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Miriam Jordan
The Ambivalent Translator: Freeplay in Janice
Gurney’s Punctuation in Translation
Strive continually to imagine time eternal and space infinite. Then tell yourself
that a planet in space is but a fig seed; an epoch in time like the twist of a
tendril.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 10, Number 17.
Trans. C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks, 2002.
Continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life span of the
things around us. A grape seed in infinite space. A half twist of a corkscrew
against eternity.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 10, Number 17.
Trans. Gregory Hays, 2002.
[T]he question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of
translation.
Jacques Derrida to Toshiko Izutsu, his Japanese translator.1
Abstract
This essay examines the artwork of Toronto-based artist Janice Gurney, focusing
on her use of text and punctuation in her artwork; her work is specifically
examined in relation to Derrida’s notion of freeplay. Focusing on artists who are
part of Gurney’s social network, I trace a brief history of the use of text and
textual elements within contemporary Canadian art, connecting this history to
Gurney’s use of text as an ambivalent act of historical translation. The focus of
this text is an examination of Gurney’s use of punctuation from The Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius in her new series of paintings titled Punctuation in Translation.
Each of Gurney’s paintings represent a single translation of Marcus Aurelius, in
which only the punctuation is reproduced, eliminating the words and in this way
she presents Aurelius not through the presence of his words in translation, but
through their absence. Gurney revels in the never-ending Derridian freeplay of
translation and contextualization that occurs with each and every reading of her
artwork.
rÉsumÉ
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Cet essai porte sur le travail de l’artiste de Toronto, Janice Gurney, en mettant
l’accent sur l’usage qu’elle fait du texte et de la ponctuation dans ses œuvres ; nous
examinons en particulier son travail sous l’angle de la notion de « libre jeu » de
Derrida. En resserrant l’analyse autour d’artistes qui font partie du réseau social
de Gurney, j’expose brièvement l’histoire de l’utilisation du texte et des éléments
textuels dans l’art canadien contemporain, en liant cette histoire à l’usage que fait
Gurney du texte comme acte ambivalent de traduction historique. Ce texte porte
plus précisément sur la manière dont Gurney utilise la ponctuation du texte des
Méditations de Marc Aurèle dans sa nouvelle série de tableaux intitulée Punctuation
in Translation. Chacune des peintures de Gurney représente une unique traduction
de Marc Aurèle dans laquelle seule la ponctuation est reproduite ; en éliminant
les mots, elle représente Marc Aurèle non pas à travers la présence de ses mots
traduits, mais à travers leur absence. Gurney révèle le concept du « libre jeu » de
Derrida dans la traduction et la mise en contexte qui se produit à la lecture de
chacune de ses œuvres.
¤
Gurney’s Histories
The artwork of Toronto-based artist Janice Gurney is preoccupied with the
construction and translation of histories, specifically the ways these histories
contradict and overlap in the viewer or reader who constitutes them. In Gurney’s
visual language, elements are not discrete or distinct, but become mixed up with
no clear boundaries and constantly shifting contexts. As Shirley Madill states in
Janice Gurney: Sum Over Histories: “One of the most startling characteristics of
postmodernism is its acceptance of fragmentation, discontinuity, ephemerality,
and the chaotic. Janice Gurney constructs visually the nature of this discourse”
(Madill 1993: 13). A survey of her work reveals a series of examples; in Past SelfPortrait (Gurney 2000), the artist constructs a photographic portrait of herself
using the indexically lettered pages of her address book, which are arranged to
spell out her name: J-A-N-I-C-E G-U-R-N-E-Y. The chaotic visual nature
of this portrait depends upon the presence and absence of a decontextualized
network of names that have been written, crossed out and rewritten, forming a
discontinuous relationship between herself and the social networks that are used
to constitute a “portrait.” This portrait can be understood as a manifestation of
the social relations mediating Gurney’s autobiographical self-image. “Mediation,”
as Raymond Williams states, refers primarily to the necessary processes of
composition in a specific medium,” and consequently “indicates the practical
relations between social and artistic forms.” But mediation more commonly
points to “an indirectness of relation between experience and its composition”
(Williams 1981: 24).
