On Professionalism: Artists in their natural habitats

The conference at which I was going to present some of my research on professionalism in the arts has been postponed, so I stopped posting little teasers about it. But here's one more to think about until it gets rescheduled...

In in 1923 book The Art Spirit, influential teacher and painter Robert Henri discusses the conventions of the artist's studio. According to historian Sarah Burns, the studio of the late 19th century had become an important front in the creation of a professional identity for the American artist. Particularly thought the work of artists William Merritt Chase (whose studio was a frequent subject of his art, see below) the studio communicated a kind of worldliness to visiting collectors who were charmed by the artist's taste in furniture, textiles, and other miscellanea. American artists of Chase's generation (and audiences, as the Godey's Magazine image above suggests)  saw the studio as a stage on which artist identity was performed, and a large part of that identity was the demonstration of sophistication and sensitivity.

William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916). Studio Interior, ca. 1882. Oil on canvas, 28 1/16 x 40 1/8 in. 

Henri objected to such posturing, and suggested the artist had something to learn for a more common tradesman, the barber. He writes:

A barber has an apparatus that is surprising, and all in such remarkable order. [...] An artist proposes to make a work of art, and while his work requires infinite skill, he is generally far behind the barber in the arrangement of the most ordinary necessities. Why should this be so? Why would a studio be a boudoir, a dream of oriental splendor to have tea in, a junk shop, a dirty place, and rarely a good convenient workshop for the kind of thought and the kind of work the making of a good picture demands? [itals. mine]

In opposition to a powerful visual metaphor for creativity, Henri tries to re-position the artist's studio as a kind of workshop, moving it away from the implicitly feminine 'boudoir' of an earlier generation. Connecting the studio with a rather humble job, Henri draws a circle around the creative act, limiting to certain tasks (after the completion of which, one can exercise thrift by cleaning up and saving unused material, he later writes, rather than wasting it by allowing it to become a 'crust of dirty, dust collecting dried up paint'). He doesn't reject the idea that the studio is a manifestation of the artist's identity; but he clearly seeks to shift it to a more masculine and industrial statement - one reflective of the climate of professionalism in which he lived.

David Stephens in Translation

This is a talk I gave today at the Center for Art in Wood in Old City Philadelphia. I am grateful to artist, writer, and curator Robin Rice for the invitation and for the chance to talk about an artist I greatly admire.

I'm posting my speaking notes, and if time permits, I'll go through and add more images and hyperlinks to connect the somewhat loosely structured essay to other ideas. ~gerard

David Stephen, Cenotaph T.O.B.B. (Tower of Brothers' Blood), 2009-2012, painted wood, 108 x 144 x 72 in. 

David Stephens in Translation

Gerard Brown

Presented at “David Stephens: A Colloquy”

Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia PA

Robin Rice, Chairperson

March 22, 2014

I’ve been invited to talk about David Stephens’ sculpture in relation to translation. In preparation for writing about his work in the gallery guide for this exhibit, I went to David Stephens’ studio in late December and asked him how one could utterly misunderstand his work. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that one could ignore the fact that it is to be read.

I began to entertain the idea that the list of materials in his work should possibly be more elaborate than it is. The guide describes the sculpture and installations in the show as being made of ‘painted wood’ and I suggest that they should possibly be described as being made of painted wood and language.

Stephens’s work is covered in thick coats of language. For me, this calls to mind historian Steven Roger Fisher’s descriptions of the ancient world as covered in writing that declared the power and wealth of its ruling class to an almost illiterate public. Rogers challenges the myth of a ‘literate’ ancient world (67), pointing out that in a typical Greek household, the only person who could read was likely to be a slave who read to her master or mistress (55). This description of a world filled with language that could not be read (unless, ironically, by those who lacked freedom) echoes the experience of being in the gallery with Stephens’ work. The fact that David Stephens uses language in such a way that its meaning is not transparent appears to call for some sort of translation. Or does it?

