“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 ‘dierence’, a continuous deviation from
what we think we are?”