the artist who doesn’t speak english is no artist

I have no idea where this is going to wind up, but here goes.

I found Maria’s starving-artist narrative particularly poignant, for a lot of reasons. The most inane one first: I was struck by Prendergast’s attentive rendering of her, which, it seems to me, rather lovingly seeks to capture as much of Maria’s complexity as possible. For example: “Another evocative phrase…was ‘because I love America’; [Maria] used it several times: to explain, for example, why she had chosen to study English in high school…Each time, however, she signaled sarcasm, by either a forced smile followed by a cascading laugh or mock fervor in her voice and eyes” (Prendergast 63). Maria comes across as an expressive, intuitive, idealistic-if-increasingly-disillusioned cultural commentator.

Secondly, it’s curious to think about English as the lingua franca of art, which is something entirely other than finance or composition or research articles. My first thought when reading Maria’s assertion that “The artist who doesn’t speak English is no artist” was, “Really? DaVinci? Rubens? Cezanne? There are entire generations of artists whose work participates in American cultural consciousness who not only did not speak English, but are also all dead—they aren’t speaking anything at all. And their work still matters.” Isn’t that art’s “thing”? Isn’t art supposed to transcend all this petty business of talking and writing in favor of a more visceral (purer?) mode of communication? But that’s a naïve reaction—art, like music, was embroiled in linguistic politics long before English ever mattered (the vestiges of which are visible in the fact that art majors are tested on their knowledge of Italian terminology to this day). So the question isn’t my initial “does art really have a lingua franca too?”, but rather, “when, how, and why did English usurp (that’s a judgmental word) the Romance languages’ rotating roles as ‘the language to know’ for artists in this day and age?” …and, perhaps, “Has the periphery changed?” (Maria locates the divide between the center and periphery of the art world along linguistic lines—has this always been the case?)

Thirdly, and least-well-thought-out, there’s a whole part about translation on pp. 60-61: “…the act of translation between language and experience…[and] one final act of translation—that between viewer and work” (Prendergast). Postmodernity has made the notion of image-as-text a rather common one. It’s not new to think of “reading” an image in terms of its compositional elements, recognizing it as created, situated, etc., which I think is one kind of translation. But video is even more complex: “Maria translated the audio of the video into English subtitles so the work would be legible to the largest portion of the international audience they aspired to attract…The introduction of English, an idiom with which she was not completely comfortable, created exactly the kind of distance it was the point of her art to collapse” (Prendergast 61). Hmm…