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The Persons

This artist’s book undertakes research into an alternative form of life writing, taking as it does the autobiographical details of people whom I have encountered in print during the first 50 years of my lifetime. The specific link between procedural form and appropriated content in this text are without precedent in previously published examples of practice-led research. The Persons celebrates my fiftieth birthday with 50 pages of material written or translated into English during my own lifetime. These sources include sentences found in newspapers, gossip and special interest magazines, philosophical and religious literature, psychoanalytic case studies, lyric poetry, personal emails, diaries, and travel literature. The “personal” subjectivity that is evoked by the circumstances of the writing and foregrounded by the title is displaced by the objectivity of the textual sources. Much of the material is presented chronologically, although the text frequently departs from adhering strictly to a temporally sequential format. The Persons thus offers readers the potential of a narrative, but that narrative is undercut by the text’s disjunctive use of source material. No two consecutive sentences have been drawn from the same source, and all of the sentences follow a parallel grammatical structure, with the proper name and verb always preceding their complimentary parts. The book was launched at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and at the Artist’s Book Fair in Berlin, and the primary context for its circulation is in the visual arts. As such, the book moves away from conventional literary form and linear narrative, and offers its readers instead a site for textual immersion.