Carlos Fentanes

One of the first songs in the musical Cats from Lloyd Webber is about the Naming of Cats, a difficult matter indeed.

Right now, I have a difficult time trying to name a work of art and I remembered that poem of T S Eliot that Lloyd Weber took for his musical, I’m going to leave the original poem at the end of this article.

There’s a very famous work from Damien Hirst, one of his top ten better artworks, it’s called: “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, but everybody knows it as the stuffed shark or the ten-million-dollar shark. If there’s something that attracts me from Damien Hirst work are the titles, he has an amazing imagination for the titles and the title is an essential part of the content and narrative of the work.

The same as “The Physical Impossibility…” there are a lot of works of art that we just know it for the popular name and not for the name that the artist wanted, like the Mona Lisa or the Arnolfini Portrait.

What about the famous painting known as The Portrait of Whistler’s Mother while the name that Whistler chooses for it was very abstract: Arrangement in Grey and Black.

The title also tells a story, usually the personal artist’s story and let us get inside the artist’s mind. That’s why I want something more complex for my last work, at the beginning the name was: Self Isolation, that was a year ago and in the meantime during the process of drawing the work had become more intense and the meanings are much more than just the Pandemic Lockdown. What to do? How do I begin the process of renaming a work of art?

And at the end, if for some lucky strike it becomes a reference artwork, how the public will name it, is it going to be the same name, or just Self Isolation or maybe something simpler like “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife”, maybe, I don’t know.

I really want a name like “The Physical Impossibility…” Something to piss off the gallerists when they try to put the title in a small card but also something with the power to set you in a profound trance or in a meditation state like the cats on T S Eliot poem:

“The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
          His ineffable effable
          Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.”

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

     It isn’t just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter

When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,

     Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James,

Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—

     All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,

     Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:

Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—

     But all of them sensible everyday names,

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,

     A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,

     Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,

     Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,

Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum—

     Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,

     And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover—

     But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

          His ineffable effable

          Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular name.