By Blaž Lukan
My text is entitled The Janez Janša Project. But we need to be aware that
this - that is, the project that carries this name - first of all needs
to be proven. That is to say, we need to prove that there exists a "project"
that deserves this name, that a planned action was carried out, which can
be understood as a performative act, and that we are not dealing simply
with an intimate, private act, whose motivations and effects are none of
our business. For there are certainly a handful of signs that point to the
latter: the three Slovenian artists who have decided to change their names
to Janez Janša have remained silent regarding their decisions and they have
offered no comments regarding the change while they have stated that this
was an intimate, personal decision, which requires no public rationalisation.
This was simply a change of name, which constitutes the individual's civic
right and which, at least in Slovenia, requires no explanation (not even
a formal, administrative one).
However, in this text, I will challenge this account - which does not understand
the change of name as a project but rather as a personal decision of the
three artists - on a number of key points. The first counter-argument concerns
the public nature of this change. The three individuals who decided to change
their name appear regularly in public, in various contexts, mostly to do
with art; their name change is thus public not only in the administrative
sense (administratively speaking, data such as names belong to the private
sphere while they are, of course, also publicly accessible, say, as information
available in phone books) but also in a broader sense of the public sphere.
The decision was made by three artists, not three anonymous individuals,
and two of them are active in the field of contemporary performing arts;
even more, in their work, these artists often problematise the foundations
of contemporary art practices. So we can hypothesise - for now, we have no
proof to claim this - that their name change concerns their art practice,
their artistic activities.
The second counter-argument concerns the choice of name. The three artists
did not pick just any name; they chose Janez Janša - the name of the Slovenian
Prime Minister, the president of the centre-right SDS party (Slovenian democratic
party/Slovenska demokratska stranka), the front man of the right wing in
the Slovenian political arena. No doubt, the choice of name indicates a
certain agenda. If we know anything about these three artists' worldviews - or
at least about the worldviews of two of them - we can say with certainty that
they are closer to the Left and that they have been critical of the political
stance and policies associated with the best-known owner of the name Janez
Janša (by the way, the Telephone Register of Slovenia lists seven individuals
called Janez Janša). We can deduce this conclusion from their artistic actions,
manifestoes and performances. Take Janez Janša formerly known as Emil Hrvatin
for example; his editorials in Maska and his activities as one of the leaders
of the Association of Non-Governmental Organisations confirm our conclusion.
Since the new name, therefore, cannot be a symptom of a primary fascination
with the most famous authority figure with that name (which is often the
motivation for a name change, and obviously many commentators interpret
in this way the change of name discussed in this article) - for the three
artists through their choice of name reach into Žižek's "traumatic core"
(in this case, into the traumatic core of the Slovenian state and its transition) - the
reason for the change must lie somewhere else. We can assume, then, that
we are dealing with a conscious, even conceptual decision (at least two
of the artists involved are often classified precisely as conceptual artists),
for we can discern in this name change an act of a conscious and carefully
planned supra-identification, which exceeds the personal, intimate character
of the decision and which manifests, first and foremost, its critical point.
The third counter-argument is related to the decision that all three artists
assume the same name, that is, the name of Janez Janša. Of course this decision
could be simply personal, but it is a fact that the three artists chose
the same name and thus achieved a certain degree of identity among themselves,
with the best-known Janez Janša and, after all, with everyone else carrying
this name (there is ten of them now). If we try to theorise their act, we
could say that they have produced a series. The series and its effects are
invoked in an exclamation, which witnesses have attributed to one Janez
Janša at his wedding: "The more of us there are, the faster we can
achieve our goal!" (which, coincidentally, is the motto of the political
party whose president is Janez Janša); they are also hinted at in We are
all Marlene Dietrich FOR (Mi vsi smo Marlene Dietrich FOR), the title of
one of the latest performances by another Janez Janša, still known as Emil
Hrvatin at the time of the performance; and the series is also confirmed
by the joint appearance of the artists collaborating in the current exhibition
at Mala galerija in Ljubljana entitled TRIGLAV - OHO, IRWIN, Janez Janša,
Janez Janša and Janez Janša (TRIGLAV - OHO, IRWIN, Janez Janša, Janez Janša
in Janez Janša), whose performer and publicist, visual artist and intermedia
artist are all called Janez Janša.
