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TOPIA 18 | 67

Miriam Jordan

TheAmivalentTranslator:Freeplay inJaniceGrney’sPunctuation in Translation

Strive continually to imagine time eternal and space innite. Ten tell yoursel that a planet in space is but a g seed; an epoch in time like the twist o atendril.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 10, Number 17. rans. C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks, 2002.

Continual awareness o all time and space, o the size and lie span o thethings around us. A grape seed in innite space. A hal twist o a corkscrew against eternity.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 10, Number 17. rans. Gregory Hays, 2002.

[]he question o deconstruction is also through and through the question o translation.

Jacques Derrida to oshiko Izutsu, his Japanese translator.1

AbSTRACT

Tis essay examines the artwork o oronto-based artist Janice Gurney, ocusing

on her use o text and punctuation in her artwork; her work is specically examined in relation to Derrida’s notion o reeplay. Focusing on artists who arepart o Gurney’s social network, I trace a brie history o the use o text and

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textual elements within contemporary Canadian art, connecting this history toGurney’s use o text as an ambivalent act o historical translation. Te ocus o this text is an examination o Gurney’s use o punctuation rom Te Meditations

o Marcus Aurelius in her new series o paintings titled Punctuation in ranslation.Each o Gurney’s paintings represent a single translation o Marcus Aurelius, in which only the punctuation is reproduced, eliminating the words and in this way she presents Aurelius not through the presence o his words in translation, butthrough their absence. Gurney revels in the never-ending Derridian reeplay o translation and contextualization that occurs with each and every reading o herartwork.

RÉSuMÉ

Cet essai porte sur le travail de l’artiste de oronto, Janice Gurney, en mettantl’accent sur l’usage qu’elle ait du texte et de la ponctuation dans ses œuvres ; nousexaminons en particulier son travail sous l’angle de la notion de « libre jeu » deDerrida. En resserrant l’analyse autour d’artistes qui ont partie du réseau socialde Gurney, j’expose brièvement l’histoire de l’utilisation du texte et des élémentstextuels dans l’art canadien contemporain, en liant cette histoire à l’usage que aitGurney du texte comme acte ambivalent de traduction historique. Ce texte porteplus précisément sur la manière dont Gurney utilise la ponctuation du texte des Méditations de Marc Aurèle dans sa nouvelle série de tableaux intitulée Punctuationin ranslation. Chacune des peintures de Gurney représente une unique traduction

de Marc Aurèle dans laquelle seule la ponctuation est reproduite ; en éliminantles mots, elle représente Marc Aurèle non pas à travers la présence de ses motstraduits, mais à travers leur absence. Gurney révèle le concept du « libre jeu » deDerrida dans la traduction et la mise en contexte qui se produit à la lecture dechacune de ses œuvres.

¤

Grney’sHistories

Te artwork o oronto-based artist Janice Gurney is preoccupied with theconstruction and translation o histories, specically the ways these historiescontradict and overlap in the viewer or reader who constitutes them. In Gurney’s visual language, elements are not discrete or distinct, but become mixed up withno clear boundaries and constantly shiting contexts. As Shirley Madill states in Janice Gurney: Sum Over Histories : “One o the most startling characteristics o postmodernism is its acceptance o ragmentation, discontinuity, ephemerality,and the chaotic. Janice Gurney constructs visually the nature o this discourse”(Madill 1993: 13). A survey o her work reveals a series o examples; in Past Sel-

Portrait (Gurney 2000), the artist constructs a photographic portrait o hersel using the indexically lettered pages o her address book, which are arranged to

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spell out her name: J-A-N-I-C-E G-U-R-N-E-Y. Te chaotic visual natureo this portrait depends upon the presence and absence o a decontextualizednetwork o names that have been written, crossed out and rewritten, orming a

discontinuous relationship between hersel and the social networks that are usedto constitute a “portrait.” Tis portrait can be understood as a maniestation o the social relations mediating Gurney’s autobiographical sel-image. “Mediation,”as Raymond Williams states, reers primarily to the necessary processes o composition in a specic medium,” and consequently “indicates the practicalrelations between social and artistic orms.” But mediation more commonly points to “an indirectness o relation between experience and its composition”(Williams 1981: 24).

