Thoughts on Pessoa and Duchamp as they have been recently jostled inside my head.
A primary intention for me going into this project has been how to make it -the historical contextualization of the use of alter egos by artists (of many different types of practice)- as little as possible about Duchamp. This might seem strange considering it is a project about identity, self-representation and alter-egos; this would be strange and basically leave the gates to the city wide open to attack. There really is no way around Duchamp. Rrose is the elephant in the room and she will be talked about.
There are many reasons why I want to limit the conversation around Duchamp -mainly because he tends to dominate the conversation when discussing identity, self-representation and alter egos, but as ground-breaking as he was there were others working with these ideas at the same time as Duchamp from other points of view while using similar tools -namely multiple personas. The key for me will be finding a way to talk about Duchamp and his many selves in such a way that neither he nor they dominates the conversation. This is possible.
As I have begun revisiting the work and biography of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa I have noticed an overlap with Duchamp in how and why (as much and in as many ways as this ‘why’ has been hypothesized on by scholars) each created and worked with his personas -alter egos and heteronyms.
One thing which became clearer to me is that both Pessoa and Duchamp were very aware in how they controlled the story -the myth- of the personas they created and worked with. There was a great deal of intent in how they communicated the identity of the personas, authorship, and relationship between artist, creation (object or persona) and the spectator/reader. The approaches they took, the methods they employed, were in some ways different, for example in terms of timing (place in the process). And, the degree of conscious versus unconscious (intentional versus unknowingly intentional) intention for each varies -but as to the nuances in the intentions of each, Pessoa and Duchamp, I am thinking this is less an area I need to explore in terms of my project, instead leaving that topic to the many Pessoa and Duchamp scholars who are continuously searching for new ways to ‘explain’ the work of these two twentieth-century wonders.
What I am interested in relative to my project is how Pessoa and Duchamp used the ideas of the multiplicity of identity (grounded in late nineteenth-early twentieth century models of the development of identity) to forge tools -in the form of multiple personas- which applied to their respective practices expanded not just their personal methods but how the methodologies in which they were working (or have been posthumously placed) have since come to be understood (defined, described?). I am interested in doing this not from the point of view of a Pessoa or Duchamp scholar, there are enough of these with more knowledge and interest in approaching this from that point of view, but from the point of view of an artist-researcher asking within the context of my own creative practice:
How can/could these tools be forged?
How can/could/are/were these tools be playfully applied within a creative practice, specifically within my painting practice?
How did/does their application within a creative practice, and specifically my own painting practice, expand(ed) [or change?] the scope of the practice.
Note: these questions are not to be taken as my 'research quetions' anymore than understanding more of the how and why contain within the practices of Pessoa and/or Duchamp is the aim of my research. They are all little stepping stones along the path.
Key words coming out of these questions are ‘playfully’ and ‘scope’. Regards to ‘playfully’ as I have delved into this research the concept of play stemming from developmental theory [of how and why children play in the ways they do as part of the learning process leading to the cognitive development of identity -personal and communal- through self reflection] has become an important area of my research, and it is providing insight into the approaches taken by both Pessoa and Duchamp -both serious ‘players’ in their fields. I will need to address ‘scope’ from two directions. The first being, in terms of the work of Duchamp and Pessoa, how their use of these tools expanded their own approaches to their practices as well as how the work they produced has impacted the greater (scholarly) understanding of the scope of the methods and methodologies in which the work has been placed by others since its production. This will be important to clarify not to argue specifically for the shifts that occurred for Duchamp and Pessoa, or even for the artists and writers who followed in their footsteps, but it will be important to contextualize how the shifts [expansion/change] occur in my own practice and how knowledge of this could benefit other creative practices in which the ideas of identity and self-representation are addressed from knowledge and questions being asked in the twenty-first century.