By chance, when ‘Arty Fouray,’ a potential nickname for Arthur Fouray was transcribed vocally on a phone, in 2014, it resulted in an acronym: RT4A.
Matching the character count of Warhol’s name (4 for the first name, 6 for the last name – with each syllable having a double meaning), it is an experiment with a hasardous, unpredictable, yet arbitrary source material: a given name, consciously deconstructed beyond traditional, ego-driven notions of artistic identity.
By shedding an identity and adopting an impersonal code, a set of letters and numbers, RT4A performs a kind of symbolic violence against the artist’s ego and the cultural capital typically associated with a known, individual artist’s name.
It even becomes a simulacrum – a copy without an original, an entity that undermines the difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’. The RT4A project can be seen as an avatar, a fake, complicating the distinctions between artists and ‘constructed’ identities.
As a signature, it embodies a paradox: simultaneously the mark of an artistic act and an impersonal symbol obscuring individual identity. It not only facilitates the incorporation of other artists’ practices into RT4A but also ensures that its creations are not confined to the temporal boundaries of a single artist’s lifespan.