In Past Sel-Portrait , Gurney uses the ragmented letters o her name through

which to represent hersel as a network o relationships. Her discontinuous sel-portrait makes visible the social networks necessary to produce her artwork—thepeople she draws upon in various intellectual, economic and social communitiesthat enable her artistic productions. Narrated as a voice, however, the “sel-portraitis a hybrid, discontinuous collage o stolen language … undermining the supposedunity o authorial voice and pointing to the impossibility o establishing a singularidentity” (Kritzman 1984: 204). Gurney again conronts these issues in her series o (re)paintings Cancelled (Te Surace o Behaviour, 1988) (1997), in which she—in aDerridean gesture o absence/presence—paints over the surace o our paintings,

three o which were given to her by other artists, with black paint. Tis our-part work consists o one unidentied painting by Gurney and three paintings givento her by oronto-based artists Sheila Ayearst (oil on canvas), Gordon Lebredt(acrylic on Plexiglass) and Yam Lau (auto enamel on aluminum). Like Gurney, Ayearst and Lebredt also make use o text in their artwork. One o Lebredt’slatex and enamel wall paintings rom Last Words No Exchange (1980), which waslater destroyed when it was painted over, spells out in text across a gallery wall:"Reading to include under(painted) orm.”2 Lebredt’s text remains to be read asan erasure, even ater it is painted over, and clearly reerences Derrida’s statement“Tere is rame, but the rame does not exist ” (Derrida 1987: 81). Reading Gurney

in relation to the artistic network that she reerences with her painted overpaintings positions the reader to read what is cancelled, to read what is paintedover, as Lebredt’s text suggests, as part o the artwork. Tis makes any notion o an origin impossible to pinpoint because reading, whether visual or textual, cannever be enclosed.

In these acts o cancellation, Gurney undermines any notion o an artistic originor end, highlighting the diculty o constructing linear artistic histories that takeplace within complex social networks and economies o capital exchange. As Jody Berland states:

examination o the context o contemporary social relations shows thatthe rise o autobiography as a privileged tactical response to [the crisis o

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authenticity, which] can also be discussed, just as appropriately, in termso the oregrounding o signature, whose importance is directly tied to therequirements o genealogy and market exchange. (Berland 1996: 138)

With Cancelled (Te Surace o Behaviour, 1988), Gurney undermines notionso signature, autobiography and market exchange by making it impossible todetermine where the artwork o her social network ends and her artwork begins;blacking out or cancelling the three paintings given to her, Gurney blurs theboundaries between hersel and her social relations, directly challenging herrole as an authentic author. Although viewers are made aware that one o theour paintings was originally Gurney’s, there is no means o distinguishing her work rom those o her riends and colleagues. Gurney’s act o cancellationproblematizes her presence as an author within her own work, demonstrating

the impossibility o contextualizing her artistic production as a solitary socialand economic practice or history. Instead Gurney highlights the way art is“mediated by specic social relations” (Williams 1983: 206). In blurring the art-istic signature, Gurney challenges the requirements o market exchange thatan artwork be genealogically traceable in order to establish value.3 Trough theincorporation o her social histories or networks within the very abric o herartistic process, Gurney highlights the impossibility o delimiting the rame thatsurrounds her work. “Any sign interpreting another sign, the basic condition o semiosis is its being interwoven with signs sending back to signs, in an innite

regression” (Eco 1979: 188-89). As a result, Gurney’s autobiographical gestures,rather than limiting the scope o historical readings, unction to endlessly expandthe possibilities o interpretation in an innite regression.

Gurney questions histories o representation through visual translations thatliterally play with the presence/absence o her subject matter. Using Derrida’snotion o reeplay, this text examines her recent series Punctuation in ranslation, which investigates the play o meaning that results rom her use o a Marcus Aurelius quote that has been stripped o words, leaving behind only the translatedpunctuation. As an artist who has consistently incorporated text into her work,

her abandonment o words or punctuation is, as I argue, a Derridean gesture.By employing Derrida’s reeplay as a ramework to discuss Gurney’s project,Punctuation in ranslation serves to illustrate the unbounded nature o reeplay itsel. With Derrida the notion o reeplay hinges upon repetition: to understand what Derrida means we must repeat and replay so that we can view the play that he writes o in action. As Lawrence D. Kritzman argues, “play is not to beunderstood, but practiced,” and it is through the act o play that the “practice o critical play constructs in its very inscription a principle o repetition” (Kritzman1984: 201-202). Derrida’s concept thereore both articulates and is articulatedthrough the visual repetitions in Gurney’s work—in Punctuation in ranslation, as well as in her earlier work such as Past Sel-Portrait and Cancelled (Te Surace o Behaviour, 1988 —which unction as visual enactments o reeplay.