            In her book on translation, Susan Bassnet describes three forms of translation – interlingual (the most common form – one which carries a text from one language to another), intralingual (one that translated within a given language, such as the translations of literature from one period or region into the idioms of another), and intersemiotic translation (in which the work is translated across signifying systems, such as between literature and visual art) (14).

            It would appear that Stephens, whose Braille writing stands for words in English, would be engaged in intralingual translation. This act is sometimes called re-Englishing and happens all the time in varying degrees of inventiveness. Romeo and Juliette was updated and transported to mid-20^th century New York by Arthur Laurents as West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins might be seen as intersemiotic translators who helped move the drama into music and dance) and the Star Wars screen plays are being backdated and transported to Victorian England by Ian Doescher.

Anyone who spends time on translation will be happy to talk about the problems that occur when a text is moved through time or across language borders, and most of those problems involve the use of idioms. Idioms give us a chance to see how strange something is and how far it needs to travel between languages. To keep things simple, we’ll start with an example that’s interlingual (between two languages). Every semester in high school classrooms across America, the French greeting ça va is translated in to the English salutation hello, despite the fact that it more literally means “it goes” (or when inflected in speech, “[how does] it go?”). Students are taught to respond, Ça va bien merci (or, literally, “It goes well, thank you”) and all of this maps pretty well on to the English exchange How’s it going? It’s going well, thank you. The world spins madly on and no one really cares that these acts of interpretation (which is different from translation in that its material is spoken, not written language) are all being played with approximations.

The trick is when we get to translation, which deals with written language. You are reading a French text and one character says to another, Ça va. But the characters are not social equals, the greeting is being spoken by an employee to her supervisor. How’s it going? and its cognates, like how goes it? seem too informal, so you choose to translate the greeting as hello or even good morning to keep from making the reader feel like the French idiom has somehow changed the interaction of characters and to meet the needs of readers for whom you’re translating.

            We need to concentrate on the act David Stephens’ writing. Occurring in English, the only thing that prevents its immediate legibility is the script in which it is written – Braille. Idiom has nothing to do with it. If you walk over to one of the sculptures and start reading, you find what he wrote – lists of names, texts with scriptural allusions. Braille is a specific form of writing, originally developed 1824 and refined over time for greater ease of use and to fulfill specific functions (there is a specific system of Braille writing for the representation of mathematic symbols and equations, for example). One can write in Braille by means of a stylus and slate, and machines for typing and printing publications have been developed over the nearly two centuries that it has been in use (“Braille”). Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, Braille has become a common part of the visual landscape in this country.

            While Braille is an important means of providing access to written text to those who cannot see it, its use has declined precipitously in recent years (Aziz). Its status as writing is not itself universally accepted. Author Charles Mann describes Braille as a representation of writing (“a translation of writing on paper”) rather than a form of writing (1651). Nor is Braille, though it is capable of encoding other languages, a foreign language in and of itself. In this context, it’s best understood as a script developed to meet the needs of a community of English speaking readers and writers.

            What does it mean to regard a text that’s in your own language as foreign enough to imply the need for translation? Doesn’t such a behavior indicate a kind of other-ing of the blind? Braille-dependent reader Georgina Klege writes of her experiences reading in public:

If my braille reading prompts comment it is evidence that the blind, like other disabled people are still invisible in mainstream American life. Our habits and paraphernalia remain unfamiliar and exotic. Blind people continue to be excluded from the educational and employment opportunities which would give them access to the sort of academic and literary venues where they would need to read in public.

There are a few dangers here. One is that Braille might be ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ to sighted audiences (despite its aforementioned presence in the visual landscape) and that its strangeness might invite careless metaphors. Klege spends a good deal of her time discussing Ann Hamilton’s well-intentioned installation in the 1999 Venice Biennale and how, by using Braille for symbolic purposes, Hamilton (perhaps unwittingly) equated blindness with ignorance (215).

