Nonsense And Gaps

Artists. 

They really don't know who they are. 

Or do they?

Following his death in Lisbon in 1935, Anglophile Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, although rarely published, was discovered to have accumulated a substantial back catalogue of scribblings and musings regarding the act, and fact, of being a writer. 

His contemporary standing is built on the fact that much of his output, discovered in a trunk of articles following his death, was executed in the voice and language of a parade of ‘heteronyms‘ - extreme versions of pseudonyms with distinct biographies and personalities of their own.

In contemporary ‘art’ practice the idea of the ‘double’ is nearly always a thinly veiled ‘me,’ even if that ‘me’ is a compilation of ‘us’-ness using undigested theory-text picked up from dust-jackets and half-remembered college seminars as a platform for a moral high ground ( often neatly sidestepping responsibility for addressing the problem of a qualitative dimension).  

Here’s where the apparent autobiographical volte-face of literary anarchist and S and M buff Alain Robbe-Grillet becomes a useful pointer

‘ “Articulated” language,...,is structured like our lucid consciousness, which is to say, according to the laws of meaning. Thus, it follows directly that it is incapable of accounting either for an external world that is precisely not us or for the restless ghosts within us. But at the same time, I do have to use this material, language, however ill-suited it may be, because it is this lucid consciousness - nothing else - that finds fault with nonsense and gaps.’