{"id":870,"date":"2012-07-12T15:13:57","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T14:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/blog\/?p=870"},"modified":"2012-08-22T14:24:51","modified_gmt":"2012-08-22T13:24:51","slug":"now-or-lately-known-as-the-whitechapels-london-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/870","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Now or Lately Known As&#8221;: The Whitechapel&#8217;s London Open"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Structuralist and post-structuralist linguistic theory has it that the relationship between the name (signifier) of a thing and its essence or identity (signified) is an essentially arbitrary one \u00e2\u20ac\u201c there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no reason why a thing should be called by one name and not another, save for habit or convention. In his performance\u00c2\u00a0<em>Deed Poll<\/em>, Martin John Callanan shows in an imaginative and quietly witty way how things aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily so straightforward. By changing his name from Martin John Callanan to Martin John Callanan using the eponymous legal procedure, the artist demonstrated to a live audience at London\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Whitechapel Gallery the vectors of legal, political and religious power that underpin the day-to-day performative use of names in Western societies. The various hoops to be jumped through in order to satisfy banks and government bodies, including swearing on the Bible, spoken declarations, testimony from a responsible third party, signatures from witnesses, and the stamp and signature of an official registrar, are a far cry from the free movement of signifiers imagined by the post-structuralists.<\/p>\n<p>Callanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s performance accompanied the presentation of two of his works,\u00c2\u00a0<em>International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0<em>Letters 2004-2006<\/em>, in The Whitechapel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s summer exhibition,\u00c2\u00a0<em>The London Open<\/em>. The gallery\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stated intent was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to showcase the most dynamic work being made in London in 2012\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, with works being selected through an open submission process. The result is a mix of the poetic, the intelligent, and the tedious. Besides Callanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s contributions, the intersections of power and language were also explored by Sol Archer, whose video work\u00c2\u00a0<em>Palace in the Left\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>spun a dazzling web of references encompassing hummingbirds, particle physics, Mayan rituals, neurobiology, and more. Just at the point when you are ready to believe in the interconnectedness of everything, however, the video concludes with the promise that all this is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153coming soon to your future home\u00e2\u20ac\u009d: networks of meanings made possible by their subsumption under the category of consumer product.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/afternoondust.co.uk\/now-or-lately-known-as\">http:\/\/afternoondust.co.uk\/now-or-lately-known-as<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Structuralist and post-structuralist linguistic theory has it that the relationship between the name (signifier) of a thing and its essence or identity (signified) is an essentially arbitrary one \u00e2\u20ac\u201c there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no reason why a thing should be called by one name and not another, save for habit or convention. In his performance\u00c2\u00a0Deed Poll, Martin John [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1098,55],"tags":[65,2848,1166,1210,1174,1175,1173,1176,1168,1162,1163,1165,1170,1169,1164,1177,1167,1171,1172,1161],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-deedpoll","category-international-directory-of-fictitious-telephone-numbers","tag-callanan","tag-deedpoll","tag-dynamic-work","tag-far-cry","tag-government-bodies","tag-hummingbirds","tag-interconnectedness","tag-intersections","tag-linguistic-theory","tag-mayan-rituals","tag-particle-physics","tag-religious-power","tag-signifiers","tag-structuralist","tag-summer-exhibition","tag-vectors","tag-video-co","tag-video-work","tag-western-societies","tag-whitechapel-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":911,"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions\/911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greyisgood.eu\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}