Founded in 1927, The Spotlight is the entertainment industry’s primary casting resource. When I acquired several 1993 editions some years ago, I began by cutting out the faces and rebinding the books; subsequently, video, carbon copy drawings, photographs and site-specific installations have emerged. The cut-up as a literary and artistic technique has a long and established history - from the surrealists to Berlin Dadaists to the beat poets of California. My re-casting of the 1987 Spotlight directory evokes the spirit of surrealist collage, embracing Andre Breton’s definition of Surrealism as a disruptive “juxtaposition of two more or less disparate realities” or, in this case, a disruptive sequence of voided realities.
The Spotlight directory is an artefact of our spectacle-driven society where status hangs on one’s performance within a fast-moving and implacable economy. Peter Sellers’ tortured and shifting personality reflected the power of this system over the individual: “If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am. There used to be a me behind the mask, but I had it surgically removed.”
(Sellers speaking to Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show television series in 1977.)