In the context of this exhibition, the clear and present danger of seeing Braille as a form of language that requires translation is its equation of people in our own culture with foreign ‘Others’ and the concurrent failing to recognize a common language we share. The ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ code distracts through its surface representation. What is at issue in Stephens’ work is not translation, but encryption. There is an old stand-by claim about translation that if you give a poem to ten translators you’ll get ten different poems back. If you walk over to David’s work and read it, you get back exactly what he wrote. Encryption relies on the ability to pass information clearly – if in a code - between parties while introducing as little room for (mis)interpretation as possible.

            David concern that viewers might not recognize the writing in his work was actually a strategy of the ancient Greeks who sought to transmit secret messages through hostile territory by concealing them under layers of wax on wooden tablets. When the messenger was stopped there might be an innocuous message on the wax tablet that would be melted off when it reached its intended audience. This practice is called steganography, or ‘hidden writing’ (Singh, 5).

            By moving between back and forth between literature to sculpture, David Stephens may engage in an act of intersemiotic translation, coloring the meaning of his texts through the act of inscribing them on his work and shaping our reading of them by embodying them powerful physical forms. In this way, he is more like the concrete poets of the late 19^th and early 20^th century (or the poets who use ‘figured’ or shaped techniques described by Dick Higgins or Charles Boultenhouse). That’s up for debate, and would be another panel discussion altogether.

In my opinion, what needs to be translated in David Stephens’ work is not the language itself, but the way his highly idiosyncratic and original acts of writing and sculpture sit in relation to culture in general – to religious cultures, African American culture, disability culture. For this reason, Stephens’ work requires much closer reading by scholars and critics fluent in its idioms and I look forward to that conversation when it comes.

Works cited

Aviv, Rachel. “Listening to Braille.” The New York Times. 20 Dec 2009. 17 Feb 2014. < http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>

Bassnet, Susan. Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 1980.

"Braille." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. <http://www.britannica.com.libproxy.temple.edu/EBchecked/topic/77257/Braille>.

Boultenhouse, Charles. “Poems in the Shape of Things”. Art News Annual. 1959. 65-83.

Fisher, Steven Roger. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion, 2005.

Higgins, Dick. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.

Kleege, G. “Visible Braille/Invisible Blindness”. Journal of Visual Culture. 2006, v. 5. P.209. 17 Feb 2014. < http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/5/2/209>

Mann, Charles. “Cracking the Khipu Code.” Science. 13 Jun 2003. 17 Feb 2014. http://www.charlesmann.org/articles/Khipu-Science.pdf.

Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. New York, Anchor, 1999.

Notes on Professionalism

“Which occupations have gone how far in professionalizing? Established solidly since the late Middle Ages have been law, the clergy, university teaching (although the church did dominate universities, medieval faculty were by no means all clergy), and to some extent medicine (especially in Italy). During the Renaissance and after, the military provided professional careers for a dispossessed aristocracy. Officer cadres in the standing armies of Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries developed a professionalism based on a sense of brotherhood in a self-regulating fraternity dedicated to codes of honor and service. Dentistry, architecture, and some areas of engineering (e.g., civil engineering) were professionalized by the early 1900's; certified public accounting and several scientific and engineering fields came along more recently. Some are still in process-social work, correctional work, veterinary medicine, perhaps city planning and various managerial jobs for nonprofit organizations-school superintendents, foundation executives, administrators of social agencies and hospitals. There are many borderline cases, such as school teaching, librarianship, nursing, pharmacy, optometry. Finally, many occupations will assert claims to professional status and find that the claims are honored by no one but themselves. I am inclined to place here occupations in which a market orientation is overwhelming- public relations, advertising, and funeral directing”

Wilensky, Harold. “The Professionalization of Everyone” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Sep., 1964), pp. 137-158

R/W Curator's Talk

Gave a short talk tonight at the closing reception for R/W: Reading and Writing Visual Experience, a show I organized for the Hicks Art Gallery at Bucks County Community College. Here's some video:

What if you could read stupid fast?

Scanning my headlines today, I came across a curious article in FastCompany about Spritz, a technology that promises to speed your reading up to 250-1,000 words per minute (average reading wpm scores are between 180 on a monitor and 300 on paper according to a variety of places I located online).

