PRODUIRE LE RÉEL,
LETTRE À PETER COFFIN SUR LA TRADUCTION
Producing the Real,
A letter to Peter Coffin about Translation
Dear Peter,
When we met last month in London, we discussed a rare rhetorical device known as prosopopoeia: a process by which inanimate things are personified as if possessing the ability to think and communicate. Contemporary art is full of unintentional prosopopoeiae—to such an extent that we could describe its most innovative aspect as being haunted by the “speech of things.” In a reified world, in which goods circulate more freely than human beings, it is tempting to describe the experience of objects and to let them take the position of the subject.
After this discussion on prosopopoeia, we went to the Tate Modern, where you were exhibiting a work in a group show. Untitled (Line after Bruce Nauman’s T.T.A.H.t.W.B.R.M.T.) —a curvilinear length of neon that squiggles through space and illustrates the path taken by an idea. I wonder if some of the objects you create are prosopopoeiae as if channelled by you. Your work is concerned with mapping thought, giving it form so that it may have a kind of conceptual utility. Are your works encephalograms that trace the activity of thought in one way or another? Art aims to render abstract things tangible— perceptible and from this position, there exists an interesting and discreet continuity in art history, from Rembrandt to Robert Smithson or from Paul Klee and Robert Filliou. A large part of your work is about giving shape to things, as in Music Interpreted by the Brain, —we see vibrations and can even listen to the mental processes that occur as your brain reacts to the free jazz or heavy metal music you are listening to at the moment your brain is reacting and in interpretation, making its own music.
You make imperceptible phenomena accessible and experiential with scenarios offered by a greenhouse installation that facilitates interaction between plants and people, you’ve created portraits that are photographs of a subject’s otherwise invisible auric energy, you’ve presented an exhibition about micronations and concept nation states, encouraging a serious consideration of autonomous communities around the world that were created from the imagination and desire of individuals thus asserting and in a sense validating the realities and the tangiability they represent.
The project of making the most impalpable things perceptible, tangible and sometimes even visible implies, above all, in your work, that you use varied forms for the sake of connecting—and it seems to me that the dominant form is that of the circuit. There are few static shapes in your work, whether they are in movement or not. Your work represents the action of movement with attention to how one thing manages to touch another, to produce a space that is not fixed. The “Untitled” (2007) work which carries around the exhibition space along a complex, winding conveyor path, a single balloon, represents a movement that may resemble the path of a living idea or prosopopoeiae en route to some other position or new perspective “Free Jazz Mobile” (2007) reduces improvisation to a model in which the unpredictable movement in horizontal space represents the freedom improvisation offers. In both cases, connections and mobility, the two primary attributes of a circuit, are significantly present. In the history of the representation of movement, we have now reached a new threshold, through the figurative depiction of dynamic spaces: how the world creates the links, hypertexts, permanent circuits which underlie visible material.
Hence, your work is topology. I learned about this subject when I studied in the seminars of Jacques Lacan, who spent the final years of his life studying the unconscious using topological models. I was struck by the analogies that exist between this branch of mathematics and contemporary art, to such an extent that I began to suspect that topology is a useful tool with which to understand reality
Topology is more than a figurative model; it is a strategy. As you doubtless know, topology is the geometry of the qualitative: it is not concerned with quantity, but rather with shapes and their spacial relations.
We establish the invariants of a figure; we deform it and try to find the constants that remain after this act of translation. What happens when you fold a a thing or an idea in on itself? When you reduce a volume until none of its structure remains? When you force a form into another dimension? It concerns surfaces, dimensions that challenge the continuity of surfaces, thet knots that twist our reality and offer new perspective, and the passages that transform them. The piece you made for the Wrong Gallery in New York (“Untitled, Absinthe Drinker,” 2005) is a very good illustration of the issues involved in this strategy of representation. A motorized structure with a flexible mirror changes shape producing randomly shifting and morphing distortions of space and the viewers presence in this space. As a machine that produces distortions of reality, it is an effective topological device against reality. Likewise when you’ve created a circuit between music and the brain’s reception and interpretation of it, music and the reception we imagine plants have, here again you extend a topological platform from which you establish the parameters of a new relational space between heterogeneous elements, by folding them one against another.
