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Anonymous Lovers: They're/we're playing our/their song Iain and I are in a bar off the Charing Cross Road, discussing ideas around Iain and Jane's video Anyone Else isn't You, trying to make sense of their elusive, provocative work, and of this particular video, that looks for all the world like a conventional 'talking heads', a video diary of young-ish people speaking about their lives, their loves and the mix-tapes they've made for girlfriends and boyfriends. In the bar, the conversation drifts for a moment... I laugh and say to Iain that no one ever gave someone they loved a mix-tape of classical music: What would be on it? One long track? Beethoven's 5th Symphony, for example? All of it? It wouldn't be you trying to saying something personal to someone you loved, about them, about joy or love or fellowship. It would always be Beethoven, saying a great deal, about the whole world, to the whole world. Yet this already says more than enough to make sense of Anyone Else, and it's apparent subject matter - ordinary people talking about each other, and the mix-tapes they make as part of their lives together. To watch Anyone Else is to be witness to other people's thoughts about their private emotional lives. But beyond that, it touches on our own attitudes regarding how we form social bonds with others, what it means to communicate something authentic to others, and how in a mass culture made up of an seemingly infinite range of artefacts, our sense of self is formed not only by direct contact with each other, but through our relationship to the physical traces of our own past, the things that persist even though our lives may have changed.
Both the mix-tape and the personalised, confessional documentary are forms of culture we've become used to, and we feel comfortable with the idea of hearing people like us reminiscing about something we've probably done ourselves. But maybe we should be wary of how good it feels, and perhaps Anyone Else tells us two things; about how a broadcast and serially produced culture has come to present us with the image of our own personal, private lives; and how the mix-tape is a different form, in which the individual takes back a small space out of that culture, for themselves and for someone else. Hearing about the inner lives of others, watching others in seemingly real situations reveal themselves is a fixation of our age, and our generation seems at ease with emotional authenticity as a kind of display: In contemporary art, Tracy Emin declares the emotional catastrophes of her life. On TV, we enjoy the voyeurism of Big Brother, appalled and amused by how the contestants behave, the laboratory-rat context affirming rather than undermining the traumatic authenticity of individuals in impossible situations. And in public life, we're now used to the phenomenon of the public, collective expression of grief, a form that started with the death of Diana, and does not yet seem ready to abate.
In a way, none of these are very different. There's a fascination with those forms of behaviour that appear explicitly represent what we would be if only we could behave in public in a way that was truly 'authentic'. The paradox is, not surprisingly, that such forms are already quite clearly public, and yet we have to be on the other side of the screen to be part of them. So 'being real' nowadays is now strangely confirmed through consuming its representation in cultural forms that insist that they really are real. This is a theme that has emerged throughout Iain & Jane's work over the past decade, not only in the series of video-works of which Anyone Else is the latest, but in their meticulous reconstructions of rock concerts, seeking out look-alikes and tribute bands to recreate a paradoxically manufactured 'authentic' moment, of historic gigs that were often the last those bands would ever play. With those historical recreations, the problem of the real and the authentic was located in the evident intensity and spontaneity of performances that were supposed to be coolly recreated versions of the original, and in the euphoria or the melancholia of an audience that knew that even it was a simulation, they might wish itself to forget it. With Anyone Else, the problem is more subtly articulated: A cycle of personalisation and depersonalisation between individuals and the culture that surrounds us, a culture that we both create and are defined by; structures and forms of activity which, like mix-tapes and confessional documentaries, we produce and reproduce, for as long as it serves our desires, without revealing the constraints they might already impose upon us. Like Iain and Jane's previous work, Anyone Else recombines cultural forms that are the product of a generation for whom identity became radically individualised, whilst becoming ever-more grounded in the circulation of strictly cultural forms, experiences and artefacts. What their work provokes without making judgements about it, is a realisation of how the current generation make and understand their place in the world. Our generation grew up during two decades marked by important changes in our society and culture, developments that, now that we look back, profoundly