Let's think about this then. On the one hand, there is the intimate, personal
decision, made by three citizens of the Republic of Slovenia, to change
their names. On the other hand, there is the decision of three artists,
three public figures, at least two of whom are involved in contemporary
performing practices; their decision concerns a charged name, the name of
Janez Janša, the Prime Minister and a right-wing politician; the three artists
have assumed this name and thus produced a series, which points less towards
the assumed name as such than towards the meaning and effect of the series
itself. "The other hand" of this contemplation, then, seems stronger and
it invites the thought that this was a performative project. But to be able
to prove this we need to go back to the beginning.
What does a change of name mean in an intimate sense? The change of name
is actually a private act, for it is closely connected with the individual's
inner motives and, as such, with his or her personality, that is, his or
her identity; it entails giving up one's former identity and personal history
as well as one's self-image and the image of oneself as one is seen by the
others. This image is closely connected with one's name and the assumption
of a new name and therefore new identity has ramifications for it. The change
of name then is a peculiar social spectacle. The name, which signifies one's
legal, administrative identity as well as one's intimate self - even though
it is originally assigned to one arbitrarily, at birth, at christening or
when the newborn is registered in the records, but it is then assumed by
the individual as his or her own identity - becomes through this change merely
representation; the change legalises, or rather, manifests precisely the
original randomness of the name. Between the name and identity or (self-)
image a gap or a bulge appears, as Foucault would say, a gap which leaves
the name on one side and puts the individual's self on the other side, and
thus throws into relief the arbitrariness of the connection between the
two. The name becomes a sliding signifier and thus sheds light on the problematic
nature of considering identity as something predetermined or determined
once and for all, for suddenly we are forced to notice its multiplicity,
as Badiou or Foucault would put it. And if we are aware that the sphere
of identity is one of the primary arenas of contemporary art practices,
including performing arts - let's mention Orlan here, the French body artist
who has been problematising the issues of identity and (self-) image through
conceptual plastic surgery procedures on her face - we can begin to understand
the change of name by the three Slovenian artists in this sense, that is,
as a change enacted in the field of performativity.
An additional confirmation of this thesis comes from the fact that the change
was carried out by three artists, two of whom, as already mentioned, have
been working in the field of performing arts and expanding the field's thematic
and strategic horizons through original and witty projects (such as Emil
Hrvatin's Refugee Camp for First World Citizens [Begunsko taborišče za državljane
prvega sveta] or Davide Grassi's Stock Exchange for Problems [Borza problemov]).
And it is also confirmed by the fact that the three artists, through their
name change, have produced a series which is a common phenomenon or concept
in contemporary (visual) arts. Even more: if we can understand the change
of name in the sense of identity as a body-art event of sorts (by which
I mean not only the rupture between the individual and his/her name, that
is, a rupture in one's identity, but also the common, albeit pathological
bodily changes that a name change triggers), the production of the series
is most forcefully inscribed precisely in the fields of the social and the
political - in other words, the production of the series becomes an ideological
inscription. The series leads to the disappearance of the subject, to its
emptying or de-subjectivisation. The series with its continuation ad infinitum
produces a sequence of empty signifiers, which can then be filled at random
with new contents. The series is authorised through absence, the self in
the series appears as a "pure void" (Žižek). A causal chain appears between
the three artists, that is, between the three Janezes Janšas, and Janez
Janša as Janez Janša; the chain produces a posterior identity, which in
turn raises the fundamental question of the referent. What is at stake then
is not the disappearance of Emil Hrvatin, Davide Grassi and Žiga Križ as
artists, public figures or citizens, but rather the concurrent disappearance
of Janez Janša, the name and its owner, that is, the disappearance of the
original Janez Janša and his symbolic function. The multiplication of the
name as a signifier leads into the disappearance of the referent, and the
aforementioned motto of the party now has to be taken literally: the more
Janezes Janšas there are, the faster we can achieve the goal of the emptying
of the subject, its desubjectivisation and the establishment of the empty
signifier. The goal - more or less unconceptualised, collateral - of the act
of changing one's name then is to undermine the real ideological, economic
and political power of the carrier, which entails sacrificing one's own
personal or intimate and artistic or public identity. What is crucial here
then, in my opinion, is the offering of the empty space - the void, through
which the ideological mechanism as such is revealed - for a possible territorialisation
by a new, say, political subjectivity.
The change of name as non-event, or rather, as an event which does not want
to be one in a manifestative sense, thus exploits a certain unintentional,
spontaneous action, which was triggered by the act of renaming in the administrative
sense. In the sense of identity, the act becomes an event through the staking
of one's own personal history, name and identity or self-image, that is,
through the indication of their disparity; as an event, it enters the register
of contemporary performing arts in the sense of having to do with reality;
yet, the act, in the moment when it is carried out by an artist or an actor
from the field of contemporary performing arts (the situation is similar
to the circumstances created by the appearance of the readymade in a gallery
space), becomes an artistic event or a performative project. On the other
hand, however, this act becomes an artistic event also through the concept,
which is discernible in the choice of name as the target of the renaming
and in the production of the series, which triggers a chain of new meanings,
whose radical implications are politically or ideologically subversive.
