Drawing as translation

My last post on Drawing in response to art touched upon another related issue, drawing as translation. You could argue that Picasso and Lichtenstein were translating earlier artists' personal language into their own. (see) But there are several other issues that can be unpicked here, the most interesting for me though is that of the gradual erosion of the initial meaning or intended communication and the way a new object arises out of the act of translation. As children we have all played Chinese whispers, a game that relies upon the fact that people are prone to mishear things, especially if they are whispered. When the last person in the line has to announce what they believe was said, we are often genuinely surprised and enchanted by how far the initial sentence has changed. Sometimes I think art is like that. One artist makes a piece of work, another sees it and makes something similar, then another artist sees the second artist's work and makes something in response to that; and so it goes....

There is a quite technical understanding of this process, the translator Antoine Berman has identified several ‘deforming tendencies’ that occur during acts of translation: including rationalisation, clarification, expansion, ennoblement, qualitative impoverishment, quantitative impoverishment, the destruction of rhythms, the destruction of underlying networks of signification, the destruction of linguistic patternings, the destruction of vernacular network or their exoticisation, the destruction of expressions and idioms and the effacement of the superimposition of languages. 
This process is understood by Berman to be related to verbal or written languages, but we can see very similar processes of deformation occur when we look at visual translations. 
Translation is very close to copying, and historically copying was an important aspect of an artist's training.  Fialetti's 'All parts of the human body, divided into several pieces'  is a classic drawing aid, which itself uses engraved and printed translations of drawings as illustrations, which artists were meant to copy in order to build up a knowledge of the human body. Known as 'libra da disengage' these instructional manuals were designed to be followed step by step, from outline to shading, from individual body parts to full bodies. 
(My interest here is that the body is broken down in a similar way to how we can break down a written or verbal language when trying to learn it, and if words are put together in the wrong order the meaning changes dramatically. Think of what would happen if an eye from one page was put together with a torso from another). Max Ernst was one of the first people to grasp the power of this potential. 

Max Ernst: Collage

So when does copying become translating? One way to think of this is when a change of medium is involved. A chalk drawing rendered as a line drawing in pen and ink for example, or a silverpoint drawing copied in pencil. However a step further would be when a three dimensional medium, such as stone carving is translated into a two dimensional medium. 

Tourist photograph of the Belvedere Torso

'Artistic' photograph of the Belvedere Torso

Photograph of a Peter Paul Rubens red chalk drawing after the Belvedere Torso

Maerten Van Heemskerck

Hendrick Goltzius  Belvedere Torso

Not only do we have changes in expression due to changes in material, we can also see subtle changes due to the particular predilections of each artist. Rubens emphasises the compact rhythmic power in the torso, Goltzius is more interested in the sensuous body and Maerten Van Heemskerck who worked for many years as a designer for engravers, is more interested in picking out a clarity of form with his hatched pen and ink lines. Perhaps more interesting is how the two different photographs carry meaning. The 'tourist' photograph is harshly lit and our attention on the figure distracted by the other people in the image. The 'artistic' photograph, taken from an old art magazine, has used a very particular soft lighting technique to emphasise the fleshy quality of the torso. 

All the 'translations' above are historically distant, but we can get an idea of how Lichtenstein's images initially seemed so startling by looking at a few drawings from how to draw superhero comic books. 

The conventions associated with superhero comics, include certain sorts of simplification and exaggeration, what Berman would call ‘deforming tendencies’. If you replaced the styles of drawing the Belvedere Torso that were commented on further above with a comic book style, you can see how it would lead to rationalisation, clarification, expansion, ennoblement, qualitative impoverishment, quantitative impoverishment, the destruction of rhythms and the destruction of underlying networks of signification. But in the very destruction, there would also be the creation of alternative rationalisations and renewals. 

Jack Kirby

The Jack Kirby drawing above still has within it a memory of the Belvedere torso, but by now the model is but a faint one. 

As one type of simplification process is applied, it can be combined with another, until the original image becomes a pattern and loses most of its association with an initial three dimensional experience. In the image above a brush drawing was further simplified using a Photoshop 'stamp' filter. 

We have to also bare in mind that all of the images in this post are already translations from one photographic medium to another, digital photography and computer aided image manipulation is so ubiquitous that we tend to forget that it is itself a medium with specific qualities. 

Photoshop: Reticulation filter

There are of course more dramatic translations, such as a sound having a visual equivalent, as in a sound score, or the reverse; 'Adjectives, lines and marks' was "an open-ended audio drawing" that was "a spoken description of an unknown object" and it won the Jerwood Drawing Prize the other year. The translation of drawings or other visual art forms into words is an old format, one the Greeks called 'Ekphrasis', which has the following dictionary definition, 'a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined.' See this earlier post for an example. 

Aura Satz, Impulsive Synchronisation sound score, 2013

Coda

Many casts have been made of the Belvedere Torso and one of them is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. On visiting the Great Flemish Drawings exhibition recently I was able to make a drawing from the torso myself. The small sketchbook drawing I made was of course yet another translation and when I returned to Leeds I looked at the drawing and it began to transform yet again. 

These are the images that emerged.

In my mind's eye the more I looked at my notebook drawing of the great classical torso, the more it seemed to morph back into some sort of animal. The classical form based on the human body as a measure of all things becoming a warning sign and a reminder that we are not a measure of all things and that we are simply, under all our outer trappings, another animal and quite a distressed one. 

Notes

I have touched on some of these issues before; see earlier posts on eye music and mapping as translation.

The artist Bryan Eccleshall is someone specialising in the theoretical implications of a drawing practise reflecting on these issues.

See also:

Translation: Drawing between languages