altered our relationship to what self-expression and identity mean for us, and the role of culture in our lives. The 80s saw the continuous assimilation of music as a venue around which to cohere around alternative ideas to that of the uptight, stuffy and foul-tempered public culture of the Thatcher years. Incredulous towards the optimism of the 60s and cynical of the public, confrontational nihilism of punk, the 80s was a period in which you could get on and make the kind of music you wanted out of the glare of the public sphere, an unrecognised, marginal culture that grew up in the world between the boredom of the English suburbs and the embattled, beaten up city-centres. Between de-industrialisation and metropolitan decay, and out of the cultural confusion that it bred, this generation were part of an emerging culture in which cultural experience was no longer trammelled by all those contradictory edifices of post-war British life – Labourism and working-class associations, churchy morality, Tory middle-Englandism, nationalism and the welfare state. Of course, there had been youth culture and pop music ever since Rock around the Clock, but the 80s were distinct because they declared the first unravelling of all those old institutions against which counter-culture had previously defined itself. As individualism and personal choice advanced as quickly as old solidarities an moralities retreated, the counter-culture, some critics joked, swiftly became the 'over-the-counter-culture'. And if we look back on the 90s, we can see how cultural forms erupted to fill the gaps left by more traditional social identities and bonds. In the place of a political idea of working class life came Acid House and later, the New Lad. Britpop turned up to give musical voice to a dislocated, post-political sense of youthful Englishness, and before long, a metropolitan meritocracy of consumer 'lifestyle' took over, measured by the length of your loft conversion and the colour of your Vespa.
It was in culture then, that our generation turned 30. It's through music, fashion, art, and style, more than anything else, that we define who were are, what we want to be, and who we want to be it with. It is through the free-flowing circuits of the mass-media, and of the objects they produce, that we see ourselves represented, and in whose terms we define what is special to us, and what shape it takes. A mix-tape is the materialisation of a person's vocabulary of songs, their collection given new shape and meaning as a form of language, their own language, a song-sentence made out of other peoples' song-words, that reverses our relationship to our idols: instead of the anonymous multitude of individuals each focused on the live band before them, a multitude of bands, as little fragments of audio, come together to serve the individual, its desires, hopes and memories. So Anyone Else contains more than one interpretation. On one hand it no doubt reads as the typical form of one person's enthralled affection, that allows no others into the singular reality of The One I Love. This is the comforting reality of the mix-tape. But we might also understand this phrase in reverse, as the desire of the individual to assert a sense of its own reality, even in the paradoxical knowledge that as individuals, we're pretty much like everyone else. Because, even then... Anyone Else isn't you. What then is the mix-tape? The shape of a kind of privacy carved out of the anonymous, serial, repeating artefacts of a technologised public culture, a form of the personal recouped from a moment when everything is already based on the individual, for as long as those forms can be reproduced. But Anyone Else goes further, becoming itself a mix-tape about everyday life, a song made out of other people's lives from fragments of their individual experience, which often, amusingly, turn out to be strikingly similar. What it suggests is that there is no easy way into the authentic and the Real, that our ideas of documentary authenticity, of self-expression, of an unrepeatable experience, make little sense in a culture in which reality is already made up of collages of repeatable experiences and histories, in which we already know that we are on camera, and into whose gaze we perform, only to see ourselves later on TV, at the second night of a tribute-band in concert. In this sense, Iain and Jane work past the dead-end assumptions about authenticity which much performance and video art has too long struggled with, as much as post-modernism's celebrations of simulation and the endless copy. What they offer is a curious truth about 'being real' today, where the more we try to access it, the more it becomes a representation separated from us. In the absence of other, more concrete forms of association and of action, we are always threatened with disappearing into an endless circuit of individualised similarity. Anyone Else is a song that points us to everything that its subjects are, outside the frame, beyond the video screen, and beyond the words of the lyric sheet; life that is always more than the soundtrack that goes with it.
Anonymous Lovers: This text originally appeared
in the Anyone Else isn't you catalogue
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