In these acts of cancellation, Gurney undermines any notion of an artistic origin
or end, highlighting the difficulty of constructing linear artistic histories that take
place within complex social networks and economies of capital exchange. As Jody
Berland states:
examination of the context of contemporary social relations shows that
the rise of autobiography as a privileged tactical response to [the crisis of
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In Past Self-Portrait, Gurney uses the fragmented letters of her name through
which to represent herself as a network of relationships. Her discontinuous selfportrait makes visible the social networks necessary to produce her artwork—the
people she draws upon in various intellectual, economic and social communities
that enable her artistic productions. Narrated as a voice, however, the “self-portrait
is a hybrid, discontinuous collage of stolen language … undermining the supposed
unity of authorial voice and pointing to the impossibility of establishing a singular
identity” (Kritzman 1984: 204). Gurney again confronts these issues in her series of
(re)paintings Cancelled (The Surface of Behaviour, 1988) (1997), in which she—in a
Derridean gesture of absence/presence—paints over the surface of four paintings,
three of which were given to her by other artists, with black paint. This four-part
work consists of one unidentified painting by Gurney and three paintings given
to her by Toronto-based artists Sheila Ayearst (oil on canvas), Gordon Lebredt
(acrylic on Plexiglass) and Yam Lau (auto enamel on aluminum). Like Gurney,
Ayearst and Lebredt also make use of text in their artwork. One of Lebredt’s
latex and enamel wall paintings from Last Words No Exchange (1980), which was
later destroyed when it was painted over, spells out in text across a gallery wall:
"Reading to include under(painted) form.”2 Lebredt’s text remains to be read as
an erasure, even after it is painted over, and clearly references Derrida’s statement
“There is frame, but the frame does not exist” (Derrida 1987: 81). Reading Gurney
in relation to the artistic network that she references with her painted over
paintings positions the reader to read what is cancelled, to read what is painted
over, as Lebredt’s text suggests, as part of the artwork. This makes any notion of
an origin impossible to pinpoint because reading, whether visual or textual, can
never be enclosed.
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authenticity, which] can also be discussed, just as appropriately, in terms
of the foregrounding of signature, whose importance is directly tied to the
requirements of genealogy and market exchange. (Berland 1996: 138)
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With Cancelled (The Surface of Behaviour, 1988), Gurney undermines notions
of signature, autobiography and market exchange by making it impossible to
determine where the artwork of her social network ends and her artwork begins;
blacking out or cancelling the three paintings given to her, Gurney blurs the
boundaries between herself and her social relations, directly challenging her
role as an authentic author. Although viewers are made aware that one of the
four paintings was originally Gurney’s, there is no means of distinguishing her
work from those of her friends and colleagues. Gurney’s act of cancellation
problematizes her presence as an author within her own work, demonstrating
the impossibility of contextualizing her artistic production as a solitary social
and economic practice or history. Instead Gurney highlights the way art is
“mediated by specific social relations” (Williams 1983: 206). In blurring the artistic signature, Gurney challenges the requirements of market exchange that
an artwork be genealogically traceable in order to establish value.3 Through the
incorporation of her social histories or networks within the very fabric of her
artistic process, Gurney highlights the impossibility of delimiting the frame that
surrounds her work. “Any sign interpreting another sign, the basic condition of
semiosis is its being interwoven with signs sending back to signs, in an infinite
regression” (Eco 1979: 188-89). As a result, Gurney’s autobiographical gestures,
rather than limiting the scope of historical readings, function to endlessly expand
the possibilities of interpretation in an infinite regression.
Gurney questions histories of representation through visual translations that
literally play with the presence/absence of her subject matter. Using Derrida’s
notion of freeplay, this text examines her recent series Punctuation in Translation,
which investigates the play of meaning that results from her use of a Marcus
Aurelius quote that has been stripped of words, leaving behind only the translated
punctuation. As an artist who has consistently incorporated text into her work,
her abandonment of words for punctuation is, as I argue, a Derridean gesture.
By employing Derrida’s freeplay as a framework to discuss Gurney’s project,
Punctuation in Translation serves to illustrate the unbounded nature of freeplay
itself. With Derrida the notion of freeplay hinges upon repetition: to understand
what Derrida means we must repeat and replay so that we can view the play
that he writes of in action. As Lawrence D. Kritzman argues, “play is not to be
understood, but practiced,” and it is through the act of play that the “practice of
critical play constructs in its very inscription a principle of repetition” (Kritzman
1984: 201-202). Derrida’s concept therefore both articulates and is articulated
through the visual repetitions in Gurney’s work—in Punctuation in Translation, as
well as in her earlier work such as Past Self-Portrait and Cancelled (The Surface of
Behaviour, 1988—which function as visual enactments of freeplay.
Fig. 1 Punctuation in
Translation (2006)
Janice Gurney
Image courtesy of artist
The Context of Text in Canadian Art
Greg Curnoe, who began using text in his paintings in the late 1960s, was one of
a number of contemporary Canadian artists who turned to text in their art. “[A]ll
text paintings,” says Curnoe,
relate to concrete poetry in their insistence on words as objects in their own
right. The process of reading is deliberately obstructed as words are broken,
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Before entering the ambiguous space of Gurney’s artistic intervention, it is
necessary to trace a brief history of the use of text and textual elements within
contemporary Canadian art, focusing on the artists that are part of Gurney’s
social network. For Mark Cheetham, “Artists are the mnemonist of culture. Their
work is memory work, both personal and social, both intellectual and material”
(Cheetham 1991: 1). Since the conceptualism of the 1960s, the means by which
artists perform this function of remembering increasingly incorporates traces of
text. The American artist Joseph Kosuth with One and Three Hammers (1965)
juxtaposed the three distinct realities of the sign: a hammer mounted on a wall (the
object or referent), a photograph of the hammer (equivalent to the mental image
or the interpretent), and an enlarged dictionary definition of a hammer (the sign
that stands in for the hammer itself ). Through this conceptual exercise, Kosuth
literalized the manner in which signs and reality overlap, demonstrating how
contemporary art is saturated with language that reflects our complex personal
and social realities. Similar conceptual or textual gestures have been produced by a
number of contemporary artists, including Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Martha
Rosler and General Idea. In “The Sublime: The Limits of Vision and the Inflation
of Commentary” Olivier Asselin observes: “the arts of vision are permeated with
language. From the point of view of its production, the work is often already
motivated by language” (Asselin 1996: 243). The mnemonic function of art, the
rendering of the real through textual language, is an increasingly prevalent trend
in contemporary Canadian art.
