Foreignness of Art

Foreignness of Art

Autor Zana Šaškin

The overarching idea of this essay is the misreading or general misunderstanding of art. The key precondition is understanding of all art as foreign to some audience somewhere – but not simply in terms of language. Since the process of globalisation has left its print on how art is made, circulated and received, today the very status of foreign is changing, and by it we by no means understand what usually counts as ‘exotica’. National, regional and linguistic barriers provide points of reference for larger themes. Art made in the same country, by people of the same nationality, can be vastly different considering the notions of artists’ background, as are their political views and/or relations of economic and political systems.

If we don’t think much about it, we take art for granted; as if it speaks to us in a universal language, as if by its character it is a symbolic language used by humans for centuries, regardless of their culture and nationality.  We might think that it is characterized by simple conventions which humans have always been used to express that which cannot be expressed in any other way, that visual culture uses the language of the image that can be understood by anyone, and therefore is unified.  This might have been true for some previous ages, although I am very sceptical toward generalizations. The point is that it was much easier to understand the message of Western art of the past, for example in the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, where a universal language claims to confess a moral nature, purity, love, hope, etc. In the history of Christian art the best-known universals are communicated through the use of Christian symbolism of signs and emblems to teach and present religious truths.Symbols succeed where words usually fail - as in the ‘book of the illiterate’ Biblia Pauperum. Although its goal was not primarily artistic, but glorifying and spreading religion, it is instructive today for the function of visual art in medieval times.¹ This example is instructive today not as an example of a historically specific notion of art but for its function to glorify and spread religion. Everyone could understand the symbols, the metaphors and meanings which formed a part of common consciousness of the time.  Also the aesthetic experience was a direct one, stripped of words, supposedly the same for every human being with no difference. Or was it? In 1934 John Dewey referred to art as the best possible window into the culture of the Other (Dewey, 1934), suggesting therefore that differences do exist, and according to Goodman, perception of the world is enabled through symbols (Goodman, 1988). Understanding art is very much like understanding science, or any other discipline. It always requires interpretation of the symbols used and the relationships between them which produce meaning.

What happens when we no longer share this common knowledge of symbols nor a universal understanding of visual representation? What happens when definitions of art become socially and politically oriented towards a specific region of the world or society, bringing into question its universal language? I will support my points with examples of artists dealing with the absurdity of language as such, as well as with the breakdown in communication caused by artist’s different social and linguistic backgrounds. How much background knowledge is necessary to understand contemporary art? The most important fact about a particular language of art is that it has its own structure of some kind, which is shaped by political, economic and cultural factors. Since every person takes their own language and worldview for granted, it is sometimes difficult to realize how differently people with other language structures view the world. The similar notion can be found in Edward Sapir’s statement that ‘we see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation,’ (Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69)or Wittgenstein’s claim that limits of one’s language mean the limits of their world (Wittgenstein, 1922). Successful and meaningful communication requires both a sender and receiver, however, there are many things that can prevent the message from being transmitted accurately.  Many factors are important, from basic differences in language to the pitfalls of bad translation.  In communication in the same language there are further differences between the use of the formal and informal which are contingent upon the context. What is of crucial importance within cross-cultural communications are the changes in meaning between sender and receiver, as a result of a variance of worldviews.

In the year 2000 there was an exhibition in New York City titled Chinese Whispers,named after a children’s game as a metaphor for misreading the message. This exhibition focused on diverse modes of communication resulting from the artist’s position within a system of specific values, and in language as such, through misunderstandings, absurdity, and irony, in an Eastern European context. Useful in demonstrating the point of this essay, it questions the interaction between the individual and the social context by focusing on situations of misunderstanding due to cultural and language barriers, or the loss of meaning due to the noise in the channel. All of the artists came from countries in transition in Central and Easter Europe. Their work defined this experience is the context of its production.  In rearranging these contexts the artists’ rely on humour, irony or the absurd in the face of the distortion and misapprehension which can occur across cultural boundaries. Kai Kaljo’s video A Loser (1997) presents facts from her personal life in the form of brief statements accompanying them with laugh tracks from TV comedies. By placing herself into a context barely identifiable with the dignity of an individual and his/her identity, she makes more of a statement about the general passivity of today’s technological and media society that every person is confronted with on an everyday basis: the lack of real two-way communication or mutual understanding. Mladen Stilinović is a Croatian artist largely dealing with the issue of language and its application in politics and everyday life, as well as with modes of its manipulation, aiming at deconstruction of power mechanisms. The installation An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist (1992) indicates a dominance of language and the position of an artist within a particular Westernized system of values. This work deals with truths and lies, hypocrisy, differences and cynicism of power.

InPostmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism FredricJameson characterizes the postmodern as a form of cultural logic connected to the economic system of late capitalism specifically as ‘This whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world.’ (Jameson, 1991). He claims that postmodernism is ‘the ultimate form of commodity reification’, a pure celebration of the signifier. Alternately postmodernity can be described as the society of the image. With that in mind – what happens when message, or image, cannot be read? When discussing language, Jameson refers to Jacques Lacan’s conceptualization of schizophrenia as a linguistic disorder. He proposes that singular cultural texts (e.g. popular films, paintings, architecture) provide the everyday person with the means possible for evaluating the political landscape and recognizing their position within it. It is these multiple relationships between signs, signifiers and the signified that Vlado Martek is playing with in his work consisting of three parts; two ready-made objects, tautologically labelled by their actual names (e.g., a book is labelled as ‘book’); and the third part, in which the artists made a ‘mistake’: the outline of the United States is marked by the word BALKAN, while American cities are given names of various Croatian artists. By replacing the original geographical names, Martek has ‘mapped’ the Balkans (as a synonym for conflict and ethnic and religious intolerance) onto the geographical and cultural territory of the United States, thus creating a complex of ambiguous and contradictory meanings. This way he questions and plays with the ‘political correctness’ and clichéd one-dimensional definitions of democracy, civilization and multiculturalism. Marina Abramović, regardless the mentioned exhibition, addresses the issue in her videos. For example in Terra degli dei madre (1984) where she made the sound for the piece by inventing a language, made up of Italian, Yugoslavian, and Russian, or in Terminal Garden (1986) whereshe said that she

used a computer voice, but it’s so abstract that you cannot understand a word. As the words are so important in American culture, I collected many sentences from television commercials, without the names of the products...It is a kind of, a non-language. ...I immediately decided to make up my language and after I had talked, people from the tribes had understood four words [laughter], because using that kind of meta-language or non-language, you actually communicate on another level.’ (Journal of Contemporary Art, 1990),

implying thus that language is absurd as such, and that in art she aims at an another level of communication.

To illustrate that even Anglophone artists are aware of the issue, and that it is not an ‘East European thing’, I will mention Stefana McClure and her works that concentrate on the transformation of language by scripture; ‘subtitling’ of movies, hinting that we need to make sense of the foreign on our own terms. We have to define what is foreign to our individual experience, before we can hope to understand the roots of collective misunderstanding. She played with the fact that subtitles offer a way into worlds outside of ourselves. I also referred to her work Paper Balls where she ripped various texts and glued these next to each other and rolled them up into a ball, and Manga Drawings similar to the method of Films on Paper. All of her works concentrate on the impossibility of understanding the original message and replace them with a new association instead.

All the mentioned works accentuate the importance of the receiver in the process of communication and exchange. While ‘deciphering’ the message, the receiver actually co-produces it, bringing his/her own experience into it and (re)evaluates its content and meaning.  In spite of the fact that there could be huge differences in the forms of the ‘production’ of the signs and their ‘use’, the process of communication is a vital one; it initiates interaction and exchange, includes the cognitive processes and clearly delineates the relations of power. The position of receiver is also theoretically informed as it holds a prominent position in Jameson’s theory, as well as in the work of Michel Foucault. In The Foucault Reader he referred to the position of the writer in the following terms: ‘the act of writing is the creation of a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. If the author becomes insignificant, then the meaning of a text can shift and be reinterpreted, taken apart and examined for implied meanings.’ (Foucault, 1984, p 102)

During my research I have encountered the website that advertises Art in Translation (www.artintranslation.org); New Journal by Ian Boyd Whyte of the University of Edinburg and Zoë Strother of Columbia University, the first journal that takes as its mission the publication of quality English language translations of seminal works presently available only in their source language. Unfortunately I have had limited access to these resources which also question the way cross-cultural communication is understood in art. I mentioned this however, only to show how the (art) world has become (self-) aware of the issue of languages and cultures, and how in the future the statement ‘An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist’may be questionable. But I certainly doubt it.

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