No One Legible

»One of the ways of understanding this project is to imagine a busy, main street or square of a capitalist city, which wants to be the imposing centre of the agglomeration, where people live, work, go to the cinema, shop, trade etc. Examples of such places are Times Square in New York, Piccadilly Circus in London, Shibuya and Shinjuku in Tokyo etc. They are highly publicised, i.e. notoriously known places, while on the other hand they can claim that no one has ever really seen them or has a chance to see them, because they are concealed by signs and information that distract attention from them.

It is also possible to imagine a Formula 1 driver or a Tour de France cyclist followed by a camera, while you read information about Benetton, Mercedes, Esso or Alitalia, and it may not even occur to you to ask “Who is that person concealed by information? Does he have children? What is his mood? Is anything upsetting him? What is he thinking about? Simply, what kind of person is he?"

In the case of overalls this phenomenon is driven to extremes. The person is completely lost and we have no choice. It is as if this living, specific person has become instead a global personification. If we look upon him, then we must read – but it is not at all easy. Actually, it is almost impossible, because the signs interrupt each other and create unexpected connections, a sort of Babylonian language full of neologisms. In addition it is complicated by the fact that the text shifts and twists on the living body.

The “No one readable” overalls constitute a costume designed for performance. Usually, though, the performance has no anticipated plot. This “No one” who wears the overalls is performing whatever he is doing. By the fact alone that he is thus attired, he transforms the reality around him into new meanings and contexts. It is always a case of improvisation and a subtle shift in ordinary events. “No one readable” may simply walk the street, shop in a supermarket, stand in a post office queue, pray in church, sit in a cinema, stand at a bus stop, fly a kite, look out a window etc. He always attracts the attention and interest of people as a special, specific “non-person” (stricken by a global epidemic). Because it is a peculiar feeling to see someone specific, who is moving and living, but has rather an objective character.

The performance for the Zen temple in China consisted of two parts. Both of them used a Nokia N95 cell phone with a camera and large display. It was necessary first to photograph with the cell phone in Beijing as many signs, information boards, advertisements etc. as possible. In the second phase of the performance I was allowed to sit before the altar of the temple in the Lotus position during its consecration. I held the cell phone at the centre of Chi energy and about every five seconds switched the Beijing photographs from one to the next. There occurred here a certain merging of "No one readable" - i.e. the impersonal person - with the idea of "denial of the ego" characteristic of Buddhism. It was as if a being without ego had become a kind of medium or server of global information, and as if the cell phone connected the satellite network with the mental energy of this non-person-medium.« (JČ)