One of the notably recurrent motifs within Hetherington's approach is a propensity to examine the value as well as the limitations of constructed geosocial identities and boundaries. Hetherington, largely based in Glasgow, Scotland, has spent a significant amount of time living in San Francisco which has impacted his interest in how cultural identities are constructed, legitimized and transgressed. A great deal of his work takes on some of the design tropes of Japanese manga animation and pop culture - as noted previously in his momoyoculture.com website. Hetherington admits to a formal interest in the work of Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami and Momoyo Torimitsu among others 8 In no way, however, does this Scottish artist claim to have authentically emulated Japanese visual production. His Japanese references are deliberately misleading in as Hetherington puts it, an attempt at "seeing how falsified, deceptive triggers can exist within the work. I think this is a nice tension in my work"9. Here Hetherington is playing with expectations of what is considered a 'truthful' cultural representation.

Dubious towards the value of taking community building seriously Hetherington questions whether viewers are "participants in a creative, visual arts community that declares itself to be progressive, accepting, evolving and diversifying, or are we reliant on conservative structures with a patina that declares progression, acceptance, evolution and diversity"10. Belonging to a community involves the responsibility and commitment that Hetherington is unsure is worthwhile or desirable. He states that, "I feel like a reduced character in structure that declares community. As for a mutual exclusivity between community/belonging and freedom; well I am still undecided. What I do know is that I enjoy a certain invisibility/visibility, a certain kind of appearance/ disappearance, a movement between bordering between groups, individuals, communities. A certain kind of belonging and grouping that will only last for a certain duration".

This ambiguity over the interface between the duality of belonging and not belonging to a community is reflected also in Hetherington's interest in the binary between academic commentary and visual representation. Interested in the writing of Hal Foster, Hetherington's commentary on the relationship between academia and reductive simulacra of theory reflects Foster's critique of the academic art institution. Foster noted that "Theory is regularly reduced to symbolic code, a symptomatic condition, bestowing values of prestige, rigor and progressiveness on work which would otherwise appear vacuous. Some art, driven by a sense of inferiority, by disdain of the institutions, self-consciously aligns itself to these 'established' discourses. In the process it reduces itself to a shallow illustration of the theory it purportedly embodies. The very origins of the theoretical act, there always lies a process of destroying, or dissimulating the object under consideration, thereby reducing it to a mere example"11. This summary of Foster's views on the simultaneously symbiotic and destructive relationship between art objects and art commentary is reflective of Hetherington's interest in the clash points between opposing concepts, be it physical space and non-physical space or alternately a sense of belonging to a particular art scene versus not cultivating a sense of belonging.

Through his choice of medium, treatment of cultural appropriation, ideas on artistic community development and opinions on the intellectualization of art Alex Hetherington is an artist who is deeply engaged with the ambiguities of simulating meaning. Jean Baudrillard differentiated between feigning meaning and simulating meaning. He noted that "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms. Thus, feigning… leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between 'true' and 'false', between 'real' and 'imaginary'"12. In this regard Hetherington simulates meaning and, thus, confounds the viewer's perception of reality. In his choice of the internet as his medium he simulates a non-reality that lasts physically only as long as he maintains the website, but which manifests itself in the 'realness' of thoughts and memories. Similarly with his simulation of Japanese cultural imagery and identity Hetherington confounds notions of what constitutes the authentic Japanese and what constitutes the false Japanese. When it comes to Hetherington's opinions on developing and maintaining artistic communities Hetherington's ambiguity reflects his uncertainty over their realness. Where others are convinced that they are a part of an arts community that proclaims itself to be progressive, accepting and evolving Hetherington questions whether this construction is illusory at best. This dubiousness extends itself into Hetherington's opinion on the academicizing of art. Deeply interested in the writing of Hal Foster, Hetherington notes some art masks its inability to simulate meaning by relying on rigorous intellectualization to build up a framework of legitimacy. In this sense, the intellectualizing of art is seen as revealing a certain 'truth'. For Hetherington the art is not about revealing reality or the truth - it is about constructing layers of simulation. And, as Ecclesiastes noted "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."13

Footnotes:
8 E-mail correspondence between Alex Hetherington and Christina Gray, March 14, 2005
9 ibid
10 ibid
11 E-mail correspondence between Alex Hetherington and Christina Gray, March 28, 2005
12 p 171 Baudrillard, Jean. 1986. Jean Baudrillard. Stanford. Stanford University Press
13 p 169 Baudrillard, Jean. 1986. Jean Baudrillard. Stanford. Stanford University Press