SAYING ALMOST THE SAME THING
Carl Trahan Afterall Øystein Wyller Odden Curated by Elena Abbiatici and Valentina G. Levy
16 April – 23 May 2013
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SAYING ALMOST THE SAME THING [DIRE QUASI LA STESSA COSA] Carl Trahan Afterall Øystein Wyller Odden Curatet by Elena Abbiatici and Valentina G. Levy
Writing is one of the oldest forms of human communication, but from the origin, both in Eastern and Western civilizations, it was often used for rituals rather than practical use, in order to represent or evocate something, more than to communicate. In the act of writing there was an intrinsic sacredness linked to the genesis of the sign and its power of reality’s evocation. As it is known, writing and visual arts have a common origin that is ascribable to the will of representing an object through a system of signs. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida said that, spoken or written, language is always a form of writing. In fact he argued that it always question of a structured system of signs (signifiers) related to specific meanings which are shared by the same linguistic community. Taking a cue from the namesake essay of Umberto Eco, the exhibition “To say almost the same thing” want to discuss about the difficulty of understanding a written word, suggesting the possibility of error in the decoding process of the sign caused by the variability of its several interpretations. In the meanwhile, through their works and actions, invited artists reinterpret the ritualistic conception of the gesture of writing. La scrittura è una delle più antiche forme di comunicazione umana, ma fin dalle sue origini, in seno alle più diverse civiltà, occidentali e orientali, essa è stata spesso adoperata per un uso rituale piuttosto che pratico, per rappresentare più che per comunicare. Nel gesto dello scrivere è da sempre insito un senso di sacralità legato alla genesi del segno e alle sue proprietà di rappresentazione-evocazione della realtà. La scrittura e l’arte visiva hanno, com’è noto, un’origine comune che si basa sulla volontà di rappresentazione di un oggetto attraverso un segno. Il filosofo francese Jacques Deridda affermò che il linguaggio, parlato o scritto, è sempre una forma di scrittura, in quanto sistema strutturato di segni (significanti) a cui si attribuiscono significati condivisi all’interno di una stessa comunità linguistica. Prendendo spunto dall’omonimo libro di Umberto Eco, il progetto “Dire quasi la stessa cosa” nasce dalla volontà di aprire una riflessione sulla difficoltà di comprensione di una parola scritta, la possibilità di errore nel processo di decodificazione del segno e la variabilità delle sue molteplici interpretazioni, passando attraverso un recupero del valore rituale del gesto dello scrivere.
CARL TRAHAN Carl Trahan’s artistic work concerns language and interlanguage. In recent years, he has transposed ideas and concepts regarding translations into visual works of art. Of particular interest to him is what Antoine Berman calls L’expérience de l’étranger, especially in regard to the movement of translation. According to the writer, this movement originate from the same (the known, the everyday, the familiar) and goes towards the stranger, the other (the unknown, the fantastic, the Unheimliche). The impossibility of having a perfect double in translation is also a starting point from which he develops a reflection on the image and its reproduction. In the last six years, he has mainly worked with the space between German and French. Because of it’s similarities with the act of writing, drawing has been predominant in his recent production to represent notions related to translation. The usual starting point of a new project is a concept, the best medium to transpose it visually is then chosen (in the past, he has used object, installation, photography, etc.). During the exhibition Carl Trahan will be involved in a three days performance in which through the ritual of the act of writing, will highlight the semantic complexity and the ambiguity of the word-sign, which reveals itself especially when you are faced with the need to make it understandable in another language. Starting from the French word “bouleversement” the Canadian artist will compose a double tree diagram on a wall-board, in which each element is a synonym for the word of departure and their Italian translation, questioning even on what happens in translation between cultures, idioms, and between the work of art and the different visitators.
