"Sculpting with Words: From Ekphrasis to Interart Translation" (original) (raw)

Translation from Artistic Language (the New Delimitation of Art)

KnE Social Sciences

The aim of the article is to delimitate the art zone for our current era. The problematic relationship between the general public and contemporary art is well known and often discussed. The viewers often find it difficult to relate to contemporary artworks or even to understand why they are considered art. We are searching for the appropriate forms to support the viewers in the quest to improve perception of contemporary art by the public. Among the new approaches, we highlight the conception of contemporary art as based not only the category of beauty, but also the communicative act which can translate important social sense(s). This point of view we have found in conceptions of J. Dickey, A. Danto and E. Oryol. To help an ordinary art consumer discover the social sense, we suggest using facilitative discussion technique designed by American teachers A. Hausen and F. Yenawain, and the mediation technique practiced by the UIBSI (Yekaterinburg). Keywords: contemporary art, communicat...

A STUDY ON THE PROBLEM OF MEANING IN THE ART OF SCULPTURE

ArtGRID - Journal of Architecture Engineering and Fine Arts, 2023

This study explores the complex relationship between the meaning of sculpture and its making process in the context of the philosophy of language. Sculpture is a unique art form that involves the creation of three-dimensional objects that occupy physical space. However, the meaning of a sculpture is not limited to its spatial characteristics alone. This study identifies two distinct levels of meaning in sculpture: its relation to space and its making process. While the former has received considerable attention in the literature, the latter has been largely overlooked. Therefore, this study focuses on the semantic relationship between Richard Serra's sculptures and his sculpture-making processes, particularly in his early works. Richard Serra is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the Process Art movement, which emerged in the 1960s and emphasizes the importance of the making process in art. The study questions the reduction of the meaning of sculpture to a mere action and seeks to establish a deeper relationship between the philosophy of language and the process of sculpture. To achieve this, the study draws on the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and John R. Searle, who are some of the most important philosophers of language of the 20th century. Wittgenstein's concept of language games and his emphasis on the social context of language use is particularly relevant to this study. The study explores how Serra's sculpture-making processes can be seen as a form of language game, with its own rules and conventions. Similarly, Austin's concept of performative language provides a framework for understanding how the making process of a sculpture can be seen as a form of performative action. The study also draws on Searle's theory of speech acts, which suggests that language use is not just a matter of describing the world, but also of performing actions and creating new realities. Overall, this study represents an important contribution to the field of art and philosophy. By exploring the relationship between the meaning of sculpture and its making process, the study challenges traditional notions of art and raises important questions about the nature of meaning and representation in art. The study also demonstrates the relevance of the philosophy

Translation and the artist

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2013

This article reflects on the idea and role of translation in relation to artistic practice. In its trajectory around the subject it aims to bring out some of the issues at stake for artists and writers within this process of translation such as: loss, boundary, threshold, discipline, fidelity, infidelity, accuracy and error. Its disjunctive structure is intentional, since it is a meditation on the subject, which alludes or touches on aspects of theory as they might be encountered in and through practice-stumbled upon in an unsystematic, sometimes haphazard and equivocal, non-linear or tangential way-rather than provides an exposition of it.

Artistic Meaning Through Translation: Poetic Distortions and Mythologized Contradictions

Here, I lay the groundwork for approaching the question of artistic meaning and its societal impact — whether reinforcement or subversion of cultural narratives and structures. This foundation is in four parts. First, I will explore the relationship of artistic meaning to linguistic meaning and translation, which will illuminate the process of interpretation as transformative and necessarily distortional. From there, I will consider in what sense artistic meaning is yet maintained through translation. Lévi-Strauss’ discussion of mythology, elucidated through the second part of this paper, will provide a model for understanding this through the linguistic possibility of immanent transcendence. Given Lévi-Strauss’ assertion that “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction” (229), the third section will explore the need for this function through Julia Kristeva’s explanation of the abject in the maintenance of meaning itself, and through Talal Asad’s related discussion of the psychical impact of the instability of meaning on the ideological or societal level, as revealed through experiences of horror. Finally, I will show that art is capable of functioning on the levels of both poetry and myth: aesthetically and without possibility of accurate translation, yet also as a tool for navigating epistemic contradictions — the destabilizing contradictions within a social subject’s foundational understanding of meaning and identity. The myth-like aspect of artistic meaning can thus stabilize and reassure meaning for a subject whose epistemic framework is challenged. This paper will advance a theory of art as it reinforces and reifies a societal mythos, as a first and necessary step toward understanding how it might, in contrast, operate to subvert the mythos and thus structures of power.

Art and linguistic bodies: a transformative view

Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 2023

This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher's and Alva Noë's enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5).

Intrasemiotic translation in the emulations of ancient art: On the example of the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum

In his 1959 paper “On linguistic aspects of translation,” Roman Jakobson distinguished between interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation. As Gideon Toury (1986, Translation: A cultural-semiotic perspective. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Encyclopedic dictionary of semiotics, vol. 2, 1111–1124. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) pointed out, such an approach centers on verbal systems and comprises only the translations that one or another way include some linguistic system, while it discards all the cases of translation from one non-linguistic sign system to another. Consequently, it seems reasonable to add intrasemiotic translation to these types of translation to encompass these cases. The paper follows from an assumption that translation studies could offer a productive perspective to describe the history and development of copy art, as well as to define and typologize the phenomenon itself. The copies in the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum are analyzed as intrasemiotic translations, distinguishing between a number of different subtypes, while the basis for this distinction is the way and how the copy has changed in comparison with its prototype.