Mitchell, W.T.J. excerpt from the chapter “What is an Image?” Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986: 40-46.
This excerpt by the media and cultural theorist W.T.J. Mitchell looks into the tenuous relationship between images and language. Mitchell highlights not only the split and ‘competition’ between the two but also that images and language intersect at certain points; for example, in both bowing to the imperfect relationship of the signifier to the signified (42).
Mitchell dismisses translation between two languages as a metaphor for the link between the visual and the spoken, mostly for the preference that it inevitably gives to language. Certainly Mitchell’s point that ‘We know how to connect English and French literature more precisely than we know how to connect English literature and English painting’ (44) doesn’t seem totally off the mark. But this statement is curious because it seems to point to just exactly how difficult Mitchell sees the connections between language and art being. Leon S. Roudiez, the translator of Julia Kristeva’s seminal work The Powers of Horror, goes to great lengths to point out the difficulties in translation into English from Kristeva’s French essay. For one, the much smaller vocabulary of the French language results in nuances that the specificity of English cannot articulate ‘eloquently’ (viii). The example of Roudiez’ attempt to balance ambiguity and specificity in his translation is a useful way to think about our attempts at speaking about the indescribable in art or whether language is needed to talk about art; both requiring toil and a certain degree of trial and error.
Works Cited
Mitchell, W.T.J. excerpt from the chapter “What is an Image?” Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986: 40-46.
Roudiez, Leon S. “Translator’s Note”. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva, Trans Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982: vii - x
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On contemporary art, art writing, non-art writing and sometimes non-art art. The early posts are short writings on longer writings generated by a university reading list in 2008. Points of genesis for recent posts are more my own - though I admit some of them were still spurred on by university deadlines!
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