Installation at Label201, Rome, 2013
7 (les mots les plus terribles du national-socialisme), graphite drawings, 2011
Carl Trahan, during the performance Boulversement, Label201, Rome, 2013
Carl Trahan, Boulversement, detail, Blackboard paint and chalk, 2013
AFTERALL Deuteragonists who choose to laterality strategy has always been engaged in a deep search conceptual and theoretical, between fiction and refunctionalization of the form, AFTERALL, duo formed by brothers Silvia Viola and Enzo Esposito, investigates disorders of language and communication starting from exercise in the daily, pointing a finger of memory on the threshold of this. The poetic operation accomplished by the AFTERALL is essentially to make manifest those gaps or jokes of memory, history and culture, we often they deliver flashbacks fuzzy and imprecise. Are involved in an investigation aesthetics and sociological research the mistake and the babble, by chance or by necessity, of both urban spaces and objects or practices of everyday life. The beauty of the landscape incorrect, the item or customary action. On these traces the AFTERALL looking for clues to the stories, actions and documents, emphasizing what is usually considered an exception. In their work, the mistake, what is or is relegated to the margins, tends to acquire his sense of mistaking, like a journey that tests and experiences may lead to the knowledge or other knowledge. “Fine a se stesso” is the title of the work, resulted from the performance by Afterall, In “Fine a Se stesso” they traced several times on carbon paper – to make the content unintelligible - the text of a private letter, in which both the sender and the recipient were illiterate. Dated January 9, 1975, the letter was written in Brooklyn (NY) by a woman, Madeline Jordan, under dictation of the mother Philomenia de Francisco, and addressed to Giuliana Di Francesco of Qualiano (NA), with prayer of reading by his daughter Maria Esposito. The intervention of Afterall highlights the writing’s lack of efficacy as a tool of communication, also within an exchange between two members of the same linguistic community. Through the recopying of the letter, the two artists come to a progressive annulment of the meaning and the signifier, producing a total reversal of direction than the original gesture.
Fine a se stesso, Installazione, carta carbone, 2012, Courtesy Dino Morra Arte Contemporanea
Fine a se stesso, Installazione, carta carbone, 2012, Courtesy Dino Morra Arte Contemporanea
Fine a se stesso, Installazione, carta carbone, 2012, Courtesy Dino Morra Arte Contemporanea
ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN The Norwegian artist Øystein Wyller Odden explores the poetics of the object and its visual and audio expressive possibilities. His “Everything I have ever written” is the result of an action that has seen him involved for several days with an object obsolete as a typewriter. He reported several times on a single sheet (an A4 paper), everything that had happened to write during his training. The action was done by the artist in the isolation of his room, like an intimate and private ritual, with no intention of sharing. The process of obsessive rewriting undermines the communicative function of words, whose sign is lost in its repetition, making completely impossibile the transmissibility of knowledge.
Everything I have ever written, Typewriter on paper, A4, 2009
Everything I have ever written, Typewriter on paper, A4, 2009
Everything I have ever written, Work in progress, 2009
CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTISTS by Elena Abbiatici and Valentina G. Levy
In the visual-verbal research of 50’s years, marked by theorists such as Umberto Eco (and the idea of an open work) and Jacques Derrida (and his deconstruction), the verb-visual experience Fluxus of Ben Vautier, Giuseppe Chiari…, the inclusion of language in the works such af Joseph Kosuth, Nanni Balestrini, Vincenzo Agnetti, Emilio Isgrò, Alighiero Boetti etc ... Art and Literature made only one language. If in that culture of the “neo-ideogram”, the poem became a cultural and semiological sign, an attempt to compensate the crisis of representation (and the idea of the perception of death of art) in the name of the meaning, in your works the dominant feature is the incomprehensibility. Langue (the linguistic code, the structure of language) is deconstructed, like parole (the speech act), as the word becomes more un-recognizable and difficult or impossible to read. Then, it seems that in your work langue is the support and parole the incomprehensible translation. In which way Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic and semiological studies enter in your research? Do you relate with F. de Saussure’s codes? Carl Trahan: Really, I have not looked into semiology and the work of F. de Saussure... I have been more interesting in the theories on translation and more philosophical views on it. And regarding my work on the Third Reich, I have been interested in history. After All: In our research, the language is identified like a gimmick, a tool therefore used not as simple semiological analysis, but rather as a means of alternative interpretation of the contingent reality. Any form of ideogram and, in general any technical or artistic language, that we used wants to be a form of transfer, translation from a code of interpretation to another one. For example, in our installation “Fine a se stesso” what we are really interested in is to focus those changes - whether enrichment or loss - that the original meaning of communication suffers under a phase change or a translation/betrayal from its original one. So, we put attention in investigating the process of the verbal or written communication, the “gray zone” between the referent and the signifier, what happens in the moment just before the communication occurred. A buzz of Barthesian sense, inextricably linked to the present time, but also a time when it is no longer possible translate or interpret. A form of empathy with a state or a practice. A drift. Øystein Wyller Odden: F. de