The Names
(or If I Were Film)

Version May 20th 2026

As a visual artist with a profound interest in language this project is something of an outlier, as it is a work made of names rather than words or texts. It is a continually expanding piece which currently exists both as an online HTML file (which can be seen here) and in iterations of moving image within installation contexts. It consists simply of an increasingly long, randomised, non-alphabetised list of people’s names. Each name refers to anyone whom I am able to recall who has, in any way at all, come into my orbit (or me into theirs) throughout my life thus far.

The names might be the name of a person who has, in some capacity, found themselves lodged somewhere in my memory and subsequently bubbled back up again: positively, negatively, profoundly, momentarily, lovingly, lastingly, antagonistically, randomly and/or bizarrely.

The names might refer to friends, family, artists, writers, perceived enemies, filmmakers, comedians, philosophers, lovers, bosses, colleagues, politicians, critics, entrepreneurs, poets, musicians, porn stars, academics, or even none or all of the above.

The work is, of course, an impossible project and something of a fool’s errand, and yet, it continues. It is not, strictly speaking, Sisyphean, as, in theory, there will be a conclusion when I die or my memory completely fades, whichever comes first. Maybe that's why it continues, because sooner or later, it won't.

As an ongoing project, it also reveals fading memory and fading people at the same time as new figures come into orbit. Sometimes it feels as though I am somehow saving up the names for some form of “later on”.

The process also profoundly reveals to me the limits in the dimensions of my world. My sphere of “being influenced” is perhaps not as rich or open as it could be. There is a message to heed somewhere for me there.

Although the piece might emerge entirely from my own life and experience as it stands thus far — my “particular cases”, to use Boris Groys’ phrase in relation to works of art — in an odd way I also suggest that it becomes a means of my own disappearance, so that only the thought or idea of the process remains. Strangely, there is a form of disappearance through appearance. I like to think of it as a form of flattening out.

On a practical level the only 'rules' I have applied are that the people I am thinking of cannot be fictional characters. For example, if I recall the name “Ebenezer Scrooge”, then the name that follows from this would be Charles Dickens, James Bond becomes Ian Fleming, Mrs Dalloway becomes Virginia Woolf, and so on. That connection between character and the inventor of the character seems to come quite naturally.

Secondly, if there are two or more people with the same name — for example, Steve McQueen the artist and Steve McQueen the actor, or Socrates the philosopher and Sócrates the footballer — then their names appear more than once, but as the sequence of appearance of names is random, this is largely of no consequence.

Where a name exists in a different alphabet, I have tended to use a Latin alphabet version, as this is probably how I would recall it. For example, 艾未未 becomes Ai Weiwei.

As a form of afterthought, I have begun to think of this growing record as a cast and crew list, as though I were to think of myself as a film, or some kind of 'production'. Unlike an actual movie, however, I make no attempt to create a hierarchy of names in terms of directors, actors, screenwriters and so on.

It occurs to me that to do so would be to miss the point entirely, which in turn reassures me that, despite the ridiculousness of the process, there might indeed be some kind of point, even if I have not fully grasped it yet.

Having said all that, although I have refused hierarchy, there is one name which cannot be included because I cannot remember it, but which if I could recall then it might stand above others.

As a much younger man I met an enigmatic American in a London pub. I remember he carried a walking stick, even though he was probably not far from my own age at the time, and he seemed deeply thoughtful, kind, and perhaps slightly bemused by the shambolic company he found there.

He introduced me to the work of Maurice Blanchot, specifically The Space of Literature. I truly wish I could recall his name.

Steve Dutton. May 2026