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if need be, at the line’s end, as if to emphasize the physical qualities of
language, and the existence of words as things in the world. (Milroy 2001:
55)
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In presenting fragments of broken up text, Curnoe reveals how perception changes
over time and highlights the manner in which the physical qualities of language
are in a sense always in a state of motion or play, never fixed or definitive. His
monumental text paintings View of Victoria Hospital, First Series (1969) depict
the view outside his studio-window using only rubber-stamped words to paint
an ever-changing textual picture of the exterior landscape. Through an ingenious
spatial and conceptual framework, Curnoe used text to describe everything
that he saw outside his window: “A string installed between the sashes of the
studio window imposed a structure on Curnoe’s perceptions; everything the
string traversed was duly noted, even a smudge of clay on the window pane” (64).
Curnoe translated everything that he saw, from buildings to the way the light
falls on trees, as well as the thoughts running through his mind and conversations
that he had while engaged in this process. The resulting textual images showed a
constantly changing scene, always in motion and delineated through vividly visual
poetic word images that represented both the personal and social, as well as the
intellectual and political.
Curnoe’s habitual use of text in his artwork manages to convey a dynamic world in
motion that is oddly visual despite the seemingly static nature of text. As Dennis
Reid observes of Curnoe’s art:
the lettered pieces as well as the figurative paintings, was about momentary
experience, about pausing to look at something or someone. Each work
chronicles a brief passage of time turned to observation and reflection,
describing both what was before the artist’s eyes at a particular juncture and
[what] was running through his mind. (Reid 2001: 119)
Despite the individual nature of Curnoe’s momentary experiences, his observations
convey the manner in which art and the personal and social life that surrounds it
change over time. This mutability of experience, of context, has been influential
on Janice Gurney. She describes her relationship to Curnoe’s art: “I have been
more influenced by Greg’s attitude that art comes from what is meaningful to
you in your day-to-day life. This can change over time because of changes in your
life. Of course, the fact that he saw text as a legitimate material to use in painting
has always been a major influence” (personal communication). Day-to-day life is
Gurney’s context, as seen in her use of her phonebook in Past Self-Portrait, which
serves a daily function that is crucial to her life and the production of her artwork.
Rather than presenting a visual portrait of herself, Gurney constructs a textual
portrait that consists of the contact information of people that she knows and
who know her; presumably, anyone viewing this work could call one of the listed
numbers and ask what Gurney is like. “The self-portrait is in a constant state
of tension between wholeness and the bliss of disintegration” (Kritzman 1984:
206). What results is a dynamic portrait, a series of referents that are never fixed,
existing as signs in play within a larger network of signs.
A number of contemporary Toronto-based artists—many directly responding to
Curnoe—have used text in their artwork to play with the discontinuities of text
and image, re-inscribed on the readers who view them, and to re-construct a
context that is unfixed. For example, artists such as Allyson Clay, Ron Benner,
Jamelie Hassan, Gordon Lebredt, Arthur Renwick and Sheila Ayearst use
textual elements as a means of constructing contextual plurality through the
juxtaposition of text and image. Ian Carr-Harris creates a textual archive with his
sculptural installation Nancy Higginson, 1949- (1971), which consists of a wooden
box on a pedestal with a photograph of a woman inside and a typed transcript
of a conversation. Carr-Harris presents viewers with a fragmented portrait of
a woman, of whom readers re-construct a mental or conceptual representation
through the texts and images that we are left to deconstruct or read. Carr-Harris
writes that he remains
committed to acts of re-tracing, re-presenting, re-writing—they could
be called “re-touchings”—which have, for some time, characterized my
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Curnoe’s View of Victoria Hospital, First Series and Gurney’s Past Self-Portrait
both use text as an artificial index to construct a mental image of the constantly
changing subjective experiences of the individual within a larger social and
cultural context. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson emphasize the importance of this
contextualizing gesture, stating that “by examining the social factors that frame
the signs, it is possible to analyze simultaneously the practices of the past and our
own interaction with them, an interaction that is otherwise in danger of passing
unnoticed” (Bal and Bryson 1991: 175). View of Victoria Hospital, First Series not
only translates Curnoe’s view against a string into text, but also translates the
often unnoticed context surrounding his act of viewing: that is, his thoughts, the
social and political elements of his daily existence, as well as the conversations that
overlap his production of the landscapes. Similarly, Past Self-Portrait represents the
social and spatial network that defines Gurney’s identity vis-à-vis interpretative
choices that delineate the contextual framework of her social and professional life
as an artist. Through their interpretative choices both artists draw upon the larger
contextual framework that makes their work possible, whether it is a view out of
an artist’s window or names of acquaintances in a phone book. What remains in
motion along with the sign, in the free play of contextualization that occurs when
viewers read Curnoe and Gurney’s textual works, is “the position and relation of
the artist and viewer to each other and to that subject represented and the context
of practice itself ” (Monk 1988: 206). The texts in View of Victoria Hospital, First
Series and Past Self-Portrait serve an indexical function that playfully frames an
infinitely expanding context.
