Autonomy and the search of the self

Life as the never ending search for the self.
The endless definition and redefinition
The inscription of the self
"say to oneself".......(as in Roland Barthes or Felix
Gonzales-Torres textural portraits)
Self then as description:
 the ultimate code
The conceit of the photograph in self-portrait,
portrait and group portrait:
as the superficial
morpho-magical rendering
of the momentary self,
caught in the intersticies between
I,Me, You, and them.
Naming, name, signature, title.
Anononymity as either,
a resistence to or succumbing to
this obsessive need to know and identify and catagorize.
Duchamps' barber was the only person who was aware of who he was
is the coy outflanking of the
art worlds desire for fame and identification.
whisper.......(thus signature)
as if this identifiable persona
later materialized into
an indexical marker
impressed upon the work of art iself,
as a coordinated signifier of worth.
As if,
within the micro-cultural context of the art world, the society of the
artist and the artist's society are one.
the artists ability to function in one or both,
by either,
acceptance or denial
a sign of greatness.
like the religious leaders of Czarist Russia,
hypertext.....(referred to by Tolstoy).
whose true greatness is revealed only after death
when the sweetness of the odor of decay
is directly proprtional to their inner purity
and thus their true sacredness.

And it is to this art society that unknown artist is directly focused.

whisper......(Iam always interested in looking at group portraits of
famous
artists).
From sitting around a kitchen table drinking and carousing at a bar
meeting at an opening
there is a certain nostalgia that these images impart.
A kind of loss
for times unrecoverable
when artists worked together
believed in the function of art
controlled their own destiny.
Whether in fact this was the case is not the issue.
Their world may not have differed much from today.
But the past and the photos of the past impart a warm glow.
inspecting these images
one finds
the unidentified artist or person included.
Was he or she somone's friend
who just happened to be there,
was he or she some one history chose to forget.
Our gaze
transfixed by a mystery that shrouds
this indefinable entity memorialized by the camera.

said to onself....(Unknown Artist lionizes this quixotic figure by
attempting to negotiate his or her obscurity.)

with the flick of the computer brush
a superimposition of one figure
for another
is accomplished
A visual game is created
it becomes amusing to find
the unknown artist.
Like Eloise at the Plaza or Where's Waldo,
the viewer is prodded to find and search
for the unknown artist rather than doing the more familiar chore of
recognizing
the famous ones.
visual perceptual processes are deconstructed
reorganized around different fundamental principles.
New neurobiological tranitory flux
which is consciousness is momentarily disrupted.

Warren Neidich
1996, New York