Part of what was interesting about the article was the up front admission that not all reading is the same. Here are a couple of excerpts:

“Spritzing [sic] is not for everyone,” CEO and co-founder Frank Waldman tells Co.Design. “But for digesting emails, social media streams, and news especially, it allows you to read more in a shorter amount of time." 

and later...

“If you’re reading Shakespeare, you’re not going to want to do it with Spritz,” Waldman admits. “But with a romance novel, for example, people skim like crazy anyway. They just rip through a book, reading for plot. Are they savoring every word? Probably not.”

Whether people read romance novels for plot or for the steamy bits is not really the question, it's about that 'savoring' idea and whether some writing is fast food while other writing is haute cuisine. This plays into the myth of 'difficult' writing to some extent, as well as, on a cognitive level, what happens when you read.

Designers (who after all, are often responsible for the look and feel of what we read, that's not an author's job) know that some typefaces facilitate reading and others discourage it. They may also be familiar with research that shows that we read words all at once as a result of shape recognition and through predictions about what will come next in a given sentence. Some designers have even begun to develop type for readers who deal with reading-disruptive problems like dyslexia. Though reading began as a means of recording and transmitting the human voice, it lost that function more or less with the advent of printing in the west (according to Steven Roger Fischer, who write a great History of Reading). Though a number of readers still sub-vocalize out of habit, we can read at speeds that greatly outpace our ability to speak.

Spritz apparently exploits some of those cognitive loop holes by aligning text around a certain key space on the screen and flashing through it centered on that axis. Certain letters are rendered in red and their position in the word helps your mind decode them more quickly. Words flying by at the 500-word per minute rate were easy enough for me to follow.

All of which is fascinating, but it makes me think about the evolutionary conditions that led to reading in the first place and wonder whether or not we are living up to our potential. Presumably, our ability to read grew out of the evolutionary need to find meaning in the indexical signs in the landscape. Those who could 'read' the footprints of possible prey in the mud or dust, interpret how recently made they were and the direction the animal was headed, had an evolutionary advantage over those who couldn't infer that information from visible markers.

By that theory, the ability to read on a primitive level is shared with a large number of species who can figure out information from what they see. Written language didn't come along until approximately 4,000 years ago (some 30,000 - 50,000 years after early people started scratching patterns into ochre or paintings on the walls of caves), so it is arguably an aspect of our mental faculties that was latent until a function appeared for it.

Would I want superpowers of speed in reading? Yes and no...I realize that I often don't fully understand the impact of something when I first see it, and my books bristle with post-it flags that beckon me back into passages I need to think about. Watching words race by on Spritz, I wonder what happens if I try to reflect while I read, if I'll get myself tripped up and crash like a runner who has lost his stride. But the whole problem makes me wonder if we aren't actually endowed with powers we simply haven't discovered - capacities to read, to communicate, to notice - that we just haven't pushed hard enough to obtain but which lie dormant inside us, like the power of reading did for centuries.

Interesting things about writing

It would be easier to say Twitter is a colossal waste of time, though it would be more accurate to admit I just don't know what it's for. I feel like it is some tool I encounter in the hardware store that I don't know how or why to use. After all, many of us got along just fine without it for years...how essential can it be?

Then I read an interesting essay like Bob Mankoff's post about the relationship between Tweets and cartoon captions in the New Yorker (actually this one is part two; I am eager to read part one). I am struck by the ways comedy writers use twitter, as a 'warm up' and to accomplish specific joke 'moves', and it makes me wonder whether I am being too rigid in my thinking about this kind of writing....

Around our house, we have a special respect for people who can up with unexpected uses of existing materials - re-purposing is on  level with invention. Finding a way to use Twitter as a tool (rather than in its boring self-promoting, over-sharing, prescribed way) is startling in that manner.

Will I figure this out? I don't know, but I think a solution would involve exploring the limitations of the medium. I know there is an upper limit on characters, and that there are ways to tie messages together through special characters (@, #). It seems like there must be poets who are interested in limitations who are employing this thing...I am thinking about Twitterwriting and welcome any suggestions...