Nat Trotman
The Guggenheim’s Found in Translation brings together video, film, and slide projections from a global group of 11 artists, invoking the idea of translation to talk about cultural identities and politics. The artists are young, the material sometimes topical and charged. Palestinian artist Sharif Waked responds to videos made by Islamic suicide bombers, and Sharon Hayes stages enigmatic, one-woman protests in cities around the world.
The exhibition’s curator, Nat Trotman, responds to questions suggested by our readers. Thank you to everyone who submitted!
Were you previously familiar with all of the artists in the show? How did you decide on the final 11?
The initial concept for the show grew out of several works in the Guggenheim’s collection, which I realized all shared a concern with exploring politics and culture through language. It occurred to me that the notion of translation could form an interesting organizing principle for gathering these works together. With this concept in mind, I then expanded the show’s checklist through research, which of course started with artists with whom I was already familiar – though it often led me to discover works I had not known before digging into this project. The final selection came about through a careful consideration of the gallery spaces that the show would occupy, how much space each individual work required, and what resonances could be generated by juxtaposing certain works in certain galleries.
Why did you focus on younger artists? Do younger artists deal with these issues differently?
There’s a long history of artists working with language and examining social issues, but I knew from the start that Found in Translation would be a relatively small exhibition – so one of my main concerns was to keep the show as coherent and focused as possible. Certainly the ideas in the show are shared by conceptual artists like Laurence Weiner. Also many of the artists who explored issues of identity in the late 80s and early 90s (say, Glenn Ligon) could have fit easily into the exhibition’s themes. But there is an entire generation of artists who have come of age since the mid-90s that can now look at conceptualism and identity politics as historically-specific strategies, which they can employ or reference at will. To mix the first- and second-generation proponents of these tendencies would introduce an entirely different trajectory into the show: it would no longer be just about artists using language, but about the ways that artists’ use of language has changed over the past 40 years. I didn’t feel that I had the time or space to take on that kind of survey. At the same time, my hope was that by concentrating on younger artists the show could get at some of the ways that culture and language are being articulated today differently than they were 20 or 40 years ago. I feel like there is a general turn away from pointed critiques of specific hegemonic structures and toward a more evocative, poetic aesthetic, which the works in the show certainly bear out.
Were you looking for a balance of references to the past and recent events?
Not specifically. My intention was to gather works that spoke about current realities, but in almost every case these wound up being filtered through the past, usually by means of an emphasis on text. So, for instance, Sharif Waked’s To Be Continued… addresses the contemporary phenomenon of suicide bombing and radical Islam but does so through the reading of One Thousand and One Nights. Or, alternately, Patty Chang’s The Product Love, which is nominally an interpretation of a Walter Benjamin text, becomes an extended metaphor for the role of desire in the interaction between Western and Eastern cultures today. I don’t think we can investigate crosscultural dialogues without also delving into history. The geopolitical operations of displacement and difference function just as much across temporal boundaries as they do over spatial ones.
Why did you include only time-based work when text and translation are present across media?
This again largely has to do with providing focus for the exhibition, but also with my abiding affection for time-based media and a desire to let language play out not as a formal element but as a lived experience. While the presence of printed text in two- or three-dimensional objects arguably produces a time-based experience through the act of reading, that experience always competes with the more instant apprehension of the formal qualities of the text – its sculptural or painterly presence. Video and film, on the other hand, put language to use in real time, adding a sonic element and, importantly, assigning the words to a specific speaker, who becomes a sort of “other” around whom the audience must orient itself. Also, more than other art forms, time-based media create a push-pull dialectic between individual and collective apprehension. Especially when you’re dealing with multi-channel work, audience members must constantly negotiate their experience in terms of the other visitors around them. I thought all these aspects of the media would only enhance an exhibition about the possibilities and failures of communication.
Are there challenges specific to presenting time-based work?
Absolutely. There are at least three distinct ways to deal with a surplus of media artworks, which you will see in various combinations in any exhibition. You can create a wide-open space with individual viewing stations, usually with headphones; arrange a number of works into a program on a single screen or projection space; or dedicate an individual room to each work. If you are lucky enough to have the space and budget for it, I think giving each piece its own room is the most advantageous, because it allows the works to create their own psychic spaces for as many viewers as possible. Of course there are drawbacks. The more space allotted to each work, the fewer works get shown. Interstitial spaces appear between rooms that can be, put gently, less than lively. But for this show I felt these were risks worth taking.
Were you hoping to present a cross-cultural and global selection of translations? Do you think the show was adequate in that regard?
Yes, in planning the exhibition I strove to find a group of works that was globally oriented and engaged in a wide range of voices and contexts. I’m happy with the results, though I think one could always use more time to discover artists who are not operating within the U.S./European cultural nexus. The works in the show touch on issues not just in the history of the United States and Europe, but also in South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Moving through the galleries a visitor will encounter Arabic, Chinese, English, Flemish, French, German, Polish, and Spanish, not to mention glossolalia in the Steve McQueen installation. Ultimately, though, I think what makes the works, and hopefully the show, compelling is not just the particular cultures they address but the way they negotiate the interchanges between them.
Did you set out to with the intention of organizing a particularly politically relevant show? Were there parts of the show that you thought became particularly relevant in light of the recent protests and revolutions?
I wanted the show to address the political realities of contemporary life, but what really fascinated me was how artists use the idea of cultural interchange through language as a structure. My primary responsibility is to provide a space where the artworks can reach their audience as effectively as possible; so, while many of the pieces in the show deal with politics, I don’t know that this makes the show itself “political.” After all, these are aesthetic objects, not manifestos. Knowing about the protests in Egypt would certainly enhance a visitor’s experience of the works by Sharon Hayes or Carlos Motta, but do these or other works transform people’s understanding of the real-world protests? I’d like to think so, but I don’t know if that is the case. Ultimately I think that when it comes to politics, art is best when it opens a dialogue without shutting down possible responses – and I hope that is what Found in Translation achieves as well.