When talking about the subversive nature of this project, we need to be
aware that the path that these artists have chosen is the strategy of subversive
affirmation. Generally, we know what this strategy means, and it is certainly
at work in The Janez Janša Project, but the three Slovenian artists add
to it an original dimension. First of all, we could designate their act
a subversive re-nomination or de-nomination, with the latter being a more
appropriate term, for it implies the object's loss of value. Furthermore,
we need to note that the artists achieve this effect in an almost passive
manner, for the plan carries itself out by itself, by producing new meanings
solely by appearing spontaneously in the media, with no additional, special
or planned activities. Since the name change, all three artists have been
doing what they have always done in the same way (there is no evidence,
at least no official evidence, to the contrary), while their new name in
connection with their actions is producing new meanings. The following is
important when considering this conclusion: if we ask ourselves how The
Janez Janša Project is functioning, that is, where its author is to be situated,
we can re-state that it is not to be found in any planned activities of
the three artists (a plan or a concept can only be detected in their simultaneous
decision to change their names into Janez Janša) but rather in the media
following their actions. The media are following the project mostly out
of some sort of automatism, that is, in agreement with their stated aim
of reporting objectively about various events, including those in which
the three Janezes Janšas appear. It is to the artists' advantage that the
media coverage produces a certain hum, which the artists might have even
counted on and which stems from the undeniable subservience with which the
media follow the figure and the actions of Janez Janša. However, there have
been no noticeable attempts to problematise the artists' act in the media.
But this is the whole point, of course: the act of changing one's name becomes
an event through the production of media collisions, which are triggered
precisely by the appearance of the name Janez Janša in new, completely unexpected
contexts, such as "Janša dances in Berlin". The Janez Janša Project
then tactically exploits the media reality even though it enters this reality
quite spontaneously and, at first sight, with no subversive intention (or,
at least, in a significantly different way from the one deployed by, say,
the guerrilla media projects by Joey Skaggs and the Critical Art Ensemble);
it only becomes subversive through the collisions brought about by the appearances
and actions of the three Janezes Janšas. In so doing, the project undermines
the real as well as the symbolic value of the name and its original owner:
on the one hand, it imbues the name with spontaneous and critical irony;
on the other hand, it enables unexpected reactions (uncertainty, outrage,
fear) and, perhaps most importantly, it divests the name of its symbolic
power to such an extent that it can offer this newly established void to
someone else to fill it up with new - political, ideological - content...
Let's conclude with two pitfalls of The Janez Janša Project. If the media
decided to boycott the coverage of the activities of the three Janezes Janšas,
say, for ideological reasons, the project would probably undergo its factual
eclipse, at least in the public eye, for it would continue to operate on
a purely intimate level of personal identity, as an invisible performance;
we presume that, in this case, the motivation for the project would gradually
fade out. The second pitfall is the possibility of a planned, orchestrated
functioning, which would try to direct the project from without: this would
entail the loss of spontaneity, which is currently driving the project and
triggering those unexpected collisions and meanings. Yet, we have no way
of knowing which direction the project will actually take, for it resembles
the throw of the dice; we cannot imagine, for instance, what the ramifications
of the impending parliamentary election will be for the project, where unplanned
media coincidences could produce politically provocative (let's refrain
from predicting fatal) meanings and effects...
The Janez Janša Project is thus, in addition to its almost bodily dimensions,
also a media event, or rather, a mediated event par excellence, for it is
only through various forms of media representation that the project is fully
realised. All three of its manifestations - that is, the intimate manifestation
at the level of identity, the political and performative manifestation in
the public sphere, and the media or mediated manifestation - can be best understood
in the field of contemporary biopolitics, where this introduction could
be productively built upon. The self is the performance of interiority,
we could say; the self is a form of biopolitical self-representation. The
Janez Janša Project undermines the structure of power from a position within,
which it achieves through sacrifice and where it persists with extraordinary
resistance; it is, however, more or less utopian to speak about the project
as a real political alternative to the current powers that be. Nevertheless,
The Janez Janša Project is a political project, whose original strategy
subverts the dominant, "obscene" political discourse; the project thus writes
itself into the field of representational politics and, in so doing, it
interrogates the foundations of the notion of representation as such.
Translated from Slovenian by Polona Petek |