Mikhail Sokovikov & Miguel Gomez
The Author arises from the polymorphous field of discourse as a means to confer authority and value on a discreet share or text, and is concurrently projected back onto the text as its sole and unique source. (Thoburn, 2011: 121)
In the Western canon, material and metaphysical value extracted from various forms of art including images, art-objects, moving images, performances and literary works has been almost always explicitly linked to and dependant on an institutional assessment and registration of the author and author’s historical, political, social, and psychological persuasions. In the current commercial system, recognizable authorship is undoubtedly desired over obscure anonymity, all while author’s egotism, agency and biography are put ahead of the Idea in the Platonic sense. Art-world’s obsession with the author and aforementioned authorial attributes further inflates author’s subjectivity and ego, which eventually balloons and overshadows the objectivity and the Idea itself, or in other words, the excessive adulation of the author by the current global financial support system becomes the primary attribute and function that derives from an artwork a material value first, and a possible metaphysical value second.
Can collective anonymity of what Marx referred to as communal being provide an alternative to individualized authorship by dissolving author’s identity and its attributes while pursuing a multifaceted purpose of delivering a more engaging, enlightened and objective discourse? This essay is about the complex relationship between anonymity and authorship in artistic practices and how alternative modes of approaching art production, exhibition and interaction can offer an institutional critique, that can potentially disrupt the established system which operates on propped up flattery of the artist-figure.
By looking at a number of theoretical texts, I will attempt to defuse the topic and expose this polarized relationship between anonymity and individualism to be a political one. It is a conflicting dynamic, one that is directly linked to the relationship between Platonic objectivity and Cartesian subjectivity. This essay will also attempt to examine principal motivations behind collective anonymity and the general intellect (Marx) by looking at the artistic practices of Luther Blissett Project and Public Ad Campaign and how by utilizing guerrilla strategies, public interventions and media manipulations these obscure but effective collectives were able to shift the focus away from self-centeredness of the individual author and toward the Platonic sense of Idea through collective anonymity and communal engagement of the general intellect. By looking at writings by Marx, Barthes, Foucault, Vassiliou, Thoburn and Bordiga I hope to present the reader with a valuable case for an alternative to the existing system which puts the author and not the Idea as the central figure in art. Although, from this discussion a larger inquiry forms in regard to prevalence of subjectivity over objectivity in the current system of art commerce, I will adhere to my primary topic of how collective anonymity can present an alternative to the self-driving vehicle of individualized authorship where the artist is still at the core of existence. It is worth briefly mentioning at this point, that the basis of my argument here is to equate the notion of discourse to that of Ideas and Forms and that in the Platonic sense, Ideas or Forms exist independently of the author’s subjective sense perception, which is the basis of Descartes’ infamous proposition: cogito ergo sum.
Historical Context of Authorship
The invention of authorship as a term is a relatively modern innovation first used in 1710 (Ede, 1985: 1) and according to Marx, it is an intellectual device to lift material value from an individual and then market it to a buyer as with any other consumer and commercial product in a capitalist economy. This extraction of value was established through the conception of copyright laws that legitimized ownership of personal intellectual property, as well as the invention of the modern printing press. The latter further enabled mass production, marketing, distribution and sales of literary and visual work in edition form for profit.
We must also acknowledge the philosophical shift that occurred during the Renaissance, prior to the rise of modern capitalism of the 18th century, which had a profound effect on common consciousness. The new epoch consolidated the notion of existence and redirected it toward the self and the ego. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum was instrumental in rerouting consciousness away from the dogmatic approach of the medieval period and inward, toward the privileging of the enlightened individual which fuelled the new age of egocentrism and subjectivity through individualized and overemphasized sense perception. During the 18th century, authorship, by the use of identifiable signatures became the primary function of the newly developed art market, which quickly absorbed artistic aura and agency as the new vehicle of cultural commodity. Eagleton reflects on societal transformation from the social into the solitary by asserting that this privileging of the individual reflected the values of a political system that subordinated the sociality of human life to solitary individual enterprise. The somewhat murky history of authorship is comprised of a number of simultaneous philosophical and ideological movements which Roland Barthes further summed up in 1968 with The Death of the Author,
The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human person’. (Barthes, 1968: 2)
Philosophical Context and the Cult of Personality
The relationship between newly invented authorship and anonymity became more politicized and polarized with Marx in the 19th century and Foucault and Barthes in the 20th century. Marx further confirmed the newly minted authorial practice in the press media as a bourgeois device for lifting material value, this time through self-serving advertising:
So long as the press was anonymous it appeared as the organ of a public opinion without a number or name; it was the third power of state. With the signature of each article a newspaper became merely a collection of journalistic contributions by more or less well-known individuals. Every article sank to the level of an advertisement. (Marx, 1973: 134)