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TheContextofTextinCanadianArt

Beore entering the ambiguous space o Gurney’s artistic intervention, it isnecessary to trace a brie history o the use o text and textual elements withincontemporary Canadian art, ocusing on the artists that are part o Gurney’ssocial network. For Mark Cheetham, “Artists are the mnemonist o culture. Teir work is memory work, both personal and social, both intellectual and material”(Cheetham 1991: 1). Since the conceptualism o the 1960s, the means by whichartists perorm this unction o remembering increasingly incorporates traces o

text. Te American artist Joseph Kosuth with One and Tree Hammers (1965) juxtaposed the three distinct realities o the sign: a hammer mounted on a wall (theobject or reerent ), a photograph o the hammer (equivalent to the mental imageor the interpretent ), and an enlarged dictionary denition o a hammer (the signthat stands in or the hammer itsel ). Trough this conceptual exercise, Kosuthliteralized the manner in which signs and reality overlap, demonstrating how contemporary art is saturated with language that refects our complex personaland social realities. Similar conceptual or textual gestures have been produced by anumber o contemporary artists, including Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Martha

Rosler and General Idea. In “Te Sublime: Te Limits o Vision and the Infationo Commentary” Olivier Asselin observes: “the arts o vision are permeated withlanguage. From the point o view o its production, the work is oten already motivated by language” (Asselin 1996: 243). Te mnemonic unction o art, therendering o the real through textual language, is an increasingly prevalent trendin contemporary Canadian art.

Greg Curnoe, who began using text in his paintings in the late 1960s, was one o a number o contemporary Canadian artists who turned to text in their art. “[A]lltext paintings,” says Curnoe,

relate to concrete poetry in their insistence on words as objects in their ownright. Te process o reading is deliberately obstructed as words are broken,

Fig. 1 Punctuation in ranslation (2006)

Janice Gurney

Image courtesy o artist

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i need be, at the line’s end, as i to emphasize the physical qualities o language, and the existence o words as things in the world. (Milroy 2001:55)

In presenting ragments o broken up text, Curnoe reveals how perception changesover time and highlights the manner in which the physical qualities o languageare in a sense always in a state o motion or play, never xed or denitive. Hismonumental text paintings View o Victoria Hospital, First Series (1969) depictthe view outside his studio-window using only rubber-stamped words to paintan ever-changing textual picture o the exterior landscape. Trough an ingeniousspatial and conceptual ramework, Curnoe used text to describe everythingthat he saw outside his window: “A string installed between the sashes o thestudio window imposed a structure on Curnoe’s perceptions; everything the

string traversed was duly noted, even a smudge o clay on the window pane” (64).Curnoe translated everything that he saw, rom buildings to the way the lightalls on trees, as well as the thoughts running through his mind and conversationsthat he had while engaged in this process. Te resulting textual images showed aconstantly changing scene, always in motion and delineated through vividly visualpoetic word images that represented both the personal and social, as well as theintellectual and political.

Curnoe’s habitual use o text in his artwork manages to convey a dynamic world inmotion that is oddly visual despite the seemingly static nature o text. As Dennis

Reid observes o Curnoe’s art:

the lettered pieces as well as the gurative paintings, was about momentary experience, about pausing to look at something or someone. Each work chronicles a brie passage o time turned to observation and refection,describing both what was beore the artist’s eyes at a particular juncture and[what] was running through his mind. (Reid 2001: 119)

Despite the individual nature o Curnoe’s momentary experiences, his observationsconvey the manner in which art and the personal and social lie that surrounds it

change over time. Tis mutability o experience, o context, has been infuentialon Janice Gurney. She describes her relationship to Curnoe’s art: “I have beenmore infuenced by Greg’s attitude that art comes rom what is meaningul to you in your day-to-day lie. Tis can change over time because o changes in yourlie. O course, the act that he saw text as a legitimate material to use in paintinghas always been a major infuence” (personal communication). Day-to-day lie isGurney’s context, as seen in her use o her phonebook in Past Sel-Portrait , whichserves a daily unction that is crucial to her lie and the production o her artwork.Rather than presenting a visual portrait o hersel, Gurney constructs a textualportrait that consists o the contact inormation o people that she knows and

who know her; presumably, anyone viewing this work could call one o the listednumbers and ask what Gurney is like. “Te sel-portrait is in a constant state

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o tension between wholeness and the bliss o disintegration” (Kritzman 1984:206). What results is a dynamic portrait, a series o reerents that are never xed,existing as signs in play within a larger network o signs.

