Author Archives: Clare Qualmann

Whispering Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on conceptual art.

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Throughout the Gossip and Nonsense project Emily and I have been using Sol LeWitt’s sentences on conceptual art as phrases to ‘chinese whisper’. Written in 1969 these were first published in the magazine 0-9 in New York, and in Art-Language in London (both 1969). I’ve gradually been setting the resulting ‘translated’ sentences using metal letterpress type.

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Possibly the most laborious way to produce a printed page, letterpress appeals to me because of the amount of care that it requires; the decision making and accuracy; and the physicality of the heavy-weight cubes of metal; the sound of the sticky ink; the smell of news print; and the effort required to pull the press.

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To date (August 2015) the following sentences have been whispered and printed in an edition of 30, on newsprint.

1. Conceptual art are eternal optimists.

(whispered by London Met staff Cat Jeffcock, Aimee McWilliams, Charlotte Worthington and Marianne Forest in English)

12. For each work of art that comes from a circle there are many variations

(whispered by artists group members: Rebecca French, Agnieszka Gratza, Karen Christopher, Sheila Ghelani, Clare Qualmann in English)

14. The words of one artist to another might induce an idea strain.

(whispered by artists group members: Rebecca French, Agnieszka Gratza, Karen Christopher, Sheila Ghelani, Clare Qualmann in English)

15. Art can take whatever form it likes, warts are another matter

(whispered by participants in the Gossip and Nonsense symposium, Exeter, June 2013, in English and French)

16. If words come first of all it’s because of art, not literature.

(whispered by participants in the Gossip and Nonsense symposium, Exeter, June 2013, in English and French)

20. Successful art challenges our perceptions by changing our understanding.

(whispered by participants in the Renaissance Rumours event at Inside Out, King’s, October 2014, in English and French)

26. The artist makes the seed, but others do their own.

(whispered by London Met Fine Art students, May 2015, in English)

27. The concept of a work of art may involve the people.

(whispered by artists group members: Rebecca French, Agnieszka Gratza, Karen Christopher, Sheila Ghelani, Clare Qualmann in English)

34. When an artist makes his scene he makes his scene well.

(whispered by London Met Fine Art students, May 2015, in English)

You can compare the original sentences here.

Renaissance Rumours and Chinese Whispers

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As part of the ‘Inside Out’ festival at King’s College this October (2014), Emily and I organised a mass game of Chinese Whispers, drawing upon some earlier experiments at the Gossip and Nonsense symposium in Exeter in July 2013, and the Gossip and Nonsense publication workshop at King’s in June 2014.

We took over the lovely back room at Fernandez and Wells in Somerset House, where Emily introduced the broader project with a talk about the French Renaissance court, libellous pamphlets, and attempts to understand a personal investment in the spread of rumour and gossip. We went on to play several games of Chinese Whispers, using quotes from Montaigne, as well as Sol LeWitt’s sentences on conceptual art.

P1020078P1020091I also talked about the use of  language, and translation, in art – which I wrote about a little in a previous blog. Our participants really enlivened the discussion with their reflections on the process – the difficulty of holding onto the words under pressure, and the intimacy of the whisper.

 

We experimented in English, and with some ‘live’ translation in and out of languages that were shared by members of the group.

We closed the event with an outdoor game – using the architectural space of the courtyard at Somerset House as a frame to whisper around. Our participants spread themselves in a line, and as the first person whispered to the second they left the from of the line and went to the back, waiting for their turn to come again. Using this method we created a Chinese Whispers chain that moved all of the way around the courtyard’s perimeter.

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Interestingly the phrase that we whispered (Sol LeWitt’s 7th sentence on Conceptual art, contracted to ‘The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion) soon reduced to a very manageable length, and began to feel like it would not morph any further becoming rather boring to repeat over and over again… as we neared the end of the second side of the rectangular courtyard a participant took action to remedy this, with laughter breaking out along our line as the word ‘arse’ was intentionally introduced. Somehow by the time we had returned to the Fernandez and Wells doorway in the north east corner of the courtyard we were left with the phrase ‘The officer’s arse is scarier than his face which is really heavy.’

