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

Emily’s chapter on ‘Scandal’, co-written with Rowan Tomlinson, from Renaissance Keywords, edited by Ita McCarthy, is available as a free download from the Legenda website.
The chapter explores the secular and theological charge of the word scandal in the sixteenth century, and argues that it was a keyword for both the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Hugh’s état present of studies on early modern French obscenity is also available for free download from the French Studies website.
Hugh’s AHRC-funded Obscenity network was in many ways a precursor for our current project on Gossip and Nonsense.

Intercontinental propagation of Dominic Hills’s print of the ‘donjon d’amour’ or dungeon of love continues apace (see previous post on fly-posting in Berlin), recently in the sultrily appropriate surroundings of Savannah, known to many as the location for the book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the Clint Eastwood film of the same name.

Savannah is also home to the SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), a major art school, doubtless an ideal location for fly-posting the dungeon. Indeed, Dominic Hills takes inspiration from the revolutionary posters produced at Parisian art schools in the student rebellions of 1968.

In an admittedly rather poor recreation of the spirit of May ’68, we duly received the official stamp required for putting up posters on campus and liaised with security guards to make sure we put up the prints in the few places designated for posters. The results, however, are pleasingly incongruous:

The second location, the Student Center in a converted synagogue, provided a similarly unlikely setting for the dungeon. One wonders what impact the posters made on staff and students on the morning following our posting of the dungeon on the designated notice board. However they reacted, we are very grateful to the employees of SCAD, including at student media and in security, who welcomed us, our strange request, and the dungeon itself with such characteristic southern charm and hospitality.

Clare Qualmann reports on artworks using online translations to play a game of Chinese whispers:

I have been working with Emily on a series of artworks that take the form of games of inter-lingual Chinese whispers. I am interested in exploring how processes of translation shift meaning, lose their way, create new versions of texts, and generate nonsense along the way. One version of this is an experiment using online translation services to create multiple versions of a text – google translate and babelfish respectively, moving from language to language to see how meaning shifts (and is lost)

The starting point text, a quote from Montaigne about rumour, is first translated from English to Afrikaans, then from Afrikaans back into English, then from English to Albanian, and from Albanian back to English, and so on, moving alphabetically through the 72 languages that google can work with, and the 14 languages of babelfish (as babelfish does not order them alphabetically – I have followed the order in which they do offer them).

The resulting texts are visualised in these animated sequences, that show the transformation (in fits and starts) between sense and nonsense.

The full content of the texts can be read below:

• GoogleTranslateAll
• Babelfish translation

Our friend and colleague Dominique Brancher went away from our symposium armed with a set of Dominic Hills’s prints of the Dungeon of Love, to fly-post them around Berlin.

Here we see the Dungeon on display outside the Trinkteufel, a punk bar in Kreuzberg, one of the trendiest districts in Berlin.

And here on a road sign at the intersection of Adalberstrasse and Naunynstrasse (also in Kreuzberg). Another fly-poster has put up the word ‘easy’, as if it were easy to break into (or out of?) the Dungeon.

And finally at a club on the banks of the Spree, the river which goes across Berlin, Club der Visionäre (The Club of the Visionaries), Treptow. 

Dominic Hills takes inspiration from old French naughtiness, Japanese print-making and revolutionary art from the May ’68 student rebellion in Paris. Japanese print-making also catered for working-class culture, including advertising, while the May ’68 revolutionary posters produced by art students turned Paris into a gallery for strange and rebellious images.

Fly-posting the Dungeon in Berlin is in the same incongruous, rebellious, democratic, immediate, surreal , intrusive, and fun spirit.

Here is Dominic Hills’s latest print inspired by a combination of a Renaissance double-entendre and posters from the May 1968 protests in France.

The French expression comes from Bruscambille (see previous posts), in a speech of his in praise of night (see subtitles below if needed):

Pour donques vous montrer evidemment que tant s’en faut que la nuict soit pernicieuse & dommageable : mais au contraire, tres-utile & profitable, combien pensez-vous qu’il y en ait en la compagnie qui ont esté faits & forgez du marteau naturel sur l’enclume de la nature en une seule nuict ?

To show you clearly that it is hardly likely that night is pernicious and damaging but that it is instead very useful and profitable, how many do you think of the assembled company were made and forged with the natural hammer on the anvil of nature in a single night?

In addition to the anvil of nature and the natural hammer, there are, among other things, the crossbow, the croissant, the flute, the gutter, the labourer, the library, the pestle, the door, and the tambourine of nature too…

In early 2013, I was involved in a collaboration with the performance poet and writer Malika Booker, to produce a podcast for the While You Wait series commissioned by Fuel Theatre. The series is an extended meditation on the idea of waiting, and the podcasts can be downloaded and listened to, while you wait for the bus, for a friend, or for the sun to come out. Malika’s podcast is called Waiting … in a Hairdressers, and is a portrait of a Caribbean hairdressers on the Walworth Road in London (close to where I used to live, above a launderette … but that’s another collaborative story). We also made a short film about the podcast, where we talk about the collaborative process and the finished piece. I met Malika to talk about gossip and passing the time, and early modern barbers whose shops became a hive of rumours and tittle-tattle, thanks (according to Erasmus) to the idle men who hung around there. She was particularly interested in anthropological theories of gossip from the 1960s, which see gossip as a kind of grooming activity, one that cements friendships and promotes social cohesion, an idea which plays nicely with the setting she chose for the podcast. Gossiping with your hairdresser might be even better for you than the head massage before the hair cut. Malika’s exploration of a twenty-first century hairdressers reveals a place where people wait, talk, and swop stories, a place you might choose to go and spend time in, even if you weren’t getting your nails done.