Curnoe’s View o Victoria Hospital, First Series and Gurney’s Past Sel-Portrait both use text as an articial index to construct a mental image o the constantly changing subjective experiences o the individual within a larger social andcultural context. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson emphasize the importance o thiscontextualizing gesture, stating that “by examining the social actors that ramethe signs, it is possible to analyze simultaneously the practices o the past and ourown interaction with them, an interaction that is otherwise in danger o passingunnoticed” (Bal and Bryson 1991: 175). View o Victoria Hospital, First Series notonly translates Curnoe’s view against a string into text, but also translates the

oten unnoticed context surrounding his act o viewing: that is, his thoughts, thesocial and political elements o his daily existence, as well as the conversations thatoverlap his production o the landscapes. Similarly,Past Sel-Portrait represents thesocial and spatial network that denes Gurney’s identity vis-à-vis interpretativechoices that delineate the contextual ramework o her social and proessional lieas an artist. Trough their interpretative choices both artists draw upon the largercontextual ramework that makes their work possible, whether it is a view out o an artist’s window or names o acquaintances in a phone book. What remains inmotion along with the sign, in the ree play o contextualization that occurs when

viewers read Curnoe and Gurney’s textual works, is “the position and relation o the artist and viewer to each other and to that subject represented and the contexto practice itsel ” (Monk 1988: 206). Te texts in View o Victoria Hospital, First Series and Past Sel-Portrait serve an indexical unction that playully rames aninnitely expanding context.

A number o contemporary oronto-based artists—many directly responding toCurnoe—have used text in their artwork to play with the discontinuities o textand image, re-inscribed on the readers who view them, and to re-construct acontext that is unxed. For example, artists such as Allyson Clay, Ron Benner,

Jamelie Hassan, Gordon Lebredt, Arthur Renwick and Sheila Ayearst usetextual elements as a means o constructing contextual plurality through the juxtaposition o text and image. Ian Carr-Harris creates a textual archive with hissculptural installation Nancy Higginson, 1949- (1971), which consists o a woodenbox on a pedestal with a photograph o a woman inside and a typed transcripto a conversation. Carr-Harris presents viewers with a ragmented portrait o a woman, o whom readers re-construct a mental or conceptual representationthrough the texts and images that we are let to deconstruct or read. Carr-Harris writes that he remains

committed to acts o re-tracing, re-presenting, re-writing—they couldbe called “re-touchings”—which have, or some time, characterized my

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convictions concerning art as a public address. I remain … ascinated by our relations with denition and history–with “story-telling”–and thedimensions o light and space that we employ to negotiate these linguistic

relations. (Carr-Harris 1999: 78) Te storytelling with photographs and ragments o text makes the viewer areader o the linguistic relations that Carr-Harris stages, resulting in the produc-tion o a context that remains fuidly unxed. Te portrait o Nancy Higginsonthat emerges through the reeplay o text and images is a portrait caught in themobility o semiosis paralleling Gurney’s Past Sel-Portrait , as well as Punctuationin ranslation, in the fuidity and playulness o the interpretative process. Baland Bryson argue that “the text or artwork cannot exist outside the circumstancein which the reader reads the text or the viewer views the image, and that the

work o art cannot x in advance the outcome o any o its encounters withcontextual plurality” (Bal and Bryson 1991: 179). Tis playul lack o xity, and theinnite change in contexts, recur in the process o reading and viewing Gurney’sPunctuation in ranslation.

