AN INTERPRETATION/TRANSLATION OF MUNTADAS'S PROJECTS
AN INTERPRETATION/TRANSLATION
OF MUNTADAS'S PROJECTS
By Mary Anne Staniszewski
On Translation
To live is to consume {1} or so it seems since the consolidation of global capitalism and communication networks during the last half-century. But this focus on economics, can be expanded to the production of meaning. In what has been called a transnational, technological "networked society {2} to live is to translate.
Such an all-encompassing view of culture as translation marks Muntadas's On Translation -- an on-going series of installations, interventions, web sites, public projects, objects, video tapes, lectures, publications, exhibition materials, collaborations, and texts. This trans-media, transnational, site-specific enterprise exists in myriad languages, on the Net and in locations that have included New York, Madrid, Helsinki, Budapest, Santa Fe de Bogota, Paris, Turin, Sao Paolo, Arad, Rotterdam, Kassel, and Atlanta. Examining what the artist describes as "cultural translation as a contemporary phenomenon," {3} this project has not only dealt with the translation of languages, but of global treaties, political conferences, currencies, maps, knowledge categories, colors, telecommunications, computer technologies, and exhibitions. To see culture as a translation highlights the historical, interactive, dynamic, site-specific, and interpretative quality of meaning. {4} Such a perspective on art and everyday life characterizes Muntadas's entire oeuvre.
The Political Unconscious and Cultural Producers
For some thirty years, Muntadas has investigated a vast variety of subjects in order to reveal aesthetic, cultural, and social conditions that are marginalized, overlooked, or invisible -- what has been called the "political unconscious." {5} This type of investigation is the foundation of his extremely diverse oeuvre that includes a variety of strategies and media. By producing a spectrum of enterprises to engage their related issues and to transform their particular contexts, Muntadas is one of a number of artists who clarifies and defines what could be called a "cultural producer." {6} Artists, writers, intellectuals, and really anyone in any field who works with a critical awareness of the institutional and ideological limits of their endeavors functions as a cultural producer. In this case, Muntadas's exploration of translation crystallizes the inter-related issues of identity, culture, language, nationalism, internationalism, the mass media, and information and communication technologies. Very particular versions of these phenomena distinguish the modern era {7} and, in some instances, they have gained predominance since the mid-twentieth century.
Modernity and Its Frameworks
The late 18th century and early 19th century demark a shift in "the order of things" in Western culture. The well-known phrase is a translation of the original French title of Michel Foucault's book examining these modern reconfigurations. {8} Consciousness of modern nationalism and its counterpoint, internationalism, developed in the late 18th century with the liberal, democratic revolutions. Cultural identity and nationhood then became linked to a common language, as was the case in
Fig. 26 Muntadas, CEE Project, c. 1988
Among the specifically modern manifestations investigated by Muntadas are fine art, the museum, the mass media, nationalism, and internationalism. In his CEE Project (fig. 26), which was begun in 1988, the artist addresses the latter two issues by re-presenting symbols of the European Union. {12} Muntadas produced a four-by-six meter carpet with the image of the European flag: twelve golden stars on a blue ground. The carpet/flag has been placed on the floor of twelve public spaces in the EU, including a design museum in
Throughout his career, Muntadas has examined "archetypes" of modernity by creating complex and often on-going projects that are re-presented in myriad sites. In addition to On Translation and The CEE Project, which were begun in 1995 and 1988 respectively, Exposicíon (fig. 28), installed in 1985 and in 1987, are such an examples, as are, Between the Frames (fig. 27), initiated in 1983, and The File Room (fig. 30), started in 1994. These projects have been constructed to make visible social conventions and frameworks within which meaning and value are created. The artist's working method is characterized by selecting a very generalized social structure, and then investigating permutations of the idea in meticulous detail. Muntadas then reinterprets -- or translates -- these projects at a variety of international sites. In the past several years, the artist has featured this process by actually challenging curators to reinterpret his installations, as is the case for the presentation of On Translation at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. For this exhibition, which includes all the components of On Translation to date, Muntadas has asked the museum director, curator and coordinator to address the previous installations and situations of On Translation. He has requested that they install "not a recreation," "not a documentation," but "an interpretation" in order to "maximize the consequences of the idea of translation." {15}
After the first installations of Between the Frames: The Forum, Muntadas began selecting individuals to act as curatorial "translators" of the piece. At the Witte de Witte in
Between the Frames
Between the Frames -- a video and installation project which includes four-and-one-half hours of video interviews of individuals who work within or contribute to the art world -- is a representation of the art system. But this project is something more than a mere portrait of the people and institutions of the art world. Between the Frames makes visible the institutional, theoretical, and ideological configurations within which aesthetic meaning and value are produced: what could be called the contemporary art apparatus.