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convictions concerning art as a public address. I remain … fascinated by
our relations with definition and history–with “story-telling”–and the
dimensions of light and space that we employ to negotiate these linguistic
relations. (Carr-Harris 1999: 78)
The storytelling with photographs and fragments of text makes the viewer a
reader of the linguistic relations that Carr-Harris stages, resulting in the production of a context that remains fluidly unfixed. The portrait of Nancy Higginson
that emerges through the freeplay of text and images is a portrait caught in the
mobility of semiosis paralleling Gurney’s Past Self-Portrait, as well as Punctuation
in Translation, in the fluidity and playfulness of the interpretative process. Bal
and Bryson argue that “the text or artwork cannot exist outside the circumstance
in which the reader reads the text or the viewer views the image, and that the
work of art cannot fix in advance the outcome of any of its encounters with
contextual plurality” (Bal and Bryson 1991: 179). This playful lack of fixity, and the
infinite change in contexts, recur in the process of reading and viewing Gurney’s
Punctuation in Translation.
Derrida and the Impossibility of Translating Punctuation
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Janice Gurney’s Punctuation in Translation consists of a series of eleven acrylic
paintings on paper with red commas, dashes, semi-colons, colons, apostrophes
and periods all visually rotating on small white pieces of paper that float against
monochrome black backgrounds.4 The punctuation that is the visual focus of each
painting is derived from the various English translations of The Meditations of
Marcus Aurelius Book 10, Number 17. Gurney used as her source her collection
of Marcus Aurelius in translation, the largest in Canada.5 Each of the eleven
translations are slightly different, but say the same things in an intriguing demonstration of the freeplay of meaning inherent in translation. Her interest in
collecting these diverse translations is fascinating and adds a new dimension to
interpreting the work. As Gurney states:
I am fascinated by how the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome
from 161-180, continue to resonate over time. They have been preserved
in many different translations, becoming a record of both permanence
and change. One structure that places a different emphasis on the same
meaning is punctuation, represented by the difference in the number and
placement of the punctuation marks in various translations.6
Perhaps Gurney’s fascination with these different translations has to do with the
impossibility of translation and the fact that translation is always partially outside
of the text, but at the same time constrained by the text.
I associate this concept, and Gurney’s statement that translation is “a record of
both permanence and change,” with Derrida’s notion of freeplay. “The organiz-
ing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the
structure” (Derrida 1978: 278). If the play of the structure is limited by the
structure itself, then translation becomes both permanent within the limits of
structure and subject to the change of play. As James Hans re-states it, “there
is something to be confirmed by the freeplay of discourse, and that is the play
which always partially but never totally exceeds the network” (Hans 1979: 823).
Gurney’s work demonstrates the manner in which the structure of language both
exceeds the structuring network and is at the same constrained by it, just as the
translations of Marcus Aurelius play with the distinction between similarity and
difference. The various translations of punctuation in these texts highlight the
similarities in discourse surrounding Marcus Aurelius, in which the difference
in interpretation—the result of the shifting context of perspective that frames
translation and reading—is at the same time fundamental. The texts are basically
the same, but Gurney punctuates the radicality of their differences.
I choose the people at U of T because they were people I had a connection
to before I went there … or people I met and connected with who
taught in the Book History and Print Culture program … I told each
person who accepted to have the painting in their office that they could
place it anywhere they wanted. It was in their private space and the only
people who officially came to see them were the people on my graduate
committee. Otherwise the audience was whoever went to see each person
in their office. (Gurney 2007)
Gurney’s choice of professors again reflects her consistent illustration and
documentation of the social network used in producing her artwork. The
ambiguity caused by her dual relationship with these individuals, who function
both as professional colleagues and educational supervisors, is reflected in the
parameters of this project, in which the space of display is a “private office” within
a public educational institution. Here Gurney inscribes Punctuation in Translation
into an academic environment where, like the meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
the artworks can be read and recontextualized infinitely.