DerridaandtheImpossiilityofTranslatingPnctation

Janice Gurney’s Punctuation in ranslation consists o a series o eleven acrylicpaintings on paper with red commas, dashes, semi-colons, colons, apostrophes

and periods all visually rotating on small white pieces o paper that foat againstmonochrome black backgrounds.4 Te punctuation that is the visual ocus o eachpainting is derived rom the various English translations o Te Meditations o Marcus Aurelius Book 10, Number 17. Gurney used as her source her collectiono Marcus Aurelius in translation, the largest in Canada.5 Each o the eleventranslations are slightly dierent, but say the same things in an intriguing dem-onstration o the reeplay o meaning inherent in translation. Her interest incollecting these diverse translations is ascinating and adds a new dimension tointerpreting the work. As Gurney states:

I am ascinated by how the thoughts o Marcus Aurelius, emperor o Romerom 161-180, continue to resonate over time. Tey have been preservedin many dierent translations, becoming a record o both permanenceand change. One structure that places a dierent emphasis on the samemeaning is punctuation, represented by the dierence in the number andplacement o the punctuation marks in various translations.6

Perhaps Gurney’s ascination with these dierent translations has to do with theimpossibility o translation and the act that translation is always partially outsideo the text, but at the same time constrained by the text.

I associate this concept, and Gurney’s statement that translation is “a record o both permanence and change,” with Derrida’s notion o reeplay. “Te organiz-

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ing principle o the structure would limit what we might call the play o thestructure” (Derrida 1978: 278). I the play o the structure is limited by thestructure itsel, then translation becomes both permanent within the limits o

structure and subject to the change o play. As James Hans re-states it, “thereis something to be conrmed by the reeplay o discourse, and that is the play which always partially but never totally exceeds the network” (Hans 1979: 823).Gurney’s work demonstrates the manner in which the structure o language bothexceeds the structuring network and is at the same constrained by it, just as thetranslations o Marcus Aurelius play with the distinction between similarity anddierence. Te various translations o punctuation in these texts highlight thesimilarities in discourse surrounding Marcus Aurelius, in which the dierencein interpretation—the result o the shiting context o perspective that rames

translation and reading—is at the same time undamental. Te texts are basically the same, but Gurney punctuates the radicality o their dierences.

Gurney extends the logic o Punctuation in ranslation by continuing to translatethese works in a parallel series titled Meditation in Your Ofce . Produced in April2006, while she was completing her Master o Visual Studies at the University o oronto, these works document Gurney’s Punctuation in ranslation paintings within the oces o six university proessors: Mark Cheetham, David Galbraith,Pat Fleming, Linda Hutcheon, Barbara Fischer and Elizabeth Harvey.7 AsGurney explains:

I choose the people at U o because they were people I had a connectionto beore I went there … or people I met and connected with whotaught in the Book History and Print Culture program … I told eachperson who accepted to have the painting in their oce that they couldplace it anywhere they wanted. It was in their private space and the only people who ocially came to see them were the people on my graduatecommittee. Otherwise the audience was whoever went to see each personin their oce. (Gurney 2007)

Gurney’s choice o proessors again refects her consistent illustration and

documentation o the social network used in producing her artwork. Teambiguity caused by her dual relationship with these individuals, who unctionboth as proessional colleagues and educational supervisors, is refected in theparameters o this project, in which the space o display is a “private oce” withina public educational institution. Here Gurney inscribes Punctuation in ranslation into an academic environment where, like the meditations o Marcus Aurelius,the artworks can be read and recontextualized innitely.

In Standard Edition (2006), a giclée print on watercolour paper, Gurney presents aphotograph o the refection in the glass covering one o her paintings; the image

refected back is o Proessor David Galbraith’s library. As a result the image showsthe punctuation o Gurney’s painting foating against a backdrop o Galbraith’s

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books. With her title Gurney wittily points out the impossibility o a standardedition, a static text, by the innite

regression o texts that Gurney presents viewers with. It is in the reader that “the ext is experienced only in an activity o production. It ollows that the ext cannotstop … its constitutive movement is thato cutting across (in particular, it can cutacross the work, several works)” (Barthes1978: 157). Similarly, Meditation in Your Ofce (2006) consists o a photograph

o Gurney’s painting leaning againsta wall on a wooden desk, with stackso papers parenthetically ramingthe work. In the series, Meditation inYour Ofce , meanings are constantly inmotion through the play o ideas thatoccur with each reading o text(s)—aprocess that is akin to that o theacademic environment, in which textsand thought are always in play.

