(Research Report by Jeff Scheible.)
Research Report: Signature Event Context
Abstract:
On 28 January 2008, three Slovenian artists, who all officially changed their names to “Janez Jansa,” walked through the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, with video cameras recording their faces as they continually repeated the phrase “My name is Janez Jansa.” With the aid of handheld GPS devices, they walked in divergent paths so that the charting of their collective path signed their name, which can be seen online. They titled their project “Signature Event Context,” in reference to Jacques Derrida’s foundational essay about deconstruction.
Description:
In summer 2007, three well-known Slovenian artists all changed their names to Janez Janša, which is the same name of the current, conservative prime minister of Slovenia. On 28 January 2008, they performed their Signature Event Context project, which was supposed to open the next day as an installation in transmediale in Berlin, a festival for art and digital culture. It was controversially excluded from the festival’s exhibition at the last minute, for reasons which were undoubtedly political in nature. After this hoopla, the festival director decided to re-include their project.
The three Janšas’ actual performance (though where their “performance” begins and ends is not necessarily easy to define) involves their walking in divergent paths through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin in such a way that their collective path signs their name. They navigated their ways through the memorial with GPS devices. They were each also hooked up to microphones and videocameras, which recorded them repeating the phrase "Jaz sem Janez Janša” (“My name is Janez Janša”) nonstop as they walked.
The online installment of their project features an aerial Google map of the memorial, and it shows the movement of the three artists through the space in three different shades of a bright green cursor, as they “write” their “signature.” In a text box on the upper right corner of the project’s website, each Janša’s changing latitudal and longitudinal coordinates are clocked as they move. On a sidebar on the left side of the screen, the three video recordings of each Janša’s head moving through the memorial and reciting their repeated phrase simultaneously are arranged vertically, creating a repetitive cacophony. Their virtual signature-walk lasts about seven to eight minutes. When it is over, a new screen appears with a downloadable guide to “Draw Your Path and Walk it Out,” alongside a quote by the memorial’s architect, Peter Eisenman, regarding only being able to know the past through its “manifestation in the present.”
The website describing their project’s concept, http://www.aksioma.org/sec/concept.html , explains, “Signature Event Context at the Holocaust Memorial puts together 3 concepts (signature, event and context) from Derrida’s essay in complex relation; signature itself is an event which re-contextualizes the site of signature.” The site also states, “In Derrida’s words, walking and talking signatures by Janša, Janša, and Janša are the physical manifestations of nowness via individual experience.”
The passage from Derrida’s essay that they quote in their project is the following:
"By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer. But, it will be said, it also marks and retains his having-been present in a past now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now, in general, in the transcendental form of nowness (maintenance). This general maintenance is somehow inscribed, stapled to the present punctuality, always evident and always singular, in the form of the signature. This is the enigmatic quality of every paraph. For the attachment to the source to occur, the absolute singularity of an event of the signature and of a form of the signature must be retained: the pure reproducibility of a pure event." (Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass)
The artists’ choice of this passage indicates their interest in Derrida’s explanation of the complicated temporality of the written signature, as an inscription that is characterized by a “transcendental” now-ness. For Derrida, the function of the signature is to prove the past presence of its writer, which because it is for a future proof, always carries this presence with it, making “now,” and its singularity, in some “enigmatic” sense last forever.
When the three artists “walk” and “talk” their signature, rather than “write” it in Derrida’s sense, they make a signature in a context that might have slightly different contradictory relations to temporality than the contradictory temporal relations about inscription that interest Derrida. Because there is no ink involved, there is no permanent inscription of their ephemeral signature. Because it is a joint signature, too, the concept of “singularity” seems to be at the very least thrown into question. Because a form of their project then does survive in virtuality, online—and for that matter is only visible in this manner--their signature-performance does not exactly evade the eternal now-ness of the signature, but rather asks us to think about some ontological properties of online “writing,” which then might help us rethink writing, singularity, and temporality more generally. Finally, the politics of the project certainly complicate it. What does it mean to take place in a Holocaust memorial, for example? The irony of the name they each decided to take on for their artistic performance raises a host of questions about political authority, which might help the viewer familiar with Derrida also consider the comments in his essay about context and writing’s inevitable expansion of it.
This project has a fascinating, if also confusing, relationship to Derrida’s “Signature Event Context,” which is an essay that itself seems to open up endless questions about what it is about, and what it can be about, perhaps especially since it is precisely about an endless opening up of writing.
What is most interesting and valuable about Janšas’ project in terms of my sub-project is that it demonstrates how far one can go with Derrida’s writing in this essay, particularly in terms of making new kinds of writing with an already existing piece of writing. In the context of our class, we might certainly understand Janša, Janša, and Janša’s project as an “interpretation +” Derrida’s essay to an extreme. They legally changed their names, they used multiple digital technologies to deform the work’s ideas, and, in doing so, they raised several questions about what it is that Derrida’s text was about in the first place.
While in the context of our class, an “interpretation +” this large in scale would not be feasible, the creative and deformative engagement it has with the essay certainly inspires many possible, more modest, ways that I can engage with the text, raise questions about it, and hopefully open up new ways of understanding its writing—specifically its translations, punctuation, and parentheses—and get creative with it.
Resources for Further Study:**
Signature Event Context online can be found at http://sec.arscenic.org/ .
As Signature Event Context happened less than one month ago, there are not many resources about it. But there are some, and they are compiled on the following webpage: http://www.aksioma.org/sec/reference.html .
Of all the links on the page, the most interesting essay is, I think, about the artists. It is called “The Janez Janša Project,” by Blaž Lukan, http://www.aksioma.org/sec/lukan.html .
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