that we today keep at a distance, but which, I believe, we secretly, and justifiably, continue to entertain. Some tendencies in modernism perpetuate this Romantic idea, while others contradict it, so that, a Jackson Pollock remains a singular Romantic figure of genius, while Russian Constructivists or Andy Warhol might prefer to be regarded as rather uninspired, anonymous, machine-like artists. Today, we pick and choose from all these models of the artist, treating them all with post modern sceptical irony.
When Eduardo Cadava edited a book of essays on ‘the subject’ in the mid 1990s he gathered together his material by asking all the leading philosophers of his time to write in answer to the same question: ‘Who comes after the subject?’ clearly, the ‘subject’ has then already been rigorously deconstructed, even before this question was asked. But if we are the kind of selves or ‘ones’ who have already satisfactorily thought through or thought away our self-hood and our one-ness, we might still justifiably ask, ‘well, what kind of a self or what kind of a one is that?’ Gilles Deleuze’s answer to Cadava’s question was brief, and within it he insisted that the subject must be an event, we should forget the idea of the self as a ‘thing’ and replace it with the idea of the self as event. In this way, I am an event, one is an event, and therefore no different from other events. Deleuze says the subject is the same as “a season, a wind’ or 5 o’clock”, I am a wind, a season, a time of day –and I feel that I can live with that.
Nietzsche –who inspired Deleuze’s thinking- admired the Ancient Greeks for having many gods –not just the Christian One- gods that were believed to enter into and influence human affairs. For these Greeks it seems the self was not at all singular, and nor was it fully responsible for itself in the way we think of a Christian or a modern Freudian identity taking responsibility for the self. Rather than neurotically or guiltily address my actions, I might explain them as caused by the gods –the god of love perhaps, or of wine, or of war, or of several of these gods arguing within me. Nietzsche considered this to be a far more appropriate, useful and accurate account of experience, even though this idea was controversial and out of step with late 19th Century thinking. The self is not only always becoming, it is always many, and, in being many, is no longer one, no longer a ‘self’. (SHIVA)
We can assert then, that any cherished or habitual notion of a singular self might be culturally specific, it might be modern, Western, European etc. The famous words of 17th Century thinker Rene Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’ are seen by many of the philosophers in Cadava’s book to be a mistaken source of a modern idea of the subject and the self. So too is the character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who’s inner anxieties compete with the objective realities of his surroundings as a sense of injustice or paranoia. Hamlet is seen by many as so exceptional a figure for the time in which he first appeared, that he can also be seen as the source of a the modern idea of the self.
It might be obvious at this point to refer to recent and contemporary artists who use the subject as the focus of their work. Artists like Cindy Sherman, Orlan, Francesca Woodman, Leigh Bowery or Nikki s. Lee (Ryan Trecartin, Marcus Coates, Lindsay Seers, Marcus Coates) would all be good candidates to be used in essay-writing on this theme, however, I’m going to cite an artist who’s work I find more surprising because it emerges from within a culture that we do not usually associate with a critical exploration of subjectivity. The artist is Xavier Messerschmidt, a sculptor, employed to produce busts of the great and the good of the Austrian court in the 17th century. Messerschmidt, in his late career, increasingly produced busts made of his own face grotesquely contorted into extraordinary grimaces. Here you can see a man and an artist who is not concerned with art’s ability to freeze and cherish his best and most noble image (according to the traditions of the death mask, or the stiff Victorian photographic portrait) but is, instead, sincerely engaged with accepting the many dynamic possibilities of being a self, for better or for worse. There is nothing cool about Messerschmidt’s faces, they appear rather ugly and foolish, publicising embarrassing possibilities that we would rather keep hidden, and yet, they do insist that, beneath the surface of art’s ability to maintain a stylish and entertaining record or critique of experience, art can also be a field in which we express uncomfortable contradictions, uncertainties, multiplicities which might otherwise go unseen and repressed.
Messerschmidt’s busts are, after all, not a million miles away from the contortions of our favourite soul singer, or from images of celebrities –each of whom own a face literally worth a fortune- caught jumping in mid-air by Philippe Halsman, or caught yawning or stumbling on the catwalk by the convenience and speed of digital photography. We can see the revered icons of our age giving-in to moments of becoming other, reaching beyond the self, and submitting to other forces, reminding us that we do not know what art can be, nor what an artist is, nor what the self, subject or a ‘One’ really is.
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