On Names

At the end of last week, I spent two full days in Nagoya for Aichi Triennale. This is an internationally renowned contemporary arts festival held in various cities across Aichi prefecture. It also includes performing arts programme. I’ve been following the programme of the Triennale for nearly a decade both as a producer/programmer and a researcher and now I finally had the chance to sample the offer in person. The theme of this edition is “Still Alive” inspired by a series of works entitled I Am Still Alive by Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara. Today’s blog entry is a reflection on this series.  You can read more about this fascinating artist here.

    It’s around noon on Sunday and I find myself at the Aichi Arts Centre. I take the elevator to the 10^th floor and enter a vast entrance hall plastered with Aichi Triennale branding, video screen in the middle showing an installation and entrances to exhibition halls to each side. I am quickly pointed to the ticket desk where they verify my ticket. I picked my pass day before when I attended Tomomi Adachi’s opera, but that’s perhaps a separate post. They hand me the exhibition programme in English automatically.　勉強のために日本語もお願いします。 (I want it in Japanese as well please because I am learning). I am not sure why it is assumed that every foreigner should speak English.  At the entrance of the first exhibition hall, this little incident quickly translates into a work of art in the form of Marcel Broodthaers’ Carte d’utopie politique et petits tableaux 1 ou 0 (Map of Political Utopia and Small Paintings 1 or 0). It is a simple commercial map with the political crossed out and utopia written above.  I turn around the corner to a vast room displaying a series of telegrams. On Kawara has sent these to various curators and acquaintances from 1970 to 2000. The telegrams had just two lines – “I am still alive” and On Kawara. There were many of these on display, but probably not all. I decide to take a closer look at all of them to see if there are any discrepancies. In the second or third row of tables, I spot two telegrams sent to another Japanese conceptual artist Yutaka Matsuzawa from New York to Nagano in July 1970 from two different post offices. These two telegrams have On Kawara’s surname misspelt as Kawarea. As I browse through the rest of the telegrams, I start to contemplate on how important our names are to our identity.

On Kawara, Telegram to Sol LeWitt, February 5, 1970, From I Am Still Alive, 1970‒2000, LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut, USA, 
© One Million Years Foundation

    Since moving to the UK nearly 14 years ago, I have been faced with the fact that almost nobody can pronounce neither my full first name nor surname – Berislav Juraić. I won’t bore you with how many different iterations or mispellings of my name I heard or seen. Indeed, my mobile phone bill still bears name Berisalb as no matter how many times I spelt it to the agent when taking out the contract and sending letters/phoning in to correct it afterwards, they just couldn’t get it. At one point, even before this happened, I had enough and changed my first name to Beri, though not in the official documents as I don’t want to give that away. I quite like this shortening as, even in Croatian, it could be my nickname. However, this didn’t prevent misspelling. Now, my name is often being anglicised as Barry or Berry.

    I don’t know if Kawara deliberately misspelt his name or if it was some kind of an inside joke between the two artists, Matsuzawa and Kawara. In an ideal world, I’d like to think that, but it is more likely that the officials made a mistake without even realising it. It happened not once, but on two occasions at two different places, too.  This made me reflect how our identities are being taken away with each misspelling and each mispronunciation of our names. Here, I don’t mean at all when the same person misspelling or mispronouncing it does it once or twice or acknowledges their inability. I am the first one to admit that I have difficulty with some names or even with remembering, but I try to acknowledge it every time. In my opinion, this is fine as long as you own up to your mistake. It is when you develop relationships over longer period that it hits hard when a person keeps on mispronouncing at best or at worst inventing an entirely new name (yes, it does happen!) because they feel that they can do that without asking or apologising.

    My research deals a lot with Japanese and other identities, so already in the first week, I can put Kawara’s work in context of Yudai Kamisato’s work. Japanese names are interesting. You can have two people with the same pronunciation of name, but with different kanji writing. While, on the one hand the beauty of Japanese language supports such diversity, on the other hand the institutions try to negate it. The current Japanese legal system requires married couples to choose one family surname, although Japanese imperial family members have no surnames at all. This legal requirement has been contested since the late 1980s as it infringes on individual rights. See this excellent academic article for example. Furthermore, in these pandemic years this has again become a hot topic given that the Saikō-sai (Japanese Supreme Court) rejected for the second time (first time was in 2015) the proposal for ‘selective surname system’ whereby couples could retain their surnames should they wish. For example, as this Mainichi Shinbun survey earlier this year shows the majority of Japanese under 40 supports the selective surname system, so why the wait to change it? In the coming days, I am hoping I will be able to find out more about it from my fellow Japanese.

    Therefore, thinking about the theme of the Triennale ‘still alive’, I remember every time someone who doesn’t speak my language, pronounced or spelt my name correctly. In these moments I feel still alive. Isn’t it time that we all start thinking about names?

P.S. This week I am starting my own little conceptual art project sending picture postcards from Japan to family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues across the globe. I had this planned before I came here without knowing much about On Kawara’s work or other artists exhibiting in Aichi Triennale, but it will be interesting to see what comes out of it, if anything.

I thank Aichi Triennale 2022 Organising Committee for providing me with the images.