It must also be mentioned here, that although The Communist Manifesto is universally attributed to Marx and Friedrich Engels, the first edition of the seminal work, however, was published namelessly to possibly avoid the very thing that is to become of the authors themselves; their own indoctrination into the cult of personality. He acknowledged the authorial perversion that eventually steers the artist-figure toward the glamourizing celebrity status of the cult of personality. For Marx, the cult of personality was simply an extension of the privileged individual, which in itself perpetuates the capitalist structure of identity (Thoburn, 2011: 121). This critique of excessive adulation will be echoed in Italy by the Luther Blissett Project about one hundred and fifty years later. The rivalry between individual authorship and collective anonymity was carried out as further condemnation by the Italian communist and a strong opponent to the cult of personality, Amadeo Bordiga, who proclaimed:
It is the attribute of the bourgeois world that all commodities bear their maker’s name, all ideas are followed by their author’s signature, every party is defined by their leader…Work such as ours can only succeed by being hard and laborious and unaided by bourgeois publicity techniques, by the bile tendency to admire and adulate men. (Bordiga, quoted in Camatte, 176)
While Foucault sides with Marx and Bordiga who both exalted their condemnation of the capitalist system and new methods of economic exploitation, Foucault also questioned how polymorphous discourse influenced the role of the author or as he would call it the author-function. He is explicit in claiming that Ideas and discourse were not always a commodity to be mined for material value by private enterprise. In his 1969 essay What is an Author? Foucault declares:
In our culture—undoubtedly in others as well—discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risk long before it became a profession caught in a circuit of property values. (Foucault, 1969: 124)
Foucault sides with Barthes by further destruction of the author in lieu of unidentified polymorphous discourse. His critique expands the author-function by explaining the intrinsic benefits of author’s annihilation and ultimate erasure in a literary work, as well as the irrefutable impact of anonymity. Foucault (1969) states,
What gives books like those which have no other pretension than to be anonymous so many marks of singularity and individual interpretation are not signs of a style, nor the mark of a singular or individual interpretation, but the rage to apply the eraser by which one meticulously effaces all that could refer to a written individuality.
Nevertheless, anonymous art, though to some, may seem to exist on the fringes of the mainstream culture has always provided an alternative to self-centred authorship which as we have already stated is a relatively new invention. Luther Blissett Project was an autonomous art collective that existed during the mid-1990’s across multiple European countries. LBP’s multinational projects directly critiqued and subverted capitalist politics of the post-soviet era of the mid 1990’s. LBP’s primary objective was to detach and remove singularity of the author by “creating a “con-dividual” shared by many, and fragmented, a “dividual” composed of multiple situations and personalities simultaneously” (Blissett, 1997: 43-44). LBP implemented new media guerrilla techniques that often interrupted and provoked authorities through public pranks and interventions. The loosely formed collective existed anonymously without a figure head, or rather, the Luther Blissett was a multinational composite of hundreds of participants across multiple countries with several socio-political goals. As Thoburn states in To Conquer the Anonymous:
Through the skilful orchestration of hoaxes, pranks, pranks, and fakes, Luther Blissett’s practice was characterized by scandalous disruption of mass media across the platforms of television, newspaper, radio, and Internet. (Thoburn, 2011: 130)
Another example of collective anonymous action is the Public Ad Campaign whose guerrilla tactics include the New York Street Ad Takeover of 2009 and 2010. During a May morning in 2009, PAC mobilized dozens of artists and volunteers to wipe out and replace 20,000 sqft of illegal street-level advertisements with artwork by more than a hundred international participants. Within a span of about eight hours 120 street-level billboards mostly in Manhattan and North Brooklyn were wiped out and replaced with ephemeral artwork (whether or not the work that replaced advertisement constitutes as artwork in the full sense of its meaning is beyond the scope of this essay). As a result, more than five artist/volunteers were arrested, but the city began to closely monitor NPA’s illegal operation which have gone unnoticed by New York City for decades. It could be argued however, that this public intervention dethroned the professional artwork created by graphic designers as work for hire in lieu of self-serving needs of each of the NYSAT participating artists, however in this example I am simply alluding to the overall impact of the communal being enacted anonymously and collectively.
Institutional System of the Identified Author
To continue, we need to acknowledge that there is a widely accepted system which depends on institutional and academic reliability on author’s identity and this system provides for a systemic and economically productive operation. Within this system, an identified author still plays a vital role in the contemporary art world and is considered central to the idea of art, only followed by other author-specific attributes like biography, themes and agency (Vassiliou, 2017: 5). Although anonymous art production can, as we shall see, provide challenges to art institutions, it is hard to deny today’s continuous praise of the author. The author is the driver of corporate profits through dissemination of intellectual property. As Vassiliou (2017) further points out,
Detailed authorship and extensive cataloguing is still preserved as the centre of museography and increasingly globalized contemporary art. Museums and various institutions are forming vast electronic databases, accumulating more and more registers and names, and there is a growing mass of contemporary artwork that bears some kind of signature.
The Author is celebrated, as s/he is compensated.