Fig. 27 Muntadas, Between the Frames: The Forum, capcMuseé d'art contemporain de
The videotapes, which were edited from some 160 hours of tape recorded from 1983 to 1991,{17} are divided into eight chapters: The Dealers, The Collectors, The Gallery, The Museum, The Docents, The Critics, The Media, and Epilogue (composed of artist interviews). These chapters can be shown individually or together as screenings, on television or in one of the many installations, such as those at the
Key to understanding Muntadas's formulation of Between the Frames is the fact that the individuals interviewed in the tapes -- with the exception of the Germans and Japanese who speak in English -- use their native languages: Catalan, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Text translations were offered in exhibition publications in the languages of the site. If Muntadas had treated the tapes in the conventional manner and had them translated or had added subtitles to match the language of the location's population, this would have made the issues of cultural and linguistic differences inaudible. It would have produced what the artist has described in another context as a "decaffeinated experience." {19} This multiple language soundscape and installation which mirrors such diversity, allows the visitor to circulate "between the frames" to metaphorically hear and glimpse parameters of a social system, the art world.
Another essential aspect of this piece is the focus on the periphery, the marginal, the frames that engender the discourses within which art is produced. Missing from this portrait of the art world is what might traditionally be the centerpiece of an exhibition and the entire aesthetic enterprise: the work of art.
Exposición/Exhibition
#Fig. 28 Muntadas, Exposicíon, Galería Fernando Vijande,
Muntadas's concern for the boundaries that define and limit a social territory took its most literal form in his installation, Exposicíon (fig. 28), presented in Madrid in 1985, and translated as Exhibition in New York in 1987.{20} Similar to Between the Frames where the centerpiece -- the work of art is missing -- in Exhibition there were no paintings, no sculptures, no videotapes, just frames, three video monitors, a slide projector, a film projector in Madrid, and a light box in New York. There were no ambient lights. Nine "tableaux" comprised the show: The Print Series, The Drawing Series, The Photo Series, The Triptych, The 19th-Century Frame, The Slide Projection, The Video Installation, The Billboard, The Film Projection in
Installations as Ideology
The boundaries and frames of any social entity is the realm where ideological limitations reside. Often overlooked is the fact that these ideological dimensions of exhibitions, galleries, and museums are manifest in another framing device: installations. {21} What has become the standard method -- hanging works of art isolated on neutral-colored walls at a height for an ideal viewer -- is a recent convention and a representation in it own right. Most viewers to an exhibition do not see this framework that emphasizes not only the autonomy of the artwork, but that of the spectator. Not unrelatedly, these types of displays can enhance a viewer's sense of an idealized, ahistorical independence and even free will -- characteristics associated with the mythology of the modern humanist subject.
Displaying works isolated and in neutral-colored interiors became a convention from the 1920s to the late 1960s, and by 1970 much of the diversity of institutional display practices that had characterized the early years of modern art museums diminished. {22} During the late 1960s and early 1970s was also when artists' relation to installation practices -- and the political dimensions of the institutions and locations where they situated their work -- changed. Although the avant-gardes had developed a variety of display practices throughout the first half of the twentieth century,{23} the late 1960s and early 1970s marked the years when artists' installations became commonplace. This was when conceptual, site-specific, inter-media and installation-based art proliferated. With landmark exhibitions such as the 1969 Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form 1969 at the Berne Kunsthalle {24} and the 1970 Information at the Museum of Modern Art, {25} curators did not so much select specific pieces, but invited artists to create works for that particular exhibition. Each time such work was presented, it would be re-interpreted to suit the particular site and audiences. These were the years when Muntadas began exhibiting.
