From anonymous pamphlets in which 18th-century art critics challenged the authority of the French Académie Royale while claiming to speak for the anonymous public to artists’ collectives like the Guerrilla Girls, who, since the mid-1980s, have harnessed the namelessness of their members for purposes of activism and of institutional and feminist critique: In the art field, anonymity has long been primarily regarded as an emancipatory strategy. On the internet, too, the ability to remain anonymous is often closely associated with the promise of a democratization of public debates and political participation. In ­repressive political systems, in particular, anonymous online speech remains an indispensable channel of free expression for dissidents and marginalized groups. At the same time, anonymity promotes the spread of discriminatory content and so becomes a catalyst for online harassment and hate speech.

In the art world, as elsewhere, statements posted online without an author’s real name are not infrequently littered with vitriolic and hostile language. To make matters worse, the lack of restraint that characterizes the ostensibly anonymous internet as a realm largely beyond the reach of criminal law has also spread to the streets – think only of the masked ICE agents in US cities. Moreover, given the breakneck speed at which artificial intelligence has been evolving, the ultimately anonymous chat partner has been gaining influence, while it is users who serve as the anonymous authors of the large language models underlying AI.

In light of these developments in society, politics, and media technology, reservations regarding anonymous and pseudonymous actors are understandable. But rather than rashly dismissing the emancipatory potential of anonymity, this issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST, which was conceived in consultation with Isabel Mehl, undertakes a critical reassessment. To this end, the contributors relate recent phenomena in art and media to historical examples and theories and examine the complex interplay of the often antithetical forces that shape these issues.

The fundamental ambivalence of ­anonymity was described by Georg Simmel as early as 1903. His essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” explains how anonymous urban life can have a numbing effect but also protect individual autonomy in a complex society. Simmel’s thoughts on secrecy as a fundamental form of social relations serve Gary T. Marx as the point of departure for an exploration of anonymity through types, roles, and functions; as he demonstrates, their meaning and value are dependent on context – and not just in the technologically complex landscape of our present day. A new identity assumed upon ­entering a witness protection program, for instance, is something very different from the switching of identities that Philippe Thomas practiced in the 1980s and 1990s. Hanna Magauer analyzes his play with names as a postmodern encryption that moves between the search for identity and its obfuscation. She addresses not only Thomas’s contradictory stance on authorship but also authorship’s significance for the writing of art history and in establishing socioeconomic status within the art world.

Two contributions examine the implications of pseudonymous criticism for the sociology of art: Anke Dyes provides a critical revision to the recent trend of blogs and collectives whose self-declared aspiration is to evade the social ­dynamics of the art field through the use of pseudonyms. Her hypothesis that any piece of writing circulating on the internet today ­represents a form of “hope labor” (Kylie ­Jarrett) – which is to say, serves to raise the author’s profile in the labor market and within their own network – extends that analysis beyond online ­personas to scrutinize the specific exploitative logic of platform capitalism. Similarly, Annika Bender, the best-known pseudonymous author on the blog Donnerstag, which attracted ­attention in the German-speaking world in the 2010s, turns out in retrospect to have been a product of its time. In conversation with Leonie Huber and Anna Sinofzik, Steffen Zillig, one of the two writers who published reviews under this nom de plume, takes a critical view of the practice of ­hiding behind a fictional persona, yet he also defends it as disruptive play in a field that, he argues, was (and still is) plagued by a dearth of discursive sporting spirit.

To what extent can the concealment of individ­ual identities benefit collective political goals that transcend particular interests and essentialist tendencies? That is the question probed in the contributions by Gabriella Coleman and Simon Denny as well as Jaleh Mansoor. Mansoor focuses on the Emilia-Amalia working group and its use of affidamento, a consciousness-raising and community-building technique devised in the Marxist-feminist movement in 1970s Italy. She examines this practice of entrusting oneself to one another with a view to the influence that cultural policies compromised by capitalism exert over institutions and discourses of ­identity ­politics. Public-interest leaks of confidential government documents to journalists have often been the work of hackers like the group Anonymous, which has been active in shifting formations since the 2000s and is a focus of Coleman’s research. In conversation with Denny, whose art has repeatedly grappled with whistleblowing and the growing sway of digital technologies over politics and society, Coleman explains the origins of “hacktivism” and its opaque tactics, which are often wrongly lumped together with those of right-wing actors like QAnon.

How can the use of personas and literary masks be leveraged in the liminal zone between fiction and criticism? That question will be explored during the launch event for this issue. In a reading at Amant in New York, Lynne ­Tillman and Stephanie LaCava, rather than engaging in dialogue themselves, will let some of their characters speak – including Tillman’s Madame ­Realism as well as Bath, the narrator from LaCava’s novel Nymph.

The image spread by American Artist shows this decidedly generic name – which derives from a creative engagement with identity, race, and knowledge production and which has been American Artist’s legal name since 2013 – in ­different settings: on a place card of the sort seen at formal dinners, say, or on a traffic ticket, where it is flanked by a license plate number and other identifiers. The work raises the age-old ­question that drives this issue as a whole: “What’s in a name?”

Leonie Huber, Elsa Mack, and Anna Sinofzik

Translation: Gerrit Jackson