What’s in a name? Artist receives his MA for changing ID
THERE was a time when aspiring artists went to art school to learn how to draw, paint and sculpt before they started breaking the rules.
Now, decades after David Hockney and Peter Blake honed their craft at the Royal College of Art in London, visitors to the 2019 postgraduates’ final show will find an MA student whose art involved changing their name in the pursuit of anonymity and gender neutrality.
Meet Mx Name Surname.
“It was a process of elimination really,” the student said. “I wanted to minimise my identity on paper to as minimal as possible, so it’s Mx Name Surname – Mx is the gender neutral term replacing… Mr, Mrs or Ms. Name Surname was the most logical minimisation of a name… It’s anonymous and, paradoxically, not anonymous at the same time because it highlights itself as something different.”
Visitors to the graduation show, which opens to the public on Friday, will find Name Surname in a designated space, available to chat about “identity, gender and bureaucracy”, or indeed anything else.
Making things easy to remember, even the artwork is titled Name Surname as it is inseparable from its maker.
The RCA describes it as “primarily about identity, illustrated through stories about the bureaucracy and experience of having the name Name Surname when dealing with banks, government and college administration. Surname said: “The initial gesture was just to minimise my identity… Identity, gender and bureaucracy are kind of things that all get brought up in the conversation surrounding it… “I’m there to introduce myself and then, pretty quickly, conversations just get brought to the surface.”
Exhibiting relevant material such as a bank card with the new name was considered. An earlier show did include that “bank card on the piece of paper that the bank sent it to me on”, Surname said. “But the show is going to be as minimal as possible. So it’s just going to be me in the space.”
Responses to any biographical questions were just as minimal. Surname declined to give even basic details such as a previous name, age or place of birth, revealing only that before the RCA there were three initial years of study at Camberwell College of Arts.
Surname is graduating with an MA in Contemporary Art Practice, defined by Jeremy Millar, the RCA’s senior tutor, as art which is “not determined by any particular medium”.
Asked what impressed him about his student, Mr Millar said: “His complete commitment to his work, to what he wanted to set out to do. In some ways, it’s a very simple piece of work, which opens up on to lots of complexities. I think that’s quite an admirable thing.”
Is it art? “Of course. I would just turn it round and ask someone who was questioning that why they thought it couldn’t be art. In some ways, it’s very traditional. It’s about an individual’s relationship to society and power and how they situate themselves in the world. Artists have been doing that for thousands of years.”
Surname said such questions were no longer valid. He said: “In some circumstances, it isn’t art, but in others it is. It depends on the context.”
Others remain to be convinced. David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw, said: “Do they actually qualify for a degree for doing that?” He recalled in 1991 the RCA failed Gavin Turk after he exhibited a blue ceramic plaque that read, “Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989-1991”. He noted, however, that Turk editioned the plaques: “Saatchi bought the first and they’re now worth a considerable sum.”