In this sense, I really like that the Hebrew word for “Life,” “Wind,” and “Breath” are all synonymous!

As for the building analogy from Aldo Rossi, I’m not sure that I get it. Do you mean that, over time, a bank gets translated or interpreted into a drugstore? You’re going to have to explain that in plainer language for me to “get it.” Ha!

So the other day, the Columbian artist Gloria Ortiz-Hernandez came into the office to show my boss Wynn some astonishing new work she’s been doing. Gloria is such a wonderfully funny and almost regal lady and the new work she showed us blew my mind (also: does anyone want to lend me a bunch of money so I can get one?)! I wanted to see what had been written about her work in Art=Text=Art and found this splendid insight from Sussana Temkin:

“Returning to the original Latin, the word ‘text’ originally derived from the past participle of ‘texere,’ meaning to weave or to fabricate.”

How amazing is that! In a synaesthetic, ekphrastic sense, we can think of language as a textural material that we are weaving. So when a “word-smith” “spins a yarn” in order to “weave a tale,” they are treating language as a physical substance rather than a representative concept. This “ties in” very nicely with the work of Lenore Tawney, who was one of the most prominent and flabbergasting high-art weavers of the 20th century!

Actually, they’re both wrong. This marvelous simile was coined as far back (and probably further) as 1918, when a critic in New Republic wrote, “Strictly considered, writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics.” There’s others! “Writing about art is like knitting about music.” Or, “Talking about music is like singing about football.” You get the idea. It’s incredibly difficult to translate information from one form of conveyance to another. Of course, people do it all the time, to wildly varying degrees of success. This Art=Text=Art catalogue is overflowing with scholars writing about art. But it also includes poets trying to interpret some of the visual works INTO text, both as poetry or short fiction, or musicians trying to interpret some of the visual works INTO music.

Let’s do a little thinking about how that act of translation happens.

So there are a lot of important similarities and overlap between text (language) and visual art. Like a mark or a dab of paint, a word is always a physical thing that takes up space, unless it’s spoken and then it’s physical in terms of the vibrating air that’s hitting the hairs of the inner ear (Hmm… but now I’m thinking a word and that’s not physical… hmm). So Carl Andre’s “now now” uses a word as a physical, visible mark. Both visual and text can represent or conjure something specific like the word “Butterfly” and the butterfly in Jane Hammond’s “Four Ways to Blue.” Then there’s the way poets play with space and movement of the eyes, like Michael Strauss’s poem response to Lawrence Weiner’s work or Bronlyn Jones’s “Erasure List.”

Other ways that visual art and text do the same thing?

Much like the comparison and contrasts Karen was making below between visual art and text, there are some things that music can do “better” or more easily that text and some things text can do more easily than music. For example, it would be really hard for music to show “in front of” or “an apple sitting on a chair.” Of course, if you’ve ever read a piece of music criticism, you can see how rediculous some of the linguistic descriptions are of the emotional specificity (?) that music can convey.

So how do you translate from one to the other. How do you go about moving from text to music?