Early Projects
Fig. 29 Muntadas, Collective Experience no. 3 (Smell, Taste, Touch, Villanova de la Roca, July 1972
In the 1960s, Muntadas was producing primarily paintings. In 1971, however, he wrote a "declaration of intention" to do work that was less passive and more participatory and he stopped painting. {26} This was the beginning of Muntadas's interest in having viewers interact with his work. The "declaration" can also be understood as the origins of his current use of the statement "Warning: Perception Requires Involvement" for the posters and public projects of the {On Translation} series. In 1971, Muntadas also began doing actions -- what he described as "sensorial experiences" -- exploring smell, touch and taste that were documented first in super 8 film and then videotape. These actions were events where the artist, individuals he selected to participate, as well as gallery visitors manipulated constructions; tasted, smelled, and touched food; rubbed things on their bodies; and, in general, interacted with objects, substances, and sensory situations. {27} Many of these actions were done in private and then the documentation became a public manifestation. Muntadas often conceives of this private and public dynamic as "the micro" and "the macro," which is a polarity found in much of his work. {28} In Collective Experience no. 3 (Smell, Taste, Touch(fig. 29), which took place near Barcelona in 1971, Muntadas invited thirteen people, with eyes and ears covered, to touch, taste, and smell assorted materials (such as leaves, plastic, fruit, vegetables, wood, metal, grease), the walls, and each other, if they chose to do so. {29} An important aspect of the piece was that the thirteen people were of different nationalities, ages, professions and each was videotaped for their reactions to the experience.{30} Muntadas's careful selection of socially diverse collaborators in this early action/installation serves as evidence of the artist's persistent concern for issues of cultural translation.
Recalling some of these events thirty years later, Muntadas stated that conceptual practices were new to Spain in the early 1970s and he reviewed the way the Spanish artist community did not have "first-hand" experience of the international shows during the final years of the authoritarian Franco regime. {31} "My generation was totally isolated. The last international thing was pop and with a strong emphasis on abstract painting...There was no tradition for this type of work." When gallery visitors were invited to interact with these materials and environments, "they practically destroyed part of the exhibition....For some of the things to be manipulated -- structures made of wood and a series plastic bags hanging with different textures inside of them -- a kind of vandalism occurred... I created a box-like room on a patio of Galería Vandres covered with foam on the inside walls and the floor. But some visitors became confused...there were strange violent reactions. Some of the work was destroyed. I think this is related to the repressive situation".... In
From 1973 to 1975, Muntadas was a member of Grup de Treball (Work Group), an interdisciplinary collective of artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers formed to address political and social issues by making use of the public forum -- what the artist describes as "an open window" -- the art context could offer in an otherwise "closed" society. {33} "A lot of this work had to do with the end of Franco period: solidarity with prisoners, manifestos with workers, photo-text pieces, activism." {34} The last presentation by Grup de Treball was at the Biennale de Paris in 1975, the year of Franco's death.
It was within this personal and political context of the sometimes aggressive public reactions to his actions/-installations and the collaborations with Grup de Treball that Muntadas shifted in 1973 from video taping himself and individuals interacting with substances and sensorial situations to a broader conceptual framework of the individual interacting with social environments. His Markets, Streets, and Stations was a series of tapes recording people in public places in
By 1975, Muntadas had expanded his thematic interest in international and cultural site-specificity to include such concerns on a structural level by actually presenting a work in different locations. HOY: Proyecto a través de Latinoamerica was an action/installation that took place in
What Muntadas witnessed as he stood there in the dark could be interpreted as a tutorial in cultural translation. He remembers extremely different audience reactions. {36} In
Muntadas is part of a generation of artists that made the transition from a predominance of image and object making to a more expanded spectrum of options that includes performative, interactive, multimedia, site-specific, "time-specific" {37} creations that would morph and transform with each presentation. Considering Muntadas's career -- comprising scores of projects, installed in sometimes a dozen sites -- it is not coincidental that he has now chosen to foreground "translation," which could be said to be a foundation of his entire body of work.