Saussure has not, directly at least, been very important for my work yet, but language is. I often see what I do with objects as analogues to what one can do with words, such as tautologies, paradoxes, nonsensical interconnections, repetition until meaning is lost etc. Furthermore I see my works as attempts to reveal and investigate structures and frameworks in the subject matter. With a linguistic analogy the strategy I have been using in my recent works can be seen as similar to replacing the words in a language with unintelligible sounds as a mean to expose underlying structures. In that sense one could say I try to expose and investigate the langue of the subject matter by removing the meaningful content. In a recent series of installations I have worked with almost archetypical environments from the knowledge economy, such as the office, the conference room, the lecture hall, seminar room etc., but also domestic environments like
the living room and the home theatre. The starting point for these works is an investigation of the technologies made for presentation of meaningful content, e.g. various projectors, screens and sound systems. I investigate the application area and the limitations of these technologies by using them empty, with no “text” (in the sense of meaningful content), hence to use them as mere sources of sound and light composition. In this way my ambition is to use the same strategy on different levels: the technologies are empty and the audio-visual spectacle produced wants to work on the perceptual apparatus of the audience. The audio-visual spectacle is intended to explore and expose perception as a specialised apparatus with certain limitations and characteristics, the most prominent being as a constructive device that makes connections and fills in the blanks. A goal for me is to keep my artistic interventions as few, small and visual as possible, i.e. to show the audience how the tricks are done in order to make the spectacle constantly build up and collapse, interchangeably. In the work “Everything I Have Ever Written” (EIHEW) this strategy is not that apparent, although rewriting all my previous writings certainly explored the structures and limitations of my own creativity, thinking, style of writing etc. This was an uncanny experience. The writing is very present in your work: it is important for the act itself, designed to outline / produce a meaningful experience; for the attempt of understanding of the sign, however denied in your work, and for the use of devices that belong to the world of office and typing. The act of writing is very similar to the act of drawing: in both cases, it marks a track. Which track do you propose to leave through your research, although the text’s incomprehensibility? And what is the starting point of your work? Carl Trahan: My recent work draws inspiration from the writings of German-Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), who survived the Shoah in one of the last “Jewish houses” in Dresden. After the Second World War, Klemperer’s critical observations on the ideological underpinnings of language were published as “LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii”, or “The Language of the Third Reich”, one of the most compelling accounts on the power of man to corrupt language. The series “7 (Les mots les plus terribles du national-socialisme)”, here showed, is inspired by “LTI…”. After reading Victor Klemperer’s book, I decided to choose some words from the Nazi’s vocabulary, words that seem the most disturbing. I was interested in how typography has been important in Germany in the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries and how the Fraktur typo has been linked to the German identity. By giving words and letters a variety of typefaces, I considered how they acquired a history of their own. Typography was pivotal to National Socialists’ communication strategy. The Fraktur font was initially considered to be intrinsically “German”, but it was abandoned in 1941 for more modern typefaces; Sütterlin, a cursive and mannered version from the Fraktur family, was disgraced and eventually replaced by a simpler profile. These typefaces are no longer taught today, but whenever they are used, they allude – not always innocently – to notions of history and tradition. About the translation diagrams, like the one I will do with the word Bouleversement, I wanted to work with the possible slippage of meanings at play in the translation process. Because many words have subtile variation of meaning according to the context in which they are being used, their translations will vary and might slip away to unexpected directions... This underlines the limits and the subjectivity at play in translation. After All: For us the time of writing is a true act of performing. However, these private acts performed together or separately in our study, and almost never provided as relational moment with the audience, during which, we place ourselves in the text, written not by
us as in the case of the letter found (in “Fine a se stesso”) with an attitude that might be called servile, slavish transcription tense just because of the “already written”. It’s a task specifically aimed at identifying those gaps, those spelling errors that inevitably you commit trying to trace a sign already written not by your hand. Across these performative actions devoted to writing, we seek the gap, the juncture where even the slightest movement of signs creates a new sense of things. For this reason, our works always have a concrete base, belonging to a reality that surrounds us, or that impresses us, but still tangible, because we try to offer a vision of “other” from the daily. The text “un-readable” does not serve to convey the idea of a secret or hidden message, but rather the potential for a different kind of reading of the “un-known” as an epiphany and a plurality of senses always in circuit. Øystein Wyller Odden: In the work EIHEW the text was only meaningful during the act of writing, for me as the writer. The output, the black rectangle on a sheet of paper, is unintelligible