Subverting Identity: Cesare Viel’s Performative Works

“Enough with us, you, them/Enough with me, you, her/Enough with him.” The identity issue is one of the major topics in the performative works of the renowned Italian artist Cesare Viel (1964), as it emerges from the above quoted incipit of the script of his first performance, "I Folletti irritati", held during the Art Fair in Bologna, on 28 January 1996. The identity questioned by Viel in his works is neither a monad nor the subject of a sort of histrionic autobiographical narration. As a part of the self that reveals itself during the performative action, it is a blurry entity constantly modified by the discrete and uncertain crossing of presences, spaces, and times, which are in turn liable to change and to be reinterpreted. This concept of a constantly subverted identity is explored through the metaphoric representation ("Infinita ricomposizione", 2015), the lecture-performances devoted to his favorite writers ("Cesare Pavese—Ritratto di un amico", 2000), the re-enactment of events of his youth ("Lost in meditation", 1999), the camouflage ("To the Lighthouse. Cesare Viel as Virginia Woolf", 2004, 2005, 2017), in the latter case following a line that, from Marcel Duchamp’s "Rose Sélavy”, crosses 20th century art, culminating in the disguised self-portraits by Andy Warhol and Urs Lüthi. This contribution aims to highlight the dialogue that Cesare Viel consciously engages with influential theoreticians of performative and relational identity such as Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Gilles Deleuze, to name just a few of them, which the artist subtly recalls when he states: “What’s identity but a ‘difference’, a continuous deviation from what we think we are?”.