Andrew Spira

This book is an examination of personal identity, exploring both who we think we are, and how we construct the sense of ourselves through art. It proposes that the notion of personal identity is a psycho-social construction that has evolved over many centuries. While this idea has been widely discussed in recent years, Andrew Spira approaches it from a completely...

When Kasimir Malevich's Black Square was produced in 1915, no-one had ever seen anything like it before. And yet it does have precedents. In fact, over the previous 500 years, several painters, writers, philosophers, scientists and censors—each working independently towards an absolute statement of their own—alighted on the form of the black square or rectangle, as if for the first...

The notion of a personal self took centuries to evolve, reaching the pinnacle of autonomy with Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ in the 17th century. This personalisation of identity thrived for another hundred years before it began to be questioned, subject to the emergence of broader, more inclusive forms of agency. Simulated Selves: The Undoing Personal Identity in the...