The following is an excerpt from the open home show which is the title for 3 collaborative projects initiated by Rachel Pimm - Re-naming East Peckham, A Street party: the Glengall Ball and a Trompe l'oeil billboard. Get down to auto-italia now to collect your full, bound copy of the following text for free while stocks still last.It is currently on at auto italia and is really very good. The text can also be downloaded from their website. Some of the following came out of my Stocktake Sale Now On! project there when I worked with Rachel amongst others. I am grateful that this summarises some of the issues that arose from my own project with "auto-italia".One name authorising another
Rachel Pimm
Auto-italia* (and other name dropping) could be seen as a voice giving me the power to take on this project, and forms the back-up for my case to collaborate with those involved if they began to ask about my personal credentials (which surprisingly nobody has). So as Richard John Jones put it, “the creation of the machine can then be used to generate scenarios that are productive in terms of 'collective research', that is to say, projects that can only generate themselves through group interactions.”** And so by adopting the name auto-italia south east I am borrowing some (fictional) authority with which to approach the idea and the people who can help me construct the idea. This creation of an agency has a danger: once you author an agent who in turn authors you, you can place yourself outside of criticism by authoring your own context. This is perhaps the reason why I am sharing the authorship so widely. Very little outcome would be evident from the project without consulting with a great amount of people, as who would know I was doing this, and what would be the context for the outcome? With no reason to name something and nobody to tell, it does not exist. This writing exists in order to have something concrete to hold onto, to signpost the collective research that takes place in something like this, as a parallel with the artistic practice proposed by Richard in his Stocktake report and by auto-italia south east in the discussion it documented. This way names give authority to other names.
“Specialists create truth”***, Richard tells me. I’m an amateur**** figuring out how to incorporate a non-specific audience into the artwork I am making, tagging along with any specialist I can get my hands on: this is the anthropological urge of the institution. This means I can delve into whatever I want. I can talk to an archaeologist about digging up cultures for the sake of a piece of writing, or drop citations to philosophers in to give weight but in fact I am not going to do that in this piece of writing. There are a few philosophy and art criticism books I have referred to, leaving post-it notes to mark important quotes to be used here in relation to all this naming but in the end, there is less space for that here than for anything that is ‘user-generated’, or otherwise all of this amateur production goes unseen, and though it may not initially appear this way, I do not want to write an essay.
What was it like when Richard used the name Tate Moss***** I wonder? (After all, I use auto-italia)‘The building was bigger than us” so he named the building and not the collective. This way the geography authors something and you can pretend the aura resides in an address and not in you. After a while, as we did at auto-italia, Richard and co got attached and took it with them. We have both wanted to hang onto these names because they became entities in themselves.
Names like this help form a meta-language that binds together and objectifies a set of social groups that communicate in their own ways. Social groups, then, form themselves when there is a collective event. The residents of the road I live on say they mainly meet when something is there to petition against: the new extension to Tesco, a mezzanine level at Asda, a planned block of flats on the site we are in now. Richard talks about these extensions and how new parts of buildings for art institutions are so interesting because you get to see how that institution sees itself in order to build on what it thinks it is. The first building was what was there before the identity of the institution was formed, but an extension is only what they want it to be- it serves the purpose of identifying as ‘by’ that institution for exactly what they needs it for- a physical manifestation of their name.
*auto-italia is a registered alias with the post office ™ for 1 Glengall Road. Alias, being a synonym for pseudonym. Alias itself has so many uses and meanings, wikipedia lists it first on a page called a ‘disambiguation’ which exists to untangle too complicated an entry and where you can sift through headings to find the type of alias you’d like to look up- i.e. perhaps you’re interested in the many musicians whose ‘alias’ is actually ‘alias’. Incidentally, even auto-italia as an alias is inconsistently accepted as one. auto-italia can register with the post office but was personally rejected from Facebook because Terms and conditions state I cannot impersonate anyone and must be a person and use my real full name. Perhaps I made the situation harder for myself by applying as Auto-italia Southeast. Who has a double-barrelled first name?
** Richard John Jones, Stocktake Workshop 2 June 2008.
***Richard John Jones, from a phone conversation on the 3rd September 2008
**** From amour: to love- I’m just doing what I really like doing, with no responsibility to truth, which the specialists must concern themselves with. What I am doing is “reasonably aimless, but with a process in mind” Richard on the amateur.
