Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.05.2010, Síða 38

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 06 — 2010
26
Events: Friday, May 28, 20:00 – Háskólabíó. Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), presented and
with Q&A by collaborator and composer Matthew Patton.
Saturday, May 29, 16:00 – Nordic House. God morgen, hjarte (Good morning heartache): Billie Holiday in Nor-
wegian. Annjo K. Greenall (vocals), Vigleik Storaas. http://conference.inotherwords.is for ticket information.
Recently I read on the news
that a man, one Kenny
Strasser, had successively
duped the producers of nu-
merous TV-programmes into putting
him on the air on the premise that he
was a master in the art of the yo-yo.
When put on the air, however, Kenny
got found out: He had no yo-yo skills.
And while madly swinging his yo-yos,
beating himself over the head, bruis-
ing his genitalia and trying to “fake
it”, Kenny claimed he had no muscle
memory, and therefore perhaps the
yo-yo was not anything he’d ever mas-
ter. Sorry.
Now, lying to people is easy. Claim-
ing talent is something (almost) eve-
ryone is capable of. But things tend to
get a bit more complicated when we’re
pressed to prove our talents—when
we’re made to bring forth our yo-yos
and perform a perfect “Buddha’s Re-
venge”, a “Reverse Double-or-Noth-
ing” or—my God!—an “Elephant’s
Trunk”. Then we either put our mon-
ey where our mouths are or we fold.
Which is why most people don’t go
around faking mad skills they don’t
possess. They don’t want to get called
on.
When it comes to the arts, prov-
ing talent or skill isn’t so straightfor-
ward though. Sure, you don’t really
fake the cello anymore than the yo-yo
(although there’s more tolerance for
avant-garde weirdo shit in the cello-
world than the yo-yo world—and yes,
breaking a cello while masturbating
and drinking your own urine can be
faked)—but the same does not go for
the creative compositional arts. These
days you can fake a painting. You can
fake a song. You can fake a movie or a
play. And you can fake a poem.
This is because creative art isn’t
necessarily based on skill per se—
or even talent. Creative art is mostly
performed on instinct, it’s created in
a hinter-dimension, a subconscious
and brought forth into the conscious
world where the artist either uses his
or her cognitive skills to “finish” the
piece or throws it away before div-
ing back into the hinter-dimension
for new more interesting stuff. And
there’s no perfect, or even imperfect,
way of judging it objectively. There’s
no Turing-test for creative arts.
Yet most creative art forms require
other kinds of ambition—other ways
of “proving” one’s dedication to (and
love for) the art form, which are also
hard to fake. If you want to write a
novel you need boatloads of patience.
Just writing a hundred pages that
seem semi-coherent is an arduous
task for a lazy person. If you want
respect in the visual arts you go to
school—often you have to stay there
for years! A modern composer doesn’t
get the time of day until he’s finished
a doctorate. Even a lowly singer/song-
writer has to invest in a guitar—or
worse, a piano.
Nothing of the sort applies to po-
etry. A poet needs no qualification.
There are no schools and the only
required investment is paper and
pen. And if you can’t afford paper
and pen you can always borrow your
mother’s laptop. There’s nothing ob-
viously discernible about a poem that
says it’s “good” or “bad”—not since
we dropped metre and rhyme, in any
case. It’s now all a matter of taste and
taste is a superbly dubious and f leet-
ing concept.
This results in two things.
On the one hand poetry attracts
everyone who wants to be an artist
without having to strain themselves
too much. Every lazybone, wannabe,
poseur and charlatan who wants part
of the (perceived) “glamour” of being
an artist, becomes a poet. Simply be-
cause it’s the easiest art to get away
with faking.
On the other hand, for those will-
ing to embrace it, it may provide
greater possibilities for creation—
casual or stringent, oblivious, spon-
taneous, uneducated, stupid, banal,
kitschy, experimental, nutty—with-
out any outer guidelines or official
framework to tell us what constitutes
a “true” poem and what doesn’t.
And still telling which is which
will be well nigh impossible.
poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
Mad Skills A few words about the surprising qualities of sucking really hard
An international conference on language and the arts
EXPERIENCE MORE IN ICELAND
Puffin express offers Whale watching, puffin
watching, sea angling and dinner cruises.