In Andrea Alciato’s famous, influential, and much-translated book of Emblems, can be found this surprising and somewhat troubling appropriation of the Procne and Philomela story.

This is the French translation by Barthélemy Aneau published by Guillaume Rouille and Macé Bonhomme, Lyon, 1549 (the emblem was first published in Latin in 1546):

Pourquoy romps tu mon repos Hirondelle

Par ton babil? digne d’estre huppe telle
Que fut Tereus, Quand par glaive trencher
Voulut ta langue: & non pas l’arracher.

Comme Progné ayant par Tereus son violateur la langue couppée, fut muée en une hirondelle jase-resse. Ainsi ceulx qui savent & peuvent moins bien parler, sont les plus babillars, faschans les aultres de leur cacquet.

Why do you disturb my rest, Swallow,

With your babble? Worthy of being a hoopoe

Was Tereus, when with his blade

He sought to sever your tongue: and not to tear it out by the roots.

As Procne, whose tongue was cut out by Tereus her violator, was transformed into a jangling Swallow, so those who know least and talk badly, are the loudest babblers, upsetting others with their cackle.

The emblem shows a solitary bird flying into a ruin, possibly depicting the babbler’s destruction of all civil relationships and communication with her excessive noise. What is odd about the verse and its explanatory gloss is that it almost entirely ignores the violence and abuse in the original Greek myth. In Ovid’s retelling of the story in Metamorphoses, Procne and Philomela were sisters; Procne was married to Tereus, who raped his sister-in-law Philomela, and cut out her tongue so she could not denounce him to her sister. When Philomela managed to tell her story by weaving it into a tapestry she sent to Procne, the two sisters took their revenge by killing Itys, Philomela and Tereus’s son, and serving him up as a meal to his father. Mad with grief, Tereus went after the sisters with a sword but was turned into a hoopoe, while Procne and Philomela became birds: Ovid is not specific, but usually Procne becomes a swallow and Philomela a nightingale. (In the emblem, the names of the sisters are reversed.)

In Alciato’s emblem, this story of rape and extreme vengeance becomes a cry of irritation against a babbler. ‘Procne’ is no longer the victim of horrific violence and the perpetrator of infanticide, but an ignorant woman who doesn’t know when to shut up and so deserves to have her tongue ripped out. The transformation of Tereus from mutilating rapist into a man driven to distraction by a woman’s incessant talk is, to say the least, odd: the horror of the story feels entirely excessive to the point it is used to make. This appropriation of the story as a moralising tale and a warning to babblers, particularly women, suggests that the stereotype of the scolding, gossiping, talkative wife was undercut with an understanding of the relationship between the sexes as one fundamentally based on violence and antagonism. But the remnants of the Greek myth – the parts of the story that aren’t told – are so much in excess of the moral of the emblem that I am left feeling confused and a little disorientated.

In an earlier post, I gave some excerpts from a nonsense love poem from 400 years ago that has survived in a manuscript in a library in Paris. Dom Hills has illustrated and animated two of the nonsensical images from this poem, which you can see here:

This 3D concertina print, known as a Polyorama Panoptique, takes us through a key-hole to show us an anvil looking askance at a hammer, as well as a dozen elephants in a plum stone. Such strange and impossible images that are so characteristic of nonsense oblige the reader to do a mental double-take, perfectly illustrated here by a 3D print that also obliges us to shift perspective, steadily revealing new nonsense, much as the poem does.

Last October, The Sun published an outraged sally against the EU and its latest ‘barmy’ meddling in British business practice. This time, The Sun reported, ‘They get their claws in salons’, threatening legislation that would force hairdressers to wear non-slip soles, leave their jewellery at home, and gossip with their clients for their ‘mental wellbeing’.

The association of hair-cutting and gossip is an ancient one that goes back at least to the time of Plutarch (first century CE). Plutarch explains the tendency of barbers to gossip with the number of idle and talkative men who hang around their shop all day, with nothing better to do but chat. It seems that in sixteenth-century Europe, the gossiping barber was more than just a literary stereotype, as barbershops were often targeted by the authorities keen to eavesdrop on rumours of sedition and unrest.

I wonder what the EU commissioners (or, come to that, The Sun) would have made of this barber, who appears in the Dutch humanist Erasmus’s 1525 treatise on talk, Lingua:

‘We see so many people today like that barber; tell them a secret and they go into labour as if they would burst unless they pass on what they have heard, blurting it out to someone else. They look for another like themselves, demand eternal secrecy with many oaths, and then drop their burden; he in turn looks for someone else, who looks for another, until the whole country knows within a few days what was entrusted to one man.’

What Erasmus’s metaphor – the secret as pregnancy – seems to imply is that for a man to act in this way, unable to keep silent about the secrets he is told, is something of a travesty: a man behaving like a woman, labouring under that eternal female burden, the desire to gossip. Little ‘emotional wellbeing’ comes from this compulsion to talk: it appears more like a curse, with each link in the chain obliged to pass on what they have heard. Be careful what you tell your hairdresser.