Familiar beyond Recognition: Translation in Contemporary Abstraction, Simon Degroot
Introduction
thesis explores the difference between shapes translated from modernism into contemporary abstract painting (focussing on Russian Constructivism, Synthetic Cubism, Matisse’s paper cut-outs, Hard Edge painting, graphic design and computer desktop graphics, and shapes within the built environment) and considers how ‘translation’ might be used to “unpack” how contemporary abstract painting “makes meaning”
Paul Kremer, digital prints on canvas: http://imgsrch.tumblr.com > re: aa.still.matters
the process of interpretation and decoding is a “performative act” (3) // Hans-Georg Gadamer, “reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance and interpretation” Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 160
this perforamce is always “active and prejudiced” (3) // cf. The 7th Function of Language, p. 275: “To be understood, at least partially, by our receiver, we must use the same language. We must repeat (reiterate) words that have already been used, otherwise our receiver will not be able to understand them. So we are always, fatally, in some form of citation. We use the words of others. Now, as with Chinese whispers, it is more than probable – it is inevitable – that through repetitions each and every one of us will employ the words of others, in a slightly different sense to those others.”
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (in Dropbox)
Panofsky used “pseudomorphosis” to describe “the emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated from a genetic point of view” — Panofksy, Tomb Sculpture > Simon gives the example of Kasimir Malevich and Ellsworth Kelly’s respective black squares (4) // similarly(?), Borges’ ’Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’
References Paul Taylor’s “second degree” and the relationship between Australia and appropriation as ‘natural’, given the that our experience of art is often mediated (8-9)
contemporary art as post-historical, citing Hans Belting and Arthur C Danto (9) > “[contemporary art] manifests an awareness of a history of art but no longer carries it forward” (Belting in Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History)
“appropriation needs to be redefined for contemporary practice as more accurately belonging to a process of translation” (9)
Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 1987
referencing Rex Butler, “a work of art does not record an original experience, but rather presents ‘a translation of this experience from one language to another’” (10)
Barthes, ‘Is Painting a Language?’ (in Dropbox)