Stretching Fiction: in a language-based and visual artistic practice

Mike Croft

The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.

locus

Genetic GPS

Author's comment from their first-person perspective

The above reference to my genetic GPS suggests that the locus of my ancestral demographic and geographical movement through the millennia is a non-local connection, a connection so extensive that it is difficult to understand if not in terms of wholly other to me.

This sense of otherness, however, is extensive not only outside oneself but––and more extensive because of it––deeply within oneself as I, part of one's indissoluble sense of self.

The philosopher Jacques Derrida (2008) explains this, albeit in the context of relationship between human and animal. The significantly unconscious other, as distinct from the conventional meaning of this word, cannot be just anyone, and in the Lacanian specular sense – separate from the non-specular other theorised as the object a – is a composite of the influences, expectations and desires taken in by one during one’s early formative experience.

Derrida (2008, p.56) refers to the I as one’s ‘auto-position’, as also concerning the autobiographical and auto-presentational. In its simplest linguistic understanding, this suggests polarity with second- and third-person designations of one’s fellow humans – although Derrida’s context is in this case a discussion of merging of human vis-à-vis animal; an animal that one is inasmuch as ‘following’, as the animal reciprocally ‘follows’. Importantly for the contention that the other that is drawn out of and mirrors oneself can relate to the animal, Derrida links the I with a less-precisely theorised psychoanalytical sense than Lacan:

While this Derrida quote situates the other of oneself in a generalised unconscious sense, it also suggests that the internalised other can be equated with the animal.

See Tip 6 (2022-23), specifically the link to Seminar – Of Artistic Research: considered through hybrid writing and visual practice, for an instance of where I draw a link between myself, the character called Morry, and an animal.

Reference

Derrida, J. (2008) The Animal That therefore I Am. (Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet; Trans. David Wills) New York: Fordham University Press

other

geo-

demographics

oscillation

[…] the other which haunts in advance the ‘I think that accompanies all my representations’. [….] […] this unthought in the ‘I think,’ where the animal that I am (following) follows me from the place of the other of the unconscious […]. (2008, p.56)

This is extraordinary enough: the author's Genetic GPS (Ancestral DNA report) happens to be in the centre of what is now the country of Germany

In this respect, from ancestral perspective, the author's perceived I of me is automatically an other to myself, placed in a location that affords no awareness, either consiously or in any imaginable sense unconsciously

The finding does, however, resonate with the author's more consciously chosen geodemographic displacements in Asia (Thailand and Korea) and, until recently, Europe (Portugal).

Combining both the alienating sense of the Genetic GPS and the aforementioned chosen displacements is in a sense a form of fiction, and such fiction can be explored in terms that construct oneself as one's own subject to be at-once nearer to and further from. This oscillation is founded on an approach to artistic practice that is research-based, the latter of which by nature oscillates.

Genetic

GPS

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