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I is Other(s) (2013)
Artists: Gustavo Abascal, Marina Abramović, Sophie Calle, Mónica Castillo, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Minerva Cuevas, Lee Friedlander, Jonathan Hernández, Justin Lieberman, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Vik Muniz, Fernando Ortega, Luis Felipe Ortega, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Cindy Sherman, Roberto Turnbull and Francisco Ugarte
“…of others, in order to be I must be another,
leave myself, search for myself
in the others, the others that don’t exist
if I don’t exist, the others that give me
total existence. I am not,
there is no I, we are always us…”
Octavio Paz, Sunstone, 1957 (fragment)
leave myself, search for myself
in the others, the others that don’t exist
if I don’t exist, the others that give me
total existence. I am not,
there is no I, we are always us…”
Octavio Paz, Sunstone, 1957 (fragment)
“I is another” is a self-affirmation as pure potentiality made by the young Arthur Rimbaud, finding his way to become a person as a seer poet. We have pluralized his idea to visit Derrida’s notion of hospitality in order to approach the construction of the Self in co-authorship with the Other.
The question for the Self as a radical inquiry for the personal reality can be based on the awareness of our own finiteness. The need to generate an effective inventory, a record, a document or an archive arises when we realize we are exhaustible.
As the possibility to become familiar with the personal reflection, having access to mirrors allowed artists from the 15th Century to become the main subjects of their works, addressing the Self as the topic and material of their practice. This introduces the long self-portrait tradition that we mourned lost amidst a collective narcissism: the overexposure of the self-image animated by a large number of possibilities for self-portraying.
However, approaching the ideas brought up by the question for the Self has established a new esteem for self-portraiture as a way of bending towards one’s Self and relating to the world. It seems that the self-portrait surpasses the restrictions of practice and genre it was traditionally associated with in order to become a function: that of constructing a constantly updated Self. Then, it ceases being a mere inventory to become a way to be constituted as a person.
Concerning this reflection, the subject gets out of himself to find others; the limits of the Self arise in relation to others. The role played by mirrors in the 15th Century now relies on the Other. The ego embodies others when being constructed and, once assumed, the limits blur: an ego alter. When “I” ends, there are you, he or we. Others visit every identity, giving a new sense to the limits of the Self.
The Self is not static; it is pure action, movement, and perpetual update as a construction. A self-portrait appears as a vestige of a Self that is no longer the same in means of the possibility of continuous creation, leaving a trace that is never entirely updated. It is what is left of us, now as remnant and ruin; a trace whose permanence does not rely on subsistence but on a specter appropriated by the Other.