Writing the Self - The Temporal Self-Portrait
Writing the Self - The Temproal Self-Portrait was an essay written in 2005 to accompany an Honours examination at the Sydney College of the Arts.
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Abstract
Identity must be seen as contingent and forever incomplete, continually changing as it generates and regenerates itself. Thus to write an autobiography means, in essence, to write one’s own identity.*
The act of writing the self in art is commonly perceived as just an exploratory act that seeks to construct and communicate one’s identity. This perception of writing the self, however, conflicts with my understanding and practice of writing self-portraits. This essay therefore is not about video art and an exploration of the quaint and/or traumatic “My Life so Far” sagas, nor is it about performance art and some brash, identity defining “This is Who I Am” episode. It is about my own understanding of and the motivation for my self-portrait pieces. It is not about history and it is not about nostalgia. It is not about culture and it is not about heritage. My temporal self-portraits are not memoirs, nor are they confessions. They are not flamboyant identities I assume for the stage, nor are they personal homebodies I quietly adhere to. They are constructions and creations, but I do not consider them constructions and creations of my identity.
My self-portraits that are dancing madly on the screen are nought but ghosts. They are my bastard children that, once molested and manipulated, have been expelled into the vast void of the virtual realm, doomed to exist in a noisy feedback of “eternal return” . They could be considered amputated extensions of myself but they never wholly belonged to me. They were always, while at the same time representing me, representing something else; they were representing the actual act of writing. Despite representing writing, my self-portraits are far from entertaining life stories, not because they lack any cohesive narrative structure, but because there is barely anything in them to be told. There are no struggles in which I must overcome nor are there any lessons I could learn from. My self-portraits are fundamentally amoral and egotistical inanities involving frivolous forays into the virtual realm of signs and signifiers where I stutter and shake in a frantic effort to simulate a conceived self that is already dismembered from whatever real self I might have once imagined.
This essay approaches the reasoning and consequences of writing the self. It begins with a chapter that thoroughly explores the very nature of writing, because as Marshall McLuhan declared, “the medium is the message” , and it is henceforth essential to understand the process of writing in order to gauge how it affects the writing of the self. This chapter proposes that writing is not confined to a systematic set of codes such as the English alphabet, but can instead involve the sequencing of any symbols, symbols that are fundamentally images that signify something. Writing is represented as an essentially temporal exercise that is dependent on the sequencing of these symbols and the ordering of them into positions. The chapter also explores the consequences of writing. It explores how the ambiguity that is inherent within symbols leads to the necessary creation of a virtual space that allows the symbols to be glued together into a sequence. This creation of a virtual space, or void, demands that the reader fill it by imagining the images that the symbols represent. To do so, the reader draws on an archive of image memories, thus impregnating the symbols with temporal depth. The chapter concludes by discussing how writing connects man and the world and how it invents, rather than discovers, meaning by articulating the void and creating something that was never there before.
The second chapter, ‘Writing to Be or Not to Be’, focuses on what motivates the individual to write the self. It explores the realms of writing to exist and writing to cease to exist. The self exists through writing because it is recognised by the other; conversely the self ceases to exist through writing because a void, a virtual realm, is created that is filled by the imaginings and interpretations of the other, thus negating the self. The act of writing is approached as a performance, proposing that when we write the self we exist but when we stop writing we cease to exist. The effect of this performative act is temporal, as is the entity of the self.
My final chapter shows how my video works reflect and are fuelled by these concepts of the nature of writing and the motivation to write the self, and discusses the techniques used to achieve these ends. It explores how I treat all aspects of my self – words, body, voice and memories – as symbols to be sequenced and ordered into positions and how I write the self to cease to exist, to create a void, a vacant space that can be filled by endless imaginings of my self by the other.
It is revealed throughout these three chapters that writing the self does not necessarily involve the writing of an identity into the self but rather the writing of a void into the self. For writing one’s identity into the self would be a futile act as the self and its identity are “continually changing”. Writing a void, however, creates a space that can accommodate this forever transient and intangible self. It can therefore be seen that it is the actual nature of writing to create a void, and that this creation and extension of empty space fulfils the two fundamental purposes of writing the self. It diffuses the self across such a vast plain that the self ceases to exist as an individual whole, while at the same time creating a space that can hold the other’s various imaginings of the self, and by doing so reasserting the self’s existence.
* Barbara Steiner and Jiun Yang, ‘Writing identity: on autobiography in art’, Autobiography, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004, p16