NAME Readymade (review)

In 2007, Slovenian artists Emil Hrvatin, Davide Grassi, and Žiga Kariž had their names officially changed to that of Slovenia's then prime minister, Janez Janša. That act, they maintain, had personal motives and no links with art; however, it marked the beginning of a long-term project that has occupied the three artists' public activities and private lives alike. In the 2010 election, Janša was voted out and while Kariž reverted to his original name, Hrvatin and Grassi chose to continue living and working under the name of Janez Janša.

In 2008, Zdenka Badovinac curated the NAME Readymade exhibition at the Forum Stadtpark gallery in Graz, Austria, which featured the artists' valid personal identification papers with their new name(s). The exhibition was accompanied by an eponymous publication, richly illustrated with photographs, scans of the identification cards, and press clippings. It included texts written by Blaž Lukan, Amelia Jones, Zdenka Badovinac, Miško Šuvaković, Catherine M. Sousloff, Tadej Kovačič, Aldo Milohnić, Antonio Caronia, Lev Kreft, and Jela Krečič.

The book's topics included Janez Janša as an artistic project, the exhibition, the works by the three artists, the act of renaming, and the general problematics of the name. It thereby remains somewhat unclear what the central problematic is, which leaves ample space for different readings.

One of the book's main foci is the name itself; therefore it includes analyses of the artists' name(s) from anthropologic, linguistic, philosophical, artistic-historical, feminist, and legal perspectives. Several authors specifically address this act of renaming through the relations between the public and the private. At this point we should be reminded of the difference between "doing" and "showing doing"—Richard Schechner's ground for the concept of performance —which distinguishes performance from everyday behavior. However, Janez Janša revisits this issue and problematizes the borders between reality and fiction, positing the act of performing as a sort of a permanent reality show (152). Still, many authors agree that the artists' self-renaming is an artistic project/performance. Lukan argues that this concerns a bid on the part of three public figures (the artists) to take Janša's name into the public sphere. Besides, their choice of Janša's name—if we bear in mind their previous art practices, oriented towards experimental work advocating leftist political positions—contains a critical dimension with regards to Slovenia's right-wing government. Krečič additionally explains how this act becomes a performance, pronouncing it a media phenomenon. For her, the media are the public sphere in which performance emerges, because they become its accomplices the moment they start reporting about the work of these artists, who must be referred to by their new name(s).

Another important topic is "overidentification," recognized as the basis of the project. Jones introduces Žižek's interpretation of overidentification as practiced by the Slovenian music group Laibach, which uncovers otherwise invisible social problems (47). Lukan points out that in the discrepancy between these artists' earlier practices and this work of taking on a new name, overidentification diminishes our fascination with the prime minister. Furthermore, he stresses that the three artists assumed the same name, whereby they produced a "series." That raises the wider issue of identity and multiplication, and in their attempts to think through this work in concrete social contexts, many of the authors take us back to Prime Minister Janša's statement—which the artists themselves refer to as well: "The more we are, the faster we will reach the goal!" Milohnić addresses the linguistic structure of this statement and the generation of the "we" from the hierarchic relation of the "I + the other(s)." It follows that the artists' self-renaming series is a literal, absurd, and thus subversive response to the prime minister's interpellation (127).

The question of this project's efficacy is the most complex topic of all, because the project implies social engagement but does not realize it...