According to Roland Barthes,

Te reader is the space on whichall the quotations that make upa writing are inscribed … a text’sunity lies not in its origin but in itsdestination … the reader … is simply that someone who holds together ina single eld all the traces by whichthe written text is constituted. (148)

Tis process o reading, o intellectualplay, is evident in the eleven translationso the same meditation by Marcus Aurelius that Gurney provides—in placeo an artist statement—within the contexto her exhibition o these works. Tis additional layer o photographic tracingthat Gurney adds to Punctuation in ranslation again plays with the distinctionbetween similarity and dierence, in which the work is retraced through its

recontextualization and translation into an academic environment. Tis constanttranslation and retracing o social and historical networks, both personal andtextual, represents Gurney’s most evident display o reeplay.

Fig. 2 Meditation in Your Oce (2006) Janice Gurney

Images courtesy o artist

Fig. 3 Standard Edition (2006)

Janice Gurney Image courtesy o artist

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Grney’sTranslationandDerrida’sFreeplay

In Te Structuralist Controversy, translated by Ricjard Macksey, Derrida writes:

Freeplay is the disruption o presence. Te presence o an element isalways a signiying and substitutive reerence inscribed in a system o dierences and the movement o a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay o absence and presence, but i it is to be radically conceived, reeplay mustbe conceived o beore the alternative o presence and absence; being mustbe conceived o as presence or absence beginning with the possibility o reeplay and not the other way around. (Derrida 1972: 263-64)

Tis same text translated by Alan Bass reads as ollows:

Play is the disruption o presence. Te presence o an element is always asigniying and substitutive reerence inscribed in a system o dierencesand the movement o a chain. Play is always play o absence and presence,but i it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived o beore thealternative o presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence orabsence on the basis o the possibility o play and not the other way around.(Derrida 1978: 292)

It should be noted that Bass thanks Macksey “or his generous permission torevise his own ne translation o ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse o the Human Sciences.’ Most o the translation o this essay belongs to ProessorMacksey” (Derrida 1978: xx). Te act that Bass elt it necessary to substitute hisown interpretation o certain words in his revision o Macksey’s translation—specically Bass’s substitution o “play” or Macksey’s “reeplay”—can be seen asevidence o reeplay in action.

Tere has been a slippage o meaning between these two translations o Derrida;the most signicant dierence is the shit rom “reeplay” to “play,” with Bassconsciously making the decision to alter Macksey’s translation. We might ask ourselves why this shit? What extra signicance is added by this addition and

subtraction, this presence and absence, o the word “ree”? In discarding “ree”rom his retranslation Bass is narrowing the ocus o Derrida’s concept. In Bass’stranslation o Macksey’s sentence, “Freeplay is the disruption o presence” isreduced to “Play is the disruption o presence.” Tis dierence is interesting: thepresence o “ree” is disrupted in Bass’s translation, becoming an absence, especially in comparison to Macksey’s translation. In a Derridean sense, Bass is playing withthe concept o diérance by taking out “ree” while acknowledging Macksey’stranslation which incorporates “ree,” thereby presenting the word as both absentand present: reeplay.

In her own role as translator, I believe Gurney is perorming a similar act. Eacho Gurney’s paintings represents a single translation o Marcus Aurelius, in whichonly the punctuation is reproduced, eliminating the words. It is surprising to see

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the enormous dierences in punctuation, spread out in red, because this illustratesthe vast amount o reedom or play that is inherent in any act o translation.Contrary to the expectations that a translated text is a aithul and accurate

restatement o the original text, “the shortcomings o translation,” which Derridarelates to the distinction between ction and autobiography, is “a atal and doubleimpossibility: the impossibility o deciding, but the impossibility o remaining ... inthe undecidable” (Derrida 2000: 16).8 Te undecidability o translation is evidentin the manner in which Gurney loosely attaches the punctuation o her paintingson separate, and thereore moveable, pieces o paper. Tis double impossibility is an act o what Derrida terms diérance: these paintings are translations o Marcus Aurelius.