In Standard Edition (2006), a giclée print on watercolour paper, Gurney presents a
photograph of the reflection in the glass covering one of her paintings; the image
reflected back is of Professor David Galbraith’s library. As a result the image shows
the punctuation of Gurney’s painting floating against a backdrop of Galbraith’s
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Gurney extends the logic of Punctuation in Translation by continuing to translate
these works in a parallel series titled Meditation in Your Office. Produced in April
2006, while she was completing her Master of Visual Studies at the University
of Toronto, these works document Gurney’s Punctuation in Translation paintings
within the offices of six university professors: Mark Cheetham, David Galbraith,
Pat Fleming, Linda Hutcheon, Barbara Fischer and Elizabeth Harvey.7 As
Gurney explains:
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books. With her title Gurney wittily
points out the impossibility of a standard
edition, a static text, by the infinite
regression of texts that Gurney presents
viewers with. It is in the reader that “the
Text is experienced only in an activity of
production. It follows that the Text cannot
stop … its constitutive movement is that
of cutting across (in particular, it can cut
across the work, several works)” (Barthes
1978: 157). Similarly, Meditation in Your
Office (2006) consists of a photograph
of Gurney’s painting leaning against
a wall on a wooden desk, with stacks
of papers parenthetically framing
the work. In the series, Meditation in
Your Office, meanings are constantly in
motion through the play of ideas that
occur with each reading of text(s)­—a
process that is akin to that of the
academic environment, in which texts
and thought are always in play.
According to Roland Barthes,
Fig. 2 Meditation in Your Office (2006)
Janice Gurney
Images courtesy of artist
The reader is the space on which
all the quotations that make up
a writing are inscribed … a text’s
unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination … the reader … is simply
that someone who holds together in
a single field all the traces by which
the written text is constituted. (148)
Fig. 3 Standard Edition (2006)
This process of reading, of intellectual
Janice Gurney
play, is evident in the eleven translations
Image courtesy of artist
of the same meditation by Marcus
Aurelius that Gurney provides—in place
of an artist statement—within the context
of her exhibition of these works. This additional layer of photographic tracing
that Gurney adds to Punctuation in Translation again plays with the distinction
between similarity and difference, in which the work is retraced through its
recontextualization and translation into an academic environment. This constant
translation and retracing of social and historical networks, both personal and
textual, represents Gurney’s most evident display of freeplay.
Gurney’s Translation and Derrida’s Freeplay
In The Structuralist Controversy, translated by Ricjard Macksey, Derrida writes:
Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is
always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of
differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay
of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must
be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must
be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of
freeplay and not the other way around. (Derrida 1972: 263-64)
This same text translated by Alan Bass reads as follows:
It should be noted that Bass thanks Macksey “for his generous permission to
revise his own fine translation of ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences.’ Most of the translation of this essay belongs to Professor
Macksey” (Derrida 1978: xx). The fact that Bass felt it necessary to substitute his
own interpretation of certain words in his revision of Macksey’s translation—
specifically Bass’s substitution of “play” for Macksey’s “freeplay”—can be seen as
evidence of freeplay in action.
There has been a slippage of meaning between these two translations of Derrida;
the most significant difference is the shift from “freeplay” to “play,” with Bass
consciously making the decision to alter Macksey’s translation. We might ask
ourselves why this shift? What extra significance is added by this addition and
subtraction, this presence and absence, of the word “free”? In discarding “free”
from his retranslation Bass is narrowing the focus of Derrida’s concept. In Bass’s
translation of Macksey’s sentence, “Freeplay is the disruption of presence” is
reduced to “Play is the disruption of presence.” This difference is interesting: the
presence of “free” is disrupted in Bass’s translation, becoming an absence, especially
in comparison to Macksey’s translation. In a Derridean sense, Bass is playing with
the concept of différance by taking out “free” while acknowledging Macksey’s
translation which incorporates “free,” thereby presenting the word as both absent
and present: freeplay.
In her own role as translator, I believe Gurney is performing a similar act. Each
of Gurney’s paintings represents a single translation of Marcus Aurelius, in which
only the punctuation is reproduced, eliminating the words. It is surprising to see
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Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a
signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences
and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of absence and presence,
but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the
alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or
absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around.
(Derrida 1978: 292)
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the enormous differences in punctuation, spread out in red, because this illustrates
the vast amount of freedom or play that is inherent in any act of translation.
Contrary to the expectations that a translated text is a faithful and accurate
restatement of the original text, “the shortcomings of translation,” which Derrida
relates to the distinction between fiction and autobiography, is “a fatal and double
impossibility: the impossibility of deciding, but the impossibility of remaining ... in
the undecidable” (Derrida 2000: 16).8 The undecidability of translation is evident
in the manner in which Gurney loosely attaches the punctuation of her paintings
on separate, and therefore moveable, pieces of paper. This double impossibility
is an act of what Derrida terms différance: these paintings are translations of
Marcus Aurelius.
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Gurney’s paintings embrace the double impossibility of the presence/absence in
what is translated, presenting Marcus Aurelius not through the presence of his
words in translation, but through their absence as punctuated by the translations
of punctuation. Gurney places the punctuation as both present within the work,
being physically attached to it, and absent, in the sense that it is always movable
and removable. This presence/absence reflects the very process of translation in
the construction of these images. These differences are made more evident by her
elimination of the translated words in favour of the punctuation, highlighting the
inevitable play that occurs in and across language as it is read and translated—each
reader or translator interacting with the ideas presented and thereby adding their
own interpretation to the text. Gurney’s translations reflect ambivalence to fixed
or decidable meanings, demonstrating the text as, to borrow the words of Derrida,
a “joyous affirmation of the play of the world” (Derrida 1978: 292).