as text for the spectator. In that sense the act of re-writing everything I have ever written is the important thing, the artwork, the piece of paper is just serving as a relic of this act. This particular work deals especially with work as an activity. EIHEW was made for my final year show at the art academy. At that time, being in art school, surrounded by all that creativity and good and semi good ideas made me sick and tired of ideas and creativity in general. This, of course, gave me an artistic writers block where I, working in a conceptual, idea-based tradition my self, came to the realization that getting no ideas means having nothing to do in the studio. Working with EIHEW gave me the opportunity to work full days, every day, in my studio without being creative, innovative, productive etc. This was in many ways a starting point for this work; finding a way of working with art that never can be adapted by creative industries, a way of working for the sake of working. I also think of this work as a proposal for an activity that everyone could and should do. Re-writing every text you have ever written into a black hole is both a nostalgic, therapeutic, cathartic experience as well as a painstaking revising of yourself, your thinking, your ideas, way of expressing yourself etc. The repetition in your work becomes overlap, accumulation. Could it also be interpreted as a metaphor for contemporary art, that reiterating the old codes is generating a linguistic and communicative disorder? Carl Trahan: Words acquire meaning through context. In the drawing series “7 (Les mots les plus terribles du national-socialisme)”, I superimposed the letters that compose a selection of words drawn from the National Socialist vocabulary in Fraktur typeface, to create abstract and sculptural forms. I was interested in how German language functions forming new words by juxtaposing different words together: this could be seen as eliminating the space between the words. So I took this logic to an extreme: eliminating the space between letters to end up stacking them on top of each others. This creates a form that seems dark and mysterious, for the nature of the Fraktur Letters. Moreover, these words become unreadable and sometimes still produce discomfort for Germans: this somehow seals their meaning. After All: The repeated action and repetitive for us is a form of exercise and, in these terms, it might be interpreted as a way to bring order, but not so much as a critique on how today’s art, but rather as an opportunity for systematization of knowledge and sedimentation of knowledge that comes from everyday life.
The idea of exercise is crucial in our research, is a process, a practice which for us is very congenial to the definition of artistic practice combined with the written language and the communication of the meaning of things. In “Fine a Se stesso” signs/gestures involved in the darkness of a sheet of carbon paper, which in an interstitial position, assumes the role of a matrix betrayed, and in the act almost of self-registration, copying and returning in the dark signs, forget it by heart. If there is a superposition state in our own work is given by a form of learning done, for exercises, which inevitably generate and wandering errors and further repetitions ... repetita iuvant. Øystein Wyller Odden: Kazimir Malevich labelled his black square paintings as “architext”, as text upon text upon text, to be seen as architectural structures of text. I did not know this before I showed EIHEW to my professor. It appeared that my professor was working on a similar project consisting of a series of paintings with text upon text at the time. The repetition and reoccurrence of ideas in contemporary art makes me think of Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as only able to identify some pieces of nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by banging its head against the limits of language. Art making as head-banging against the limits of the expressible can produce bumps that are quite similar to each other. Who are the writers who have influenced you? Carl Trahan: Antoine Berman, Henri Meschonic, Julien Green and Victor Klemperer. After All: There are several writers who fascinated us, now we think to R. Barthes, L.J.J. Wittgenstein, U. Eco, T. Todorov, J.L. Borges, S. Beckett, but we suspect to forget someone... Øystein Wyller Odden: I draw inspiration from a variety of fields, especially philosophy, psychology, sociology and biology. My influences range therefore broad rather than deep, which can make a list of writers that have influenced me long and rather shallow. But one stands out; for a long time now Ludwig Wittgenstein has without comparison been the most influential writer for my work and my thinking about my work. I find his way of thinking about language and philosophical problems appealing and seductive almost to the extent where it prevents me from taking in other perspectives. For EIHEW Franz Kafka was a great inspiration, especially with regards to his painstaking self-censorship. Both in his writing, but also the fact that he on deathbed told his friend Max Brod to burn everything he had written. Brod published everything instead, luckily, but also, from Kafka’s perspective at least, ethically problematic. EIHEW and thoughts around the notion of working as an artist was also influenced and evoked by the writings of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, especially Chiapello’s essay Evolution and Co-optation “The ‘Artist Critique’ of Management and Capitalism.”
SAYING ALMOST THE SAME THING Curated by Elena Abbiatici and Valentina G. Levy Graphic design by Label201 With the sponsorship of Québec Delegation in Rome
Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Thanks to Johanne Larivière-Tieri Attaché to the educational and cultural affairs of the Québec Delegation in Rome
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec Dino Morra Arte Contemporanea Fine a Se Stesso by Afterall
via Portuense 201 - Roma www.label201.com - info@label201.com
www.label201.com info@label201.com