Indocile Strokes

The Place of an Artist’s Signature in Leticia Obeid and Fabio Kacero’s Works

Abstract

This article describe the particular gesture of two contemporary artists whose work deals with the problem of copies and forgeries: on the one hand, the series of calligraphic exercises titled Trabajos prácticos [Practical Tasks] (2021) by Leticia Obeid, exhibited at the Argentine National Museum of Engraving as part of the exhibition “Transformación. La gráfica en desborde” [Tranformation. The Overflowing Graphic]; on the other hand, Fabio Kacero’s piece called Firmas [Signatures] (2016), exhibited at Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery in Buenos Aires, where the artist collects around two hundred personal signatures. The reading of these two pieces suggests that the bond that used to function as a way of certifying the authenticity of an original work has now been stripped of its legal value (which currently relies on a number of legal tools) and, in result, the place of the signature in arts has shifted. This is why, in these works, the emergence of a repetition exercise comes from the need to find the current function of those strokes in the field. In that sense, the working hypothesis suggests that the copy, the reproduction, or even the invention of the drawing of a signature is intertwined with the production of an authorship, which will be here referred, in Laddaga’s terms (2010), as “modes of complex authorship”. Then the plastic and visual action of the mentioned works deviates from an individualizing expository position to connect with a network or collective laboratory of processes instead.