In excluding the translated words of Marcus Aurelius, Gurney focuses on the play
of the presence of the punctuation and the absence of the text, a conception that
ironically would be reversed had the text been in place: if the text were present the
punctuation would be taken for granted and for all intents and purposes absent.
This coincides with Derrida’s statement: “Play is always a play of absence and
presence” (Derrida 1978: 292). Play is predicated on the back and forth exchange
that occurs between what is present and what is absent; in this case the play that
occurs between the presence of punctuation and the absence of text, and highlights
the present invisibility of punctuation in all text. The absence of text in Punctuation
in Translation reflects a more philosophical intent. In this particular text Marcus
Aurelius dis-cusses the individual in rela-tion to the conception of Time and Being,
which he connects to—depending on the translation—a fig seed, a grape seed or a
grain of sand rotating in time. The punctuation can be seen in relation to this image
of a seed or grain, with the commas, periods and other punctuation marks functioning as individual beings spiraling within the whole of time. The punctuation
that appears in Gurney’s paintings and photographs look as though they are in
fact revolving or turning like grape seeds or grains of sand. What this suggests
is that everything, down to the smallest element—including the punctuation of
a sentence—is involved in
the rotating twist of freeplay
that occurs in all Time and
all Being.9 This is the root of
her fascination with Marcus
Aurelius. It is the fascination
with the indefinite “blank
space surrounding a word,
typo-graphical adjustments
and spatial composition in
the page setting of the poetic
text— contribute to create a
halo of indefiniteness and to
make the text pregnant with
infinite suggestive possibilities” (Eco 1979: 53).
Fig. 4 Punctuation in Translation (2006)
Janice Gurney
Image courtesy of artist
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Gurney functions as an ambivalent translator: she is
ambivalent about the possibility of authenticity or the
notion of an original and
authentic meaning, yet she
is fascinated by the search
for such meaning and the
possibilities grounded within
this search. Accordingly, in
Punctuation in Translation
Gurney is breaking down or
Fig. 5 Punctuation in Translation (2006)
translating the meaning(s)
Janice Gurney
of various translations and
Image courtesy of artist
interpretations of Marcus
Aurelius’s words into their
smallest possible visual
structure, presenting us with
translations of Marcus Aurelius as punctuation at play. In this manner, Gurney
celebrates the indefiniteness of translation by herself translating the numerous
translations into a series of images that in turn must be translated by the viewer
who reads them: every step in this process is an act of translation, no single act more
important than another. Echoing the double impossibility that Derrida speaks
of, Gurney presents us with the impossibility of deciding and the impossibility
of remaining undecided (Derrida 2000: 16). As Spivak notes in her translator’s
preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology: “Derrida’s trace is the mark of the absence
79
of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the
condition of thought and experience” (Spivak 1997: xvii). Accordingly, Gurney’s
role as translator of the trace of translation itself is to reflect the lack at the origin,
which is marked by traces of absence and presence that are the condition of
thought.
Freeplay of Meaning
Gurney’s ambivalence as translator of Marcus Aurelius parallels Derrida’s concept
of différance. As Derrida states in Speech and Phenomena:
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Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if
each element that is “present,” appearing on the stage of presence, is related
to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and
already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future
element. This trace relates no less to what is called the future than to
what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by
this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not
even to a past or future considered as modified present. In order for it to
be, an interval must separate it from what it is not, but the interval that
constitutes it in the present must also, and by the same token, divide the
present in itself, thus dividing, along with the present, everything that
can be conceived on its basis, that is every being—in particular, for our
metaphysical language, the substance or the subject. (1973: 142-43)
Gurney’s relation of her paintings and photographs to the multiple English
translations of Marcus Aurelius is one of presence that depends on the text
itself. The text is absent from the images but present as a trace. Gurney has made
reference to the past and the present through her use of translations from different
time-periods, but she has also left room in the blackness of her work for a future
translation. In this way Gurney is ambivalently playing with the conception of
a fixed location of meaning by undermining the possibility of an original and
authentic interpretation of a text.
This brings us back to the theme of the impossibility of an origin that runs through
Gurney’s work. As Cheetham states in Remembering Postmodernism, Gurney investigates “the status of originality, the putative uniqueness of artistic images …
and the sense in which an artist is an origin for a work. [ J]ust as it appears that
there is no essential, original subject in Screen, so too The Damage is Done makes it
impossible for us to find either an essential work within its layers or an essential
artist” (Cheetham 1991: 75-76). Gurney’s mixed media work Screen (1986) is a
six-panel work consisting of manipulated found images. The central image is an
appropriated still from Erich Von Stroheim’s film Foolish Wives, which shows a
young woman holding an infant. The two cibachrome photographs that frame the
Von Stroheim still are out-of-focus photographs by Andy Patton, across which is
a quotation from Marguerite Duras’s text The Lover, printed in red. The original
text that Gurney re-presents is:
At that time she’d just turned
thirty-eight. And the child was
ten. And now, when she remembers
she’s sixteen
(qtd. in Cheetham 1991: 56).
