Artists want to be anyone but themselves

In 1921, French artist and Dada daddy Marcel Duchamp posed as a woman for the first time in a series of photographs by Man Ray. These images introduced Rrose Sélavy – Duchamp’s feminine pseudonym – appearing in one portrait with rouged lips, heavy eyeshadow, a fur stole draped around her neck and elaborately ringed fingers. In another, she sports a more androgynous look, staring intensely at the viewer, her face framed by a feathered hat. A testament to Dadaism’s irreverent spirit, Sélavy pushed the boundaries of identity and gender conformity; through her, Duchamp’s art’s wit, contradictions and latent eroticism were laid bare for the world to see. “The pun that is Rrose Sélavy is an expression of everything Duchamp’s art is about,” critic Jonathan Jones once claimed; “Eros, that’s it, that’s all there is.”

Above all else, Rrose Sélavy was a project of self-mythology and one of Duchamp’s many alter egos. Music is, of course, filled with them too. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust is perhaps the best known – an androgynous, glam rock alien rock star sent to save Earth in a rather messianic fashion. As Ethel Cain, Hayden Anhedönia’s concept album charts the character’s untimely demise at the hands of a cannibalistic psychopath. And Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker occasionally adopted the alias Darren Spooner, whose amped-up, sleazy machismo allowed Cocker to push boundaries free from the constraints of his public image. Art and music are both flexible to their creator’s whims.

 

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I’ve been thinking about why artists turn to alter egos a lot recently, especially in the lead up to the Mike Kelley retrospective at Tate Modern. Planted outside of the gallery’s Turbine Hall entrance, the survey’s promotional banners feature the artist’s Ahhh… Youth! (1991), Kelley’s tragicomic teen self central in a mugshot lineup, surrounded by a kitsch klatch of ageing toys. It’s an unsettling image – a surprising choice for promotional purposes, at least. More surprising still was that it was also used for The Met’s ‘Alter Ego | Projected Selves’ back in 2021, a show surveying the “aliases, avatars, and alter egos abound in today’s media, from pseudonyms and selfies on social platforms to packaged personae in pop culture.”

Kelley isn’t the only artist to experiment with identity like this. Matthew Barney’s alter egos take on a mythic quality, wrestling with ideas of transformation, desire, power and the tension between desire and discipline. In The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), he slips into various personas – most famously that of Harry Houdini; also a 1930s starlet, a murderer, and, bizarrely, a tap-dancing satyr – each a part of his metamorphic process. Art may be Barney’s game now, but it’s his former life as an American football player that is key to this practice: “I came of age on the football field,” he told Art News in 1993. “That’s where I started to construct meaning in my life, as an athlete. I think athletes are people who understand things through their bodies.”

The work of Robert Mapplethorpe, meanwhile, blurs the lines between subject and performer. In one 1980s self-portrait he poses in full leather gear, a whip emerging from behind his body like a tail. Here, Mapplethorpe transforms into a figure of sexual dominance, teasing the sadomasochist aesthetics, hyper-masculinity and homoerotic subcultures of the time. In contrast, his 1985 self-portrait where he wears a three-piece suit and holds a skull is far more introspective. It sees Mapplethorpe take on a dandy-like persona, referencing art historical tropes such as vanitas, but also positioning himself as both creator and subject of his own artistic exploration.

Then there’s artist, photographer, and filmmaker Sohrab Hura, who plays up his ‘idiot photographer’ persona – leering, voyeuristic and complicit with the violence he captures – in response to India’s ultranationalism and digital disinformation crisis under the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rule. Cindy Sherman’s endless array of characters interrogates the boundaries of self-perception and stereotype, while one of performance artist Michael Smith’s best-known alters – Baby Ikki – lets him tap into the absurdities of adulthood. The Barbican is also currently showing a new body of work by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, whose film noir, theatrical set design and crime novel inspired paintings present the story of Bettina, “a new character in the artist’s ever-evolving cast of alter egos”.

One of the most intriguing cases of artist alter egos I’ve come across recently is British artist Lucy Otter, whose exhibition is now on show at Pippy Houldsworth. Except it’s not really. Lucy Otter is a character concocted by Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra, the protagonist of his yet unpublished novel, Siete Cavernas. Sierra has crafted a compelling – and pretty extensive – biography for Otter: an Alaskan-born, Cornwall dwelling AbEx artist “known for her heavy impasto in gestural abstractions”. To add to the lore, ‘Otter’ supposedly created these works to accompany tracks on an EP by band Duchamp Widows – another work of fiction – that will be available at the gallery, as well as merch.

Why has Sierra gone to such lengths? I’m not entirely sure. But as a PhD researcher in contemporary literature, I’m no stranger to writers toying with authorial identity. Georges Eliot and Sands wrote under masculine nom-de-plumes to be taken more seriously at a time when women writers were not. The proliferate auto- and meta-fictive tendencies of today’s novels mean that an author’s word can never be taken verbatim – especially when the writers themselves appear in text à la Ruth Ozeki, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Ben Lerner, Paul Auster and Bret Easton Ellis.

Maybe for Sierra, this is all just a bit of fun. (The same can certainly be said of Margot Martindale’s animated jaunt on Bojack Horseman, a character actress so committed she becomes a career criminal over the course of the series.) In any case, while playing with gender seems to be a large part of the appeal, for me artists and their love of alter egos speaks to something deeper: the idea that the self is mutable, a construct to be deconstructed, remade and performed.

 

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