Translation in this context is relatively novel with respect to modernism which had no need to translate anything at all: “backward” countries were expected to bring themselves to the level of the industrialized West who would not anticipate a translation of any language inferior to its own. from one side of the planet to the other. Translate? An absent figure was a last resort. Modernist abstraction therefore played the role of Esperanto, a lingua franca. Today, the translation of singularities acts as an esthetic support for a new generation of artists, the first to “taken up” by globalization. Figured translations are numerous in contemporary art, but transcoding is certainly even more important, with passages from one format to another, the production of new shapes that result from the very act of translating; the passage from sound to image, a text to a dance. Some artists translate the specific characteristics of their local culture, in a vocabulary borrowed from art history (the minimalist and conceptualist toolbox, initially). From SooJa Kim to Surasi Kuzolwong, we find practices that connect specific Western philosophical thought to a formal vocabulary that comes from the history of the avant-garde movements. Today, the interesting works speak in slang. They speak a pidgin English, the language of advertising, communication, branding, binaries, logos—the reproduction/remixing techniques of the new American wave. Artists considering these modes as the context within which our reality is framed place the process of transformation from one format to another at the center of their work, reflecting the importance accorded this esthetic of translation. You belong to a generation of artists for whom the mother tongue is a slang of translation in the context of globalization.
Representing the world is what your work concerns itself with. But because no representation is ever free from the codes of domination, we now express ourselves in the most common visual idioms of the standardized worldwide culture. The artists that interest me today are those who articulate, in unique languages, the issues that can reach anyone, regardless of their singularities. Translation is an ethic of receiving signs.
The etymology of the word “produce” is Latin: producere means “to lead or bring forth. Art seems to be shifting from “pro-duction,” to “tra-duction,” with a greater attention to process involved in translation. In other words, a shift to objects that are no longer situated between the artist and receiver, but that move through both—the world as an infinite palimpsest. These objects are no longer products but “tra-ducts.” With this idea of translation, the “death of the author,” as analyzed by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, acquires an unexpected variation: works of art now “pierce” through objects, and the artist, more than ever a subject, finds him or herself at the center of a network of countless codes; It’s you, Peter, who can translate the work of the Satin Bowerbird—the construction of an artwork for which you provide the structure, using the bird’s instinctive attraction to the color blue and translating it to what we understand of our own esthetics in that process.
When you work on the myth of flying saucers or the movements of a whale, it is always through a movement of translation. How do you interpret reality through a shape? The essence of a piece like “Untitled (Bird in Space, Tropical Drink, 2003),” which proposes a parallel between scientific research, modern universal idealism and the iconography of a cocktail, resides in a formal analogy between unrelated realities left to figure and open to be considered. I invented a word to describe this particular type of contemporary artist that I call the semionaut—someone who generates connections using signs. We can see this in such dissimilar artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Paul Chan, Francis Alÿs and Simon Starling: their work extends horizontally, in a wandering fashion, far from any predetermined formal identity.
You—and they—invent paths among the signs, without limiting yourselves to a single type of space. In so doing, you have taken on an extraordinary challenge: to invent the visual culture within an era of infinite migration. Can we still exhibit forms as was done during sedentary times? In “Around about Expanded Field” (2007), fragments of iconic sculptures are reduced to their shadows: these black silhouettes, which include the works of Joseph Beuys and Max Ernst, seem ready to loosen themselves from their static and historical weight. Portable, mobile, reduced to the essential: art in an era of fluidity, plunged into the case of an “expanded field”
The “Micronations” exhibition (2007) is compilation of ephemera, signs, documents and anything to some degree or another ‘official’ about self-declared nation states that are imaginary or which aspire to a real autonomy. An allegory of the “offshore” is offered and addresses the beneficial scattering of culture and knowledge. Because borders are invisible, and yet even more ever present and restrictive, an interesting strategy consists in infinitely multiplying them. Your project explores the accepted and expected reality with the imagination that constitutes the concrete source of art today. While modernism aimed to destroy illusion, to go beyond the canvas, to make auto-reflexive machines of art, today I tend to think that the contemporary equivalent (forget postmodernism; for us, it already belongs to the past) involves the use of fiction to explore reality. We STILL record this reality, and do so using fictional tools. In short, the new modernity is reality plus fiction. This compilation of imagined and fictionalized states creates a story that recharges and redefines that which it puts together as a compilation of such realities—itself a fiction.
Artists exist to produce realities—no longer to analyze them, critique or inventory them. These last three functions belong to a late modernism, which your work helps keep at bay.
-Nicolas Bourriaud