The text on the left panel reads:
At that time she’d
Thirty-eight. And the
ten. And now, when
she’s sixteen.
The differences in Gurney’s visual translation of Duras’s text occur across the
future/past, presence/absence of memory. The three photostatic panels placed
beneath each of the above listed images are of textured fabric. In The Damage
is Done (1986) Gurney has appropriated four paintings. Three small paintings
are mounted in a row across a large oil painting by Joanne Tod called The Upper
Room.11 It is important to note that Tod is part of Gurney’s social network within
the Canadian art scene—as A. A. Bronson points out, it is the formation of a
Canadian social network by artists that allowed us “to see ourselves as an art
scene” (Bronson 1983: 30). Two of the smaller paintings, damaged landscapes
that Gurney found in a junk-shop, flank the third monochrome painting by Andy
Patton across which Gurney had silk-screened the words “The Damage is Done.”
Gurney is not only drawing upon the social network of the Canadian art scene,
but she is literally inscribing herself upon it. These two works illustrate Gurney’s
tendency to undermine the notion of an original and an “author” through artwork
that has a discontinuous and multi-layered history, combining and convoluting the
singular or original artistic gesture. Gurney’s Screen and The Damage is Done trace
the manner in which a single gesture can resonate in a larger artistic context.
Likewise, in Punctuation in Translation there is no origin or author to be found
in its layers of possible meaning; instead, we are presented with the double
possibility and impossibility of translation in a single meditation of Marcus
TOPIA 18
The right panel reads:
time she’d just turned
And the child was
Now, when she remembers
she’s sixteen.10
81
Aurelius translated twelve times (including Gurney’s visual translations). Gurney
embraces the impossibility of this origin because
on the basis of what we call the center … repetitions, substitutions,
transformations, and permutations are always taken from a history of
meaning … whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may
always be anticipated in the form of presence. (Derrida 1978: 279)
Gurney eliminates the possibility of a fixed interpretive meaning—punctuation in
the absence of the text it is meant to punctuate does not really convey any meaning
in particular—and instead calls upon an endless history of meaning, represented
as both presence and absence, in which a beginning and end are not to be found.
In this way Gurney plays with the absence and presence of the origin—that is the
absence and presence of Marcus Aurelius as author—through her substitution of
punctuation in place of the words themselves she engages in “freeplay, that is to
say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble” (Derrida
1972: 260).
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82
For Derrida, freeplay functions as a “disruption of presence,” a disruption that he
likens to the shifting movement of a chain (Derrida 1978: 292). By this he implies
that the play of meaning is one of shifting presences and absences, this interplay
of absence and presence is a never-ending freeplay of signification: an endless
chain of meaning that is always in process. Derrida makes the radical claim
that this notion of freeplay is something that “must be conceived as presence or
absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around” (292).
As Stuart Hall explains while discussing Derrida’s concepts, “interpretations are
always followed by other interpretations, in an endless chain.... So any notion of
a final meaning is always endlessly put off, deferred” (Hall 1997: 42). As with the
example of the multiple translations of Marcus Aurelius, translation is an endless
chain that never arrives at a definitive meaning: Gurney presents us with a trace
of that chain.
Freeplay is always inherent in any act of reading, interpretation or translation
because, to borrow Derrida’s example of the chain, there is always a play between
what is present and what is absent, creating a flux in potential meanings. Meaning
is not anchored around a fixed point—an origin or “truth” that can be pinpointed,
with translations landing closer or further from this point—but instead it is
always an interplay of absence/presence. What freeplay allows for, as James S.
Hans explains, is “the need to think a non-centered world and the need to think
the discontinuities of this non-centered world” (Hans 1979: 815). This lack of
centre is derived from the discontinuous nature of text that is not simply a copy
of an original, but is also an interpretation, a translation.
In one translation of Marcus Aurelius, the reader is presented with a fig seed, in
another s/he is presented with a grape seed, and in yet another s/he is given a
grain of sand. What this demonstrates is that translation, interpretation, or even
reading is not subject to a fixed centre of meaning, but is always subject to an
infinite freeplay of signification or meaning, a shifting interplay of contexts and
readings, a disruption of presence and absence. The reading of text cannot be fixed
in advance because of the undefined contextual space that surrounds the reader,
the frame that is there and that does not exist. Gurney plays within this shifting
interplay of semiosis revealing the discontinuities that structure the way we make
meaning and think about the world.
Endless (Ambivalent) Translations
Gurney’s multiple translations of Marcus Aurelius draw our attention to the way
we interpret and make meaning through reading(s) of text even in the absence of
text. By isolating punctuation and representing it as a visual form, Gurney shows
that visual representations are open to the same play of interpretation that attaches
to words. This simple play of forms is a visual demonstration of Derrida’s concept
of freeplay, which she illustrates through the play of meaning that occurs between
her use of punctuation and the fig seed or grains of sand that punctuate the various
translations she makes use of: the punctuation is the fig seed rotating through
time. She further demonstrates this freeplay of the multiple levels of translation
by placing the paintings in the offices of six people at the University of Toronto
among the “jumble of books and papers” within the academic environment. This
expansion of Punctuation in Translation into Meditation in Your Office again plays
upon the boundlessness inside which these singular translations resonate and
rotate. “There will,” as Tilman Küchler observes, “always be ‘more’ play, before
and after the conclusion, whose final gesture will be suspended, inscribed into the
ongoing movement of play. This leads to the conclusion that there is no conclusion
possible” (Küchler 1994: 127).