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post script: sound recordings from this event featured in the Radio 4 programme ‘Something Understood’ on the 7th December 2014, entitled Gossip and Whispers.

 

 

Chinese Whispers: Gossip and Nonsense

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The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest usage of the term ‘Chinese Whispers’ in 1964, before which it was known as ‘Russian Gossip’, or ‘Russian Scandal’. In Chinese the name of the game translates as ‘passing along rumours or gossip’. Proposals for a culturally sensitive name include ‘broken telephone’ or ‘the grapevine’. In the US the game is known as ‘party line’ or simply ‘telephone’.

There’s an interesting trajectory of artists using text, translation, games, rules and instructions for generating material, works and projects, part of the post-conceptual turn in fine art in which the description of the work (or the instructions for it) are themselves the art. Looking specifically at translation in this context, a remarkable feature seems to be the borrowing of earlier artists’ works – so that the processes of translation are not only linguistic.

For example, Jonathan Monk’s ‘Translation Piece’ (2002) cites Robert Barry’s 1969 work ‘Telepathic piece’. Barry’s work, which consisted of a written statement that he would telepathically transmit the piece, was made for a gallery show in Canada in 1969. Interviewed in 2003(1) he describes the work as a sense or a feeling, and considers that it might still be operating – being passed from person to person telepathically 30 years later – though perhaps no longer recognisable considering the possible multiple changes, shifts and alterations that would have taken place as it passed through multiple thought processes. Jonathan Monk’s work takes Barry’s written statement: ‘During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image’ and sends it around the world through a series of translation agencies from English to French, then into Dutch, German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, Mongolian, Chinese, and finally back into English (2). The work is then exhibited as the translated texts, on the translation agencies’ headed paper, framed on the gallery wall. The final resulting text reads: ‘In this image the way of expression of reactions of the soul attempts to come close to a work of art’(3), transforming the meaning of the statement in a way not dissimilar to the automated translation services that I’ve used for this project. (4)

Stephen Prima’s work, ‘Upon the Occasion of Receivership’ (1989) takes Lawrence Weiner’s 1969 work ‘A Translation from One Language to Another’ (which is a text piece simply consisting of the title text) as an instruction – and sent it (Weiner’s text) to Berlitz translation agency to be translated into 61 languages. These are then organised and displayed according to the their pricing band charged by Berlitz.

Following this trajectory, for our live game of interlingual chinese whispers, conducted as part of the ‘Gossip and Nonsense’ symposium at Exeter, I chose texts from Sol Lewitt’s 1969 sentences on conceptual art (1969) (5). The first experiment took sentence 15: ‘Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally’. contracting it to ‘ the artist may use any form, from an expression of words to physical reality, equally’ the sentence was passed from English to French to English to French to English to French to English to English to English to English, with the resulting output ‘art can take whatever form it likes, warts are another matter’. The second took sentence 16: ‘If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.’ contracted to ‘If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature’ this was passed from English to English to English to English to French to English to French to English to french to English, resulting in ‘if words come first of all it’s because of art, not literature’.

I now plan to continue these games, using further sentences from Sol Lewitt, using the resulting texts to create a set of letterpress prints.

(1) Interview with Robert Barry By Raimundas Malasauskas, 3rd March 2003 http://www.janmot.com/newspaper/barry_monk.php

(2)Gray, Z., and Honer, J., 2006,  Langues Emmelees/Entangled Tongues, ADDC, Perigueux

(3) Eichler, D. 2006, Jonathan Monk, in Frieze Magazine, 100: June-August 2006 http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/jonathan_monk/

(4) Qualmann, C. 2013, http://gossipandnonsense.exeter.ac.uk/2013/08/chinese-whispers-using-online-translation-services/

(5) Lewitt, S, 1969, Sentences on Conceptual Art, Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art, Vol. 1 # 1, 1969, pp11-13