ONE SELF PORTRAIT EVERY DAY in 2020 : 317

I am a slow reader, partly because I don’t seem to find the time but mainly because I like to savour what I read. Borges is going to be a treat. This morning I started reading “Fictions” and had to stop at the bottom of the first page of his foreword with my brain buzzing with ideas.

Herzog Dellafiore came into existence approximately one year before Klara was born. For me, part of being an artist has always been the ability to show the finger to conventions. I needed, now that I was soon going to become a responsible father, to create an alter-ego who could carry on being irreverent while Daniel Devlin would become a slightly more responsible person.

Herzog’s first recorded appearance was in the Chelsea MA Fine Art 2006 catalogue. Each artist on the MA would have a page. Since I was the one designing it and organising the printing I was able to take out Daniel Devlin and replace him with Herzog Dellafiore. 

And instead of a title to an artwork I put a quote inspired by a quote by Gustav Metzger. Herzog’s name comes from combining Werner Herzog with Paolo Dellafiore (a not very well known Argentinian football player who played for Palermo at the time, just liked the sound of his name). His (or her, although he is a he most of the time) back story was of an artist who had had a degree of success in the art world but now was excluded from it, most probably because of a lack of talent and also because of his obnoxious character. His gripe with the art world was that artists were getting so good at making objects that look like art that it had become impossible to distinguish what was art and what wasn’t. That artist were being trained to make art-like objects that were indistinguishable to real art and that often looked more authentic than the real art.

When the catalogue was printed, a fellow MA student commented on my decision to “give” my page to Herzog and told me that I was being unprofessional. The idea of art as a profession has always troubled me and that is probably why I have always find it difficult to call myself an artist.

Herzog appears in a video conversation with Bruce McLean. Sheridan is operating one of the cameras and I give him a script where he has to continuously interrupt the conversation by insulting us. I tell Bruce (who didn’t know that this was part of my script) that it’s Herzog Dellafiore and that he’s angry with artists pretending to be conceptual artists but in fact being in the business of making objects that look like art, being lost in the fog of Neo-Formalism. 

Through Michael Shamberg, Herzog managed to get a show at the Tracey Neuls shop in Marylebone Lane but that got cancelled once they saw the paintings I was planning to exhibit. Pity as I took out a quarter page ad in Frieze magazine for this. 

I sometimes got actors to play Herzog. Maxine Peake was Herzog for an evening when I interviewed her. She was amazing. Goro Osojnik is a Slovenian actor who became Herzog during a talk in Ljubljana about Susak expo. 

Throughout the years, I have been working out Herzog through different projects, in Sluice magazine there is a conversation between me and Keran James mainly about Herzog, some information was made up in the moment filling missing bits of the jigsaw. 

The Lost Herzog Paintings is about when Daniel Devlin visited Herzog in Macerata and about his paintings that were lost and Charles Williams repainted them from the sketches and notes I had taken at the time.

https://susakpress.com/spiralb…/the-lost-herzog-paintings/

I have been thinking of making a documentary called “What the Fuck happened to Herzog Dellafiore” where i visit famous people asking them to talk about incidents they had with Herzog. I thought they could be real stories but just make them about Herzog; for example Bruce told me about a bust up he had with Tom Marioni so he could retell the story but pretend that the bust up was with Herzog. I thought of getting the Petshop boys to tele about their time with Herzog in the 90s.

I also am planning to write an autobiography “Herzog Dellafiore: my version”, in fact I have already somehow published it without having written it. I allocated an ISBN for it, designed a cover and registered it with Nielsen Books. For a while it appeared for sale on Amazon but it’s not there anymore, maybe it’s because I got in a bit of trouble with the Legal deposit at the British Library where a copy of very book published in Britain has to be sent to them. I had to eventually tell them that there had been a problem and that the book hadn’t been published after all and that it had been registered my mistake. There is still a trace of it here: https://www.amazon.in/Herzog-Dellafiore-My…/dp/1905659067

The problem is that writing Herzog’s autobiography is just too big of a job especially as the whole point is the existence of this book, not the book itself so maybe I’ll take Borges’ advice in his foreword : “The better way to go about it is to pretend that [this book] already exists, and offer a summary, a commentary on [it].”

I AM STILL ALIVE

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