In her role as an ambivalent translator, Gurney is translating translation in an
interconnected chain of meaning that is repeated without ending. In his translator’s
note for Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz writes:
There are inevitably trade-offs along the way and never an end in sight.
Set in motion, the mutational process stops for no one. So while its
TOPIA 18
In their translators’ preface for Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, Geoff Bennington
and Ian McLeod observe that “the translator’s attitude to the reader is profoundly
ambivalent, and this ambivalence can only be increased when s/he has learned
from the author to be translated that the task is strictly speaking impossible”
(Bennington and McLeod 1987: xiii). What this illustrates is that language, even
in the pared down form of punctuation, is not fixed; if we consider the act of
translation impossible—as Derrida (evidently) told Bennington and McLeod all
translations become ambivalent interpretations that play with the original.
83
transgressive lure may be formally irresistible, there is no definitive
translation by definition. At some point one simply has to give up. Period.
(Prenowitz 1996: 106)
What Gurney leaves us with in Punctuation in Translation is the endless chain of
punctuation. Comma.
Notes
1. Cited by Vincent B. Leitch (Leitch 2001: 1815).
2. For an interesting discussion of the manner in which Gurney makes endings indeterminate, deferring the arrival of the end through her use of erasure, see Lebredt (2003).
3. For example, if we look at the humorous ramifications of the sale of Gurney’s work a
complex and unwieldy formula emerges. The sale of Cancelled (The Surface of Behaviour,
1988) would be a complex one with percentages of profit to be divided up between Gurney, Sheila Ayearst, Gordon Lebredt, Yam Lau and the galleries that represent each of
the artists. What this hypothetical sale demonstrates is the difficulty in pinpointing the
ownership of an artistic product.
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4. Although it is uncommon to present punctuation divorced from text in artworks, Gurney is not the only artist to do this. Other examples of artists who have used punctuation
include: Arthur Renwick and Laurel Woodcock. In Delegates: Chiefs of the Earth and Sky
(2004) a series of eleven black and white photographs of the South Dakota landscape
Arthur Renwick used punctuation marks to highlight the lack of fixity between language
and the land. Laurel Woodcock’s Quotation (2006) isolates quotation marks in blue neon,
leaving the quotation blank for the viewer to fill in.
5. This information is taken from a personal conversation with the artist and her partner
Andy Patton in Toronto in August 2006. Andy Patton is a Toronto-based painter who
often enters abandoned buildings illegally to paint the walls “in the manner of ‘frescoes,’
but only with one colour” (Fischer 1995: 5). As a point of interest, the collaborative
poetry group Pain Not Bread—which consists of Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Patton—published Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, a collection of poems that
play upon the nature of translation by engaging with and recontextualizing the work of
the Chinese poet Wang Wei.
6. This quote by Janice Gurney is taken from her press release of 8 September 2006, by
Wynick/Tuck Gallery for Punctuation in Translation.
7. As a point of interest, each of these academics—all at the University of Toronto—has
different areas of study that undoubtedly influences the manner in which they “meditate”
upon Gurney’s paintings in their offices and frames the way each individual “translates”
her work. Mark Cheetham is a Professor in the Department of Art and is the Director
of the Canadian Studies Program at University College. David Galbraith is an Associate Professor in the English Department of Victoria College. Pat Fleming is a Professor
in the Faculty of Information Studies. Linda Hutcheon is a Professor in English and
Comparative Literature. Elizabeth Harvey is a Professor of English and Barbara Fischer
is a curator and lecturer at the Centre for Visual and Media Culture.
8. It should be noted that I have played with Derrida’s words in my connection of these
two quotes. In the first Derrida is acknowledging the “shortcomings of translation” in
relation to the presentation of quotes by himself from his funerary oration for Paul de
Man, whereas in the second quote Derrida is commenting on the content of his own
quote. I felt that this mixture of commentary on meta-commentary was appropriate in
relation to the meta-translation in which Gurney engages.
9. This sentence is a play on Maxwell Staniforth’s 1964 translation of Marcus Aurelius,
which reads: “Let your mind constantly dwell on all Time and all Being, and thus learn
that each separate thing is but a grain of sand in comparison with Being, and as a single
screw’s-turn in comparison with Time” (Aurelius 1964: 157).
10. For an in depth discussion of the fragmentation that occurs with memory see
Cheetham (1991: 56).
11. Joanne Tod is a Toronto-based artist and lecturer in the Master of Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto. Her paintings often re-present appropriated
imagery from advertising or the popular media as a means of critiquing the construction
of feminine identity.
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