One of the things that’s come out of my interest in the paper I referenced in my last post about John Dowland is the concept of self-fashioning. It’s not a concept that I’d come across before, and in any case it seems mostly be used in cultural studies terms to describe the social construction of self and affect in historical circumstances. There are exceptions to this, though, since obviously a critical tool that can be of use in attempting to give the formation of personal identity some background is going to be quite appealing to anyone who’d like to put some meat on the bones of how we create our selves. (And how we have historically been doing this since forever, not just since postmodernity).

A little background on my own interest, though.  My studies on artists’ books include my PhD thesis Becoming what the book makes possible: aspects of metaphorisation of identity and practice through artists’ books. This was about how the use of the roles made possible in artists’ books made it possible for artists not just to use different techniques, but different ideas of who they were: they were being poets and printers and writers and publishers and painters and (etc etc). I was concerned to set out how there were things to find out about the I of artists’ books on their makers and readers, as well as critical investigations/typologies/etc to be founded on their effects. (I’ve also more recently been interested in how artists’ books can provide dissonant or disruptive effects that cause us to alter our affect towards the institutions that provide them (in particular, libraries: see my Masters thesis). Effect recapitulates affect. Sort of. Which was my way of sidestepping others’ work on canon-creation/ definition by looking at artists’ books more as a performative locus for the artists’ identity/the reader’s critical literacy. It’s been fun.

I need to read more about how self-fashioning is supposed to work, but I think I can interpret  my own theoretical interests in its light. It’ll probably  fit with much of the theoretical apparatus I set up to describe what was happening to artists who chose artists books – with their possibilities of creating new circuits of exposure, new forms of legitimacy, ways of piggybacking on other cultural constructions and identities, etc, and their hybrid , metistic, tactical qualities (over against the qualities of definition, strategic outlook and settled identity).

This interview with John Shusterman on Art and Self-Fashioning is proving a fruitful starting point for me to see how one might begin to build up a coherent contemporary application of self-fashioning in precisely the area I’m interested in.

All this was started off by a passage in Eckstein’s paper (see my last post) where he writes about the possibilities for self-fashioning for Dowland, offered by the prospect of publishing his work. Even though publishing the work was a downgrade step for a courtly musician, for Dowland, it was a tactical moe that allowed him new forms of exposure and new ways of presenting his role. Eckstein’s notes head it as follows:

Motivations to publish printed music collections

– an increasing ‘privatisation’ of the music market in the second half of the 16th century
(a rising ‘middle class’ wants to imitate aristocratic culture)
– printed collections suddenly become attractive as
o tools of self-fashioning
o marketing instruments (e.g. Thomas Whythorne, 1771)

(Eckstein 2008)

This seemed to me to directly parallel the experiences of book artists feeling that their way of publishing (the ‘democratic multiple’ gives a sense of what was at play in instigating this wave to take advantage of the book for the opportunity it presents for self-fashioning) – that publishing would give them an alternative to the (privatised) gallery system, and  as tools of self-fashioning, of presenting their efforts in new ways, and of piggybacking into cultural areas otherwise inaccessible. Of course, one needs a more nuanced view and close readings of the topics to make the comparison interesting, but I nevertheless thought that the coincidence presented was worthy of comment. I’d like to do some more reading into self-fashioning and consider whether there is a fruitful field to illustrate this in artists’ book practices. I have (kind of) already done this, but this presents an opportunity to find a kind of theoretical crossover into a wider cultural discipline.