*****A warehouse space in Pudding Mill Lane, now gone to make way for the Olympics. It was a site with a great reputation for parties that I heard about but never saw.
Auto-italia* (and other name dropping) could be seen as a voice giving me the power to take on this project, and forms the back-up for my case to collaborate with those involved if they began to ask about my personal credentials (which surprisingly nobody has). So as Richard John Jones put it, “the creation of the machine can then be used to generate scenarios that are productive in terms of 'collective research', that is to say, projects that can only generate themselves through group interactions.”** And so by adopting the name auto-italia south east I am borrowing some (fictional) authority with which to approach the idea and the people who can help me construct the idea. This creation of an agency has a danger: once you author an agent who in turn authors you, you can place yourself outside of criticism by authoring your own context. This is perhaps the reason why I am sharing the authorship so widely. Very little outcome would be evident from the project without consulting with a great amount of people, as who would know I was doing this, and what would be the context for the outcome? With no reason to name something and nobody to tell, it does not exist. This writing exists in order to have something concrete to hold onto, to signpost the collective research that takes place in something like this, as a parallel with the artistic practice proposed by Richard in his Stocktake report and by auto-italia south east in the discussion it documented. This way names give authority to other names.
“Specialists create truth”***, Richard tells me. I’m an amateur**** figuring out how to incorporate a non-specific audience into the artwork I am making, tagging along with any specialist I can get my hands on: this is the anthropological urge of the institution. This means I can delve into whatever I want. I can talk to an archaeologist about digging up cultures for the sake of a piece of writing, or drop citations to philosophers in to give weight but in fact I am not going to do that in this piece of writing. There are a few philosophy and art criticism books I have referred to, leaving post-it notes to mark important quotes to be used here in relation to all this naming but in the end, there is less space for that here than for anything that is ‘user-generated’, or otherwise all of this amateur production goes unseen, and though it may not initially appear this way, I do not want to write an essay.
What was it like when Richard used the name Tate Moss***** I wonder? (After all, I use auto-italia)‘The building was bigger than us” so he named the building and not the collective. This way the geography authors something and you can pretend the aura resides in an address and not in you. After a while, as we did at auto-italia, Richard and co got attached and took it with them. We have both wanted to hang onto these names because they became entities in themselves.
Names like this help form a meta-language that binds together and objectifies a set of social groups that communicate in their own ways. Social groups, then, form themselves when there is a collective event. The residents of the road I live on say they mainly meet when something is there to petition against: the new extension to Tesco, a mezzanine level at Asda, a planned block of flats on the site we are in now. Richard talks about these extensions and how new parts of buildings for art institutions are so interesting because you get to see how that institution sees itself in order to build on what it thinks it is. The first building was what was there before the identity of the institution was formed, but an extension is only what they want it to be- it serves the purpose of identifying as ‘by’ that institution for exactly what they needs it for- a physical manifestation of their name.
*auto-italia is a registered alias with the post office ™ for 1 Glengall Road. Alias, being a synonym for pseudonym. Alias itself has so many uses and meanings, wikipedia lists it first on a page called a ‘disambiguation’ which exists to untangle too complicated an entry and where you can sift through headings to find the type of alias you’d like to look up- i.e. perhaps you’re interested in the many musicians whose ‘alias’ is actually ‘alias’. Incidentally, even auto-italia as an alias is inconsistently accepted as one. auto-italia can register with the post office but was personally rejected from Facebook because Terms and conditions state I cannot impersonate anyone and must be a person and use my real full name. Perhaps I made the situation harder for myself by applying as Auto-italia Southeast. Who has a double-barrelled first name?
** Richard John Jones, Stocktake Workshop 2 June 2008.
***Richard John Jones, from a phone conversation on the 3rd September 2008
**** From amour: to love- I’m just doing what I really like doing, with no responsibility to truth, which the specialists must concern themselves with. What I am doing is “reasonably aimless, but with a process in mind” Richard on the amateur.
*****A warehouse space in Pudding Mill Lane, now gone to make way for the Olympics. It was a site with a great reputation for parties that I heard about but never saw.
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