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Thomas Macho
FAMILYSCULPTURES
GENEALOGY AS PERFORMANCE
1. The Name
It’s the puzzling moment at a new beginning: a person comes into the world as if he’d been summoned, on a specific day, at a specific minute, at a specific location. The date is his first name – a name whose meaning no one doubts … horoscopes are carefully studied. Dates are proper names. A name is selected as little as is the day of birth. Or, better put, we carry a name insofar as we were born. The name is given in a pious and bureaucratic “baptism”. The name is a symbol for the incomprehensible; a cipher, like the date. Only with the naming is the birth ratified. As of then, we must combine our lives with a name that we didn’t even choose; a foreign moniker assigned as a proper name. The assignment of names, which is ritually bestowed upon newborn life, represents the namers’ most varied, often unintentional motives. Regional conventions play a role; genealogies, memories, traditions, fashion, desire for originality, ideologies, private obsessions. In the worst case, the name embodies a tragic life; decoding it could occupy entire flocks of family therapists.
And what if I want something different than what corresponds to my assignment? A change in name is the best method to give form to this reversal. Saul becomes Paul – after Damascus. Whoever enters the monastery gets a new name. Authors choose a nom de plume, artists or actors a stage name. Professional designations that meld with a name signal a change. Whether in a circle of friends or in a love relationship, nicknames or pet names express deep trust. The name of a wife or husband changes at the beginning of a marriage. Popes choose new names to illustrate the intentions of their papacies, so do dukes, kings and emperors for their reigns. Changing one’s name is like cutting through biographical obligations. As an autonomous decision, it annuls the randomness of the assignment we were unconsciously prescribed. When I myself am the only one who chooses my name, I myself name the mission to which I submit my life. With my name change, I take on – in the spirit of indispensable arrogance – the godparenthood for my existence. The main thing that always solely beatifies is that a person, in reference to his own life, is not his own uncle, but his
father.(1)
2. The family tree
Names bear testimony not only to the desires and assignments of the parents, but also to the respect (literally: retrospect) owed to forefathers and ancestors. A name endows temporal references, a genealogical system. Since the Middle Ages at the latest, the family tree – a visual tree of origins and ancestral lines – has been drawn in numerous variations: as a geometric construction (which only remotely resembles a tree) or an almost chaotic figure similar to a modern “mind map”. Occasionally it has been drawn as an arbor consanguinitatis or arbor affinitatis to demonstrate the degree of relationship or as a dynastic system to justify demands for power. It has been painted in various ways as the family tree of Christ – as “Jesse’s Root”, which according to the Book of Jesaga (Jes. 11, 1) derives from the primarily recumbent father of David – to show the busts or full images of Christ’s ancestors in the branches. These are less reminiscent of branches than vines; and it was designed as a philosophical derivation tree, as a systemic plant, that promised to lead from the being (ens) or from the substance (substantia) to a concrete individual (homo, often named Plato or Paul).
Family trees organized the world in that they provided a chronological backbone on the one hand; and attempted to hierarchically differentiate the genus und species of being on the other. The first philosophical tree was incidentally attributed to the neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrios (233–304). More complex family trees replaced – not uncoinciden-tally after the 17th century – the older models of representation of the arbor consanguinitatis or “Jesse’s Root”. In the 19th century, they advanced to the most popular visualization of temporal order, which found use in all the sciences from biology to linguistics and increasingly in everyday cultural life. The tree evolved into one of the most formative structural models of knowledge. Up until today, databases have been occasionally organized as trees; the history of evolution or the development of art and stylistic direction remain easy to arrange with the tree image. As Norbert Elias convincingly asserted, “In reality, one can compare the growth of knowledge with a tree. In the wood of an old tree, its superficial form as a young tree remains visible as an inner layer within the larger form.”
3. Art
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were known to be successful in their attempt to overcome conservative models in scientific systems, from the tree to the root systems of lichens or fungus – to the “rhi- zomes”. The “network” has simultaneously risen to the newer model of the family tree. While we can research our own family tree in the Internet and insert it into a previously programmed visualization better than ever before, we actually much more often use the Internet to create horizontal connections – contacts that cross nations, continents and time zones. Kinship is only interesting insofar as it was previously unknown, and even then, it takes a subordinate pos-ition in comparison to the possibilities of flirts and open communication. The dominance of genealogical orders – systems of ancestral obligations – has dissolved, whereby this process of dissolution is eased not only through legal amendments of name rights, but also through genetics and biotechnology’s many manipulation strategies. The traditional large, multigenerational family is surpassed by new “patchwork families”; through a flexible multiplicity of relationships, love relationships and structural adoptions that no longer yield to any chronology of background.
Of late, water – “streams” – has become much
thicker than blood. Relations are no longer suffered as nature or destiny, but are quasi practiced as a free art: as a game of similarities and metamorphoses. Genealogy as art, as performance: This shifting of genealogy to a game of virtual communities is especially clear in Angela Dorrer’s familysculptures. Based on modern technology or data generation, she generates name communities, namely the amount of all people whose last name is “Dorrer”. It plays no role whether this reflects a relationship in name or an authentic blood relationship. It could have been the number of all people who celebrate their birthdays on April 1 or have a telephone number that begins with the number 13. But then the coincidence inherent in gathering these throngs would have been conscious from the beginning. In that Dorrer remembers the magic of names that have always been random, she can create – like a sculpture – a community that deals with coincidence as it does with necessity. The members of this new community even invest their clothing, external attributes like the name itself (and previously exactly as significant as rank and profession, brought to expression through clothing). They do not represent a genealogical system, but rather an artwork.
Notes
1. Sören Kierkegaard: Entweder–Oder. Vol. II. Published by Hermann Diem and Walter Rest. Translated by Heinrich Fauteck. Munich 1988, p 834.
2. Norbert Elias: Engagement und Distanzierung. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie I. Published by Michael Schröter. Frankfurt/Main 1983, p 104.
From: “U C D - United Collection of Dorrer”, 160 Seiten, 82 Farbseiten, German/English, essays by Thomas Macho, Andreas Kühne, Hannes Fehringer und Stefan Lindl, Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg 2005
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