TVE: Primer Intento
However much Muntadas's work may seem to be characterized by social rather than the personal concerns, any creative endeavor is, in a sense, a self-portrait of its maker. The origins of another major piece of his, The File Room, lay in the artist's personal experience, and it actually contains an autobiographical reference. {38} For several years Muntadas worked on a videotape dealing with the history of Spanish television. He was given access to the archives of
The File Room
Fig. 30 Muntadas, The File Room, Randolph Street Gallery,
The File Room installed in 1994 at the Randolph Street Gallery in
The initial physical installation consisted of a gallery filled with 138 black metal file cabinets, holding 522 drawers. Seven computer monitors were installed in the file cabinets and in the center of the room was a desk with another computer where visitors could view the site and add censorship cases. All the terminals were linked to The File Room web site, which is now at www.thefileroom.org/ (fig. 5). A significant aspect of the initial installation was the visitors' access to the Internet at a time when a relatively small percentage of the U.S. population was on line. The gallery, with black-metal-file-cabinet walls and lit by the light of computer monitors, can be seen to evoke associations with oppressive institutional memory and authority. Muntadas's interest in censorship is related to an essential aspect of his work. Censorship is a crude, blatant realization of social restraints. Such repression when public, forced, and obvious is censorship, when internal, automatic, and unconscious, it is ideology. And as the artist also commented, censorship is a "negative form of translation." {44}
Although arranged according to four categories -- dates, locations, grounds for censorship, and medium -- not all the listings in the categories are alphabetized. Entering the web site, there is a statement that "the project does not presume the role of a library, an encyclopedia, or even a copy editor, in the traditional sense...but instead proposes alternative methods for information collection, processing and distribution, to stimulate dialogue and debate around issues of censorship and archiving." This type of database for The File Room's is apt, for it mirrors the simultaneously organized yet chaotic, public yet personal character of the Internet. This is one of the elements that makes The File Room such an effective piece. That it's theme is censorship is appropriate considering the mythologies and realities of the Net, which has been seen both as a vehicle for individual freedom of expression and an instrument for commercial and governmental control. The File Room serves as a lens, clarifying issues related to paradigms of the modern era, such as individual liberty, freedom of speech, internationalism, the mass media, and information and communication technologies.
The Translator
The peripheral or invisible element, which has characterizes so much of Muntadas's work, took human form in 1994. At a month-long workshop proposed by Muntadas in
To give one obvious example, this is one way to interpret Guy Debord's assessment of post-WW II culture, see Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983). A book I know only in an English translation of the original French: Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris, Buchet/Chastel, 1967).
See Manuel Castells's, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). , as I was writing this essay and making reference to Castells's work in relation to Muntadas's, the two were having a public discussion in Spain on issues of translation, globalization and the Internet. I was informed of the following discussion after I had written this text: Antoni Muntadas and Manuel Castells, "Cultura i societat
Interview with Muntadas, 23 2002.
Examining the etymology of "translation" reveals its earliest documented meanings from the 14th century include: "transference; removal, or conveyance from one person, place or condition to another," and "to change in form, appearance or substance, to transmute," as well as the meaning "...turning from one language into another." See The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, Volume 18 (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1989), 109-110. etymological origins evoke the historical, interactive, transformational, and broad cultural associations that are in keeping with Muntadas's project.
Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic art} (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981) influenced my concept of this term. When reviewing Jameson's description of "political unconscious" for these notes, I discovered that he not only defines this in terms of "the repressed" and "the ideological" (which is what I chose to remember) but he also states on the first page that "texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations," see pages 20, 12, and 9 respectively. I had forgotten that Jameson's definition of "political unconscious" also includes an emphasis on interpretation, or what Muntadas would describe as translation.
"Cultural producer" is the term I choose to use to describe an engaged contributor to society, which is similar to many other such terms, such as cultural worker. Cornel West refers to "cultural worker" in his essay "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture}, editors, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Tinh T. Mihn-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press and the New Museum, 1990), 19-36.
By modernity, I am referring to the past 200 years, and the period when the modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist state consolidated. Other configurations of the modern era include art for art sake and the museum.