Death of the Author, published in 1967 by Roland Barthes is more dead as a concept today than ever before, because it is still all about the perverted adulation of the author-figure. While the art market swells up past $45billion in annual sales according to TEFAF Annual Global Report, the art-world professionals continue to perfect the skill of extracting material value from the work of art through pump and dump of individual talent; young, old and dead. We are constantly confronted with inflated auction prices of artists of the past, as well as those of the contemporary scene that further reinforce this exhausting process. This celebrity-driven recognition model is paralyzing the potential for objectivity by further embedding material value into the author-function (Foucault, 1969: 6) which is pinned to the author rather than to the Idea in itself.
In a 2013 interview with Channel 4, ahead of his retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish artist, Peter Doig proclaimed: “There is no such thing as a contemporary masterpiece. It can’t be decided within your own time really. It’s all kind of marketing really.” Meanwhile, Jesse Darling, another contemporary artist/journalist bravely expressed her contempt for the art world’s ability to commodify the uncommodifiable avant-gardiness six years ago, only to end up as the victim of her very own diagnosis by being featured on the cover of the latest issue of ArtForum with two concurrent exhibitions in commercial galleries in New York City and London. In an article from 2012 about the fake Damien Hirst she succinctly writes,
As the art market sets crunchily to work figuring out how to sell the unsaleable, the best or cutest or savviest of the new generation are called to join in the carousel, or production-line, churning out their visionary, uncommodifiable commodities, which have acquired in the meantime a price tag in accordance to their very resistance to commodity status, their rareness, their avant-gardiness. Avant-garde simply means as-yet-unsold (though-we’re-working-on-it); “outsider” art denotes that-for-which-we-can-see-no-buyer. I’m not talking about discrete objects, but about processes and concepts – and if it sounds abstract, it is. For the art game, after all, is the slipperiest and most opaque of markets, all smoke and mirrors and business cards and canapés and champagne, and the emperor’s new clothes paraded through the Whitney. (Darling, 2012: 1)
Nonetheless, this is not to say, that the infamous Lascaux Cave Paintings dating back to the Old Stone Age some 17,000 years ago are less valuable, than a new Banksy scribbling on a South Brooklyn wall, if the value we are talking about here is not purely material (Though some would claim Banksy as an anonymous person(s), for the sake of argument I will declare him as an identifiable artist, because of his explicit brand name identity, that ultimately determines the value of his work in the very marketplace he often critiques). If we consider those Lascaux Cave Paintings to be the oldest examples of visual art, then there is a lot to be said about author’s anonymity or rather whether author’s ego, agency and biography are necessary attributes for extracting the intrinsic truth value out of a work of art that is predicated on an Idea and not artist’s biography. Perhaps there are other elements attributed to a work of art that supersede individualized accents. The central inquiry here is how much influence does the artist have in relation to an Idea or another way of putting it, whether artistic authorship is an arbitrary variable in the transcendence of an Idea.
In conclusion I would like to come back to the underlying inquiry that was first established and then abandoned in hopes of ascertaining that individualized authorship is not the only viable system of assigning metaphysical purpose to art. Based on my analysis of the autonomous and anonymous-author model, as well as unloading the historical and philosophical context of authorship and anonymity, it is my claim, that more focus should be channelled to alternative artist models, that challenge and reject adulation of the individualized author-figure. While the current MFA program at Glasgow School of Art is described by some as the Research Driven Studio Practice, I wonder if at some point in the future it could be redefined as Anonymously Driven Hybrid Practice. Or perhaps, the only viable way for collective anonymity to exist is in the actual shadows of institutionalized establishment, no different in existence, than crude and feral vandalism.
Lastly, it is worth noting the blatant hypocrisy by some of aforementioned authors that often goes unnoticed when considering their written work. While Barthes proclaimed The Death of The Author, by authoring the essay he ultimately gave into the very thesis he was arguing against.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, 1968, “The Death of the Author”.Darling, Jesse. November 19, 2012, “BeingDamien Hirst”, The New Inquiry, https://thenewinquiry.com/being-damien-hirst/Descartes, Rene. 1637. “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” pp. 19–20. 1641 (1911). Meditations On First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 14–17.Deseriis, Marco, 2011, “Lots of Money Because I am Many: TheLuther BlissettProject and the Multiple-Use Name Strategy”, Cultural Activism.Ede, Lisa, November, 1985, “The Concept of Authorship: An Historical Perspective”, Speeches/Conferences Papers.Foucault, Michel, 1969, “What is an Author?”Gallix, Andrew,“In theory: The Death of the Author”, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jan/13/death-of-the-authorPlato, “The Republic”, http://www.idph.net/conteudos/ebooks/republic.pdfThoburn, Nicholas, Spring 2011, “To Conquer the Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation”, Cultural Critique, Vol. 78.Vassiliou, Konstantinos, 2017, “Anonymous Art Reconsidered: Anonymity and the Contemporary Art Institution”, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture.Wrigley, Richard, 1983, “Censorship and Anonymity in Eighteenth-Century French Art Criticism”, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2.
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