Our ticket sale in Reykjavik Old Harbour is open from 8 am to 8 pm.
Booking by phone: +354 892 0099 | Online booking: www.puffinexpress.is
Art | Conference
Art In Translation
From May 27 to 29th,
around sixty people from
twenty-one countries
(eruptions permitting) will
gather at the Nordic House and the
University of Iceland to talk about
art, language, globalisation, and…
Jerry Seinfeld. What should he
sound like dubbed in Norwegian?
That’s what Svein Høier of the Nor-
wegian University of Science and
Technology wants to know. French
artist Claire Artemyz wonders why
some people get tattoos in languages
they can’t understand. And Profes-
sor Yoko Ima-Izumi is coming all the
way from the University of Tsukuba
in Japan to tell us how Godzilla films
have been “misdubbed” for Ameri-
can audiences.
Lest you think the Art in Transla-
tion conference is all fun and games,
let me assure you that these people
mean business.
Many of the questions these
scholars, students, artists, and pro-
fessionals will address are similar to
questions I’ve been pondering since
moving to Iceland several years ago
as an art historian. To name a few:
is there art that can’t be adequately
“translated” from one culture to an-
other for reasons of language or local
knowledge? How do globalisation of
the arts world and arts discourse af-
fect artists and professionals linguis-
tically, and how are small language
communities adapting (or not) to
new demands? What are the respon-
sibilities and challenges of those who
are translating art history and theory
from an internationally dominant
language to an internationally mar-
ginal one, or vice versa? While is-
sues like these have long been talked
about, taught, and theorised in the
literary arena, few scholars have sys-
tematically investigated these topics
when it comes to visual art, music,
film, theatre, and performance.
Yet through multiple conversa-
tions with colleagues and friends in
Iceland and elsewhere, I’ve come to
see that—of course—I’m far from
the only one ruminating on the re-
lationships between the big wide art
world and wee little countries like
Iceland with wee little languages like
Icelandic. On a number of occasions,
I have mused with fellow writers on
the difficulty of translating theoreti-
cal texts written in English into Ice-
landic; it’s not just that many foreign
terms have not been codified—a
problem not limited to arts vocabu-
lary—it seems that some concepts
themselves are easier to express in
other languages. One artist told me
that part of the problem lies in the
lack of a well-honed semiotic tradi-
tion in Iceland (admittedly, I don’t
have a well-honed understanding of
semiotics in general, so I can’t be
the judge). And a publisher of art
books with international distribution
recently expressed a concern that
is not his alone, namely, that some
non-native speakers write in English
at a level or in a style not in keeping
with their true scholarly competence.
I suspect that it’s sometimes more
complicated than a matter of pride
that certain scholars opt out of writ-
ing in Icelandic and finding a skilled
translator.
I have a vested interest both pro-
fessional and personal in the success,
however it’s measured, of Icelandic
artists and arts professionals. Posi-
tive things are happening: Listfræða-
félag Íslands, the Icelandic Associa-
tion of Art History and Aesthetics,
has awoken after a long period of
dormancy, and current president Að-
alheiður Guðmundsdóttir has led the
coordination of colloquia addressing
various professional concerns. The
Reykjavík Art Museum held a re-
cent event bringing together a large
number of players in the art scene to
hold roundtable discussions on what
has happened in the past decade and
what we can work on for the future.
The Art in Translation conference is
my drop-in-the-bucket contribution
to sparking a greater dialogue about
conspicuous and subtle linguistic as-
pects of the arts in Iceland. Extend-
ing this dialogue to include individu-
als across the globe grappling with
similar concerns will only broaden
our nuanced understanding of our
circumstances here and how to face
them productively and conscien-
tiously.
Art in Translation will be held—rain, shine,
or ash—at the University of Iceland and the
Nordic House, May 27–29. All events are
open to the public and free (with the excep-
tion of a film screening; tickets may be pur-
chased in advance). Check out the website,
http://conference.inotherwords.is, for the
schedule of diverse lectures, performances,
and other highlights. For further informa-
tion, email conference manager Shauna
Laurel Jones at info@inotherwords.is.
Words
Shauna Laurel Jones
Illustrations
Karlotta Blöndal from the
series Alphabet