The original phrase in French is "Les mots et les choses," See Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses; une archéologie des sciences humaines(Paris: Gallimard, 1966) and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences}, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences}, translated from the French, Mots et les choses (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970) (first U.S. publication, New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
Jill Lepore, for example, discussed the way a single French dialect came to be favored by printers and that became the national standard in
After the revolution, many desired the development of a
"A Short History of Telecommunications," www.francetelecom.com/vanglais/apropos/grp-histt.htm (
Constituted in 1950, The EU has gained prominence during the past decade, with such enhancements as the adoption to the Euro as the standard currency: "The process of European integration was launched on
The sites were as follows: Museum voor Sierkunst,
Interview with Muntadas,
Ibid.
Muntadas asked each of his "translators" to display their notes for their process next to Muntadas's original notes, so that the viewers to the exhibition could compare and better understand these interpretations.
The entire video archive will eventually be available for viewing at a public cultural institution.
Interview with Muntadas,
Joseph Bosma "A De-cafinated Experience (of Net.Art): Interview with Antonio Muntadas," Telepolis: magazin de netzkultur,
Exposicíon was installed at the Galería Fernando Vijande,
This is the argument of my book, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998).
See The Power of Display for this history, Ibid.
For texts that deal with this history see, for example, The Power of Display}, Ibid., as well as Bruce Altshuler's The Avant-garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), and Lewis Kacher's Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations} (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001).
The exhibition was held from 26 March 26 to
Information was held from 2 July to
This statement did not have a title, and Muntadas refers to it as a "declaration of intention." The following is an excerpt: "Situation on
These "Experiencias Subsensoriales," took place primarily in
Interview with Muntadas,
Muntadas: Media, Architecture, Installations} (note 13).
A forty minute video was produced, Collective Experience no. 3 (Smell, Taste, Touch)}, 1971.
The statements by the artist cited in this paragraph are taken from interview,
For a clip of this, see Muntadas: Media, Architecture, Installations} (note 13).
The statements by the artist cited in this paragraph are taken from 11 May and
some documentation of this group's activities, see Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s}, project directors, Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachael Weiss (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 174 and 248.
Most of the members continued creating individual work in addition to the Grup de Treball projects, as was the case with Muntadas. Interview with Muntadas 11 May 2002.
HOY: Proyecto a través de Latinoamerica -- the artist always publishes this title in Spanish, it should not be translated into other languages -- was presented at the following sites: CAYC Centro e Arte y Communicacíon, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 14 November 1975; Museu de Arte Contemporãnea da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil, 13 December 1975; Museo de arte Contemporánneo, Caracas, Venezuela, 25 January 1976; and Museo de Artes y Ciencias de la Universidad, México City, Mexico, 27 February 1976.
consciously tries to use titles that are in different languages to contextualize the work, interview with the artist, 20 May 2002.
The statements by the artist cited in this paragraph are taken from an interview on 11 May 2002.
"Time-specific" is Muntadas's term, which he described as work produced as "a time-specific reaction," often related to "activist and political work," where there is an "urgency" in terms of issues that people need to address. He considers the Grup de Treball projects time-specific work. Interview with Muntadas, 20 May 2002.
Although this autobiographical aspect has been present throughout Muntadas's work, it was only in 1996 with his video installation The Nap/La Siesta/Dutje produced for the Filmuseum in
work which is discussed in this section and is "autobiographically" referenced in The File Room, TVE: Primo Intento}, foreshadows Muntadas's explicit acknowledgement of the autobiographical element of his working process in 1996.
Interview with the artist, 23 February 2002.
The Installation at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago ran from 21 May to 4 September 1994. The gallery was in Chicago's Cultural Center, which was the city's public library before it became a municipal exhibition facility.
File Room has since been installed in other venues.
See www.thefileroom.org
The case of TVE: Primo Intento can be found in the following areas of The File Room}: Date: 1985-1995; Location:
Interview with artist,
Confirmation of previous discussion, email to author,
The workshop was titled "Urban Interventions" and was held at Arteleku: Forum de las Artes,