Participating in this encounter :
Cyril Behnke (graduate ESAD- GV )
Antonia Birnbaum, LLCP, Paris 8
Jérôme Boutterin (ENSAV Paris-Versailles)
Stuart Elliot (CSM)
Mick Finch (Central Saint Martins - CSM )
Olivier Gourvil (ESAD -GV)
Galina Munroe (currently a MA student CSM )
Katharina Schmidt (ISDAT Toulouse)
Varda Schneider (graduate ESAD- GV)
Winfried Virnich ( Kunsthochshule Mainz)
This encounter takes place in the context of the Réseau Peinture.
The proposition made by Central Saint Martins (London) consists of a seminar that questions lexical issues of words (English, French and German) that are specific to painting and its pictorial aspects (medium, painting, stage, (in)discipline...).
Moreover, the lexicon will be used at the core of a project to distinguish the complexity of notions and crossovers, starting with texts by artists and authors, selected in the three languages. This production will form the basis of a system of translation in the different languages, beginning with the video recording of the seminar.
This proposition has a direct connection with The Tableau Project of the CSM that treats questions of translation between the term tableau and the wider sense of painting in the anglo saxon context.
The project’s main problematic is to analysis the field of key terms, concepts and texts that have influenced the field of the pictorial arts within a broadly modernist field. The question of what happens to these key elements through translation being the major aspect of this. The three countries involved in this project (UK, France and Germany) are highly significant to this enquiry in terms of the historical and contemporary development of concepts important to pictorial artistic practices in the fields of theory, philosophy, critical studies and aesthetics. The increasing situation that English is progressively the lingua franca for the diffusion of ideas raises many questions of what gets changed or lost in translation.
In pictorial and visual arts there is an abundance of literature and terminology, at the same time there is a pressing need of precision and contextualisation, addressing questions like: where the terms come from? which context generated them? How translations can be misleading? Which are the nuances of the key terms/concepts? These themes can be contemplated only in a trans-national context as their understanding requires taking into account interconnectedness of cultural, national, historical, political and ideological forces at work.
The European project. The 30-months project is aimed at analysing the influence of cultural and linguistic diversity into the contemporary pictorial practice. Work will start from an in depth review of the visual arts literature to map and select key terms and texts to be critically analysed through a series of 3 seminars enriched by 6 artist studio visits and colloquia to understand the theoretical approaches underpinning the pictorial practice.