Gurney’s paintings embrace the double impossibility o the presence/absence in

what is translated, presenting Marcus Aurelius not through the presence o his words in translation, but through their absence as punctuated by the translationso punctuation. Gurney places the punctuation as both present within the work,being physically attached to it, and absent, in the sense that it is always movableand removable. Tis presence/absence refects the very process o translation inthe construction o these images. Tese dierences are made more evident by herelimination o the translated words in avour o the punctuation, highlighting theinevitable play that occurs in and across language as it is read and translated—eachreader or translator interacting with the ideas presented and thereby adding their

own interpretation to the text. Gurney’s translations refect ambivalence to xedor decidable meanings, demonstrating the text as, to borrow the words o Derrida,a “joyous armation o the play o the world” (Derrida 1978: 292).

In excluding the translated words o Marcus Aurelius, Gurney ocuses on the play o the presence o the punctuation and the absence o the text, a conception thatironically would be reversed had the text been in place: i the text were present thepunctuation would be taken or granted and or all intents and purposes absent. Tis coincides with Derrida’s statement: “Play is always a play o absence andpresence” (Derrida 1978: 292). Play is predicated on the back and orth exchange

that occurs between what is present and what is absent; in this case the play thatoccurs between the presence o punctuation and the absence o text, and highlightsthe present invisibility o punctuation in all text. Te absence o text in Punctuationin ranslation refects a more philosophical intent. In this particular text Marcus Aurelius dis-cusses the individual in rela-tion to the conception o ime and Being, which he connects to—depending on the translation—a g seed, a grape seed or agrain o sand rotating in time. Te punctuation can be seen in relation to this imageo a seed or grain, with the commas, periods and other punctuation marks unc-tioning as individual beings spiraling within the whole o time. Te punctuationthat appears in Gurney’s paintings and photographs look as though they are inact revolving or turning like grape seeds or grains o sand. What this suggestsis that everything, down to the smallest element—including the punctuation o

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a sentence—is involved inthe rotating twist o reeplay that occurs in all ime and

all Being.9 Tis is the root o her ascination with Marcus Aurelius. It is the ascination with the indenite “blank space surrounding a word,typo-graphical adjustmentsand spatial composition inthe page setting o the poetictext— contribute to create a

halo o indeniteness and tomake the text pregnant withinnite suggestive possibilit-ies” (Eco 1979: 53).

Gurney unctions as an am-bivalent translator: she isambivalent about the pos-sibility o authenticity or thenotion o an original and

authentic meaning, yet sheis ascinated by the searchor such meaning and thepossibilities grounded withinthis search. Accordingly, inPunctuation in ranslationGurney is breaking down ortranslating the meaning(s)o various translations andinterpretations o Marcus Aurelius’s words into theirsmallest possible visualstructure, presenting us withtranslations o Marcus Aurelius as punctuation at play. In this manner, Gurney celebrates the indeniteness o translation by hersel translating the numeroustranslations into a series o images that in turn must be translated by the viewer who reads them: every step in this process is an act o translation, no single act moreimportant than another. Echoing the double impossibility that Derrida speakso, Gurney presents us with the impossibility o deciding and the impossibility

o remaining undecided (Derrida 2000: 16). As Spivak notes in her translator’spreace to Derrida’s O Grammatology : “Derrida’s trace is the mark o the absence

Fig. 4 Punctuation in ranslation (2006) Janice Gurney


Fig. 5 Punctuation in ranslation (2006) Janice Gurney


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o a presence, an always already absent present, o the lack at the origin that is thecondition o thought and experience” (Spivak 1997: xvii). Accordingly, Gurney’srole as translator o the trace o translation itsel is to refect the lack at the origin,

which is marked by traces o absence and presence that are the condition o thought.

FreeplayofMeaning

Gurney’s ambivalence as translator o Marcus Aurelius parallels Derrida’s concepto diérance. As Derrida states in Speech and Phenomena :

Diérance is what makes the movement o signication possible only i each element that is “present,” appearing on the stage o presence, is related

to something other than itsel but retains the mark o a past element andalready lets itsel be hollowed out by the mark o its relation to a utureelement. Tis trace relates no less to what is called the uture than to what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, noteven to a past or uture considered as modied present. In order or it tobe, an interval must separate it rom what it is not, but the interval thatconstitutes it in the present must also, and by the same token, divide thepresent in itsel, thus dividing, along with the present, everything thatcan be conceived on its basis, that is every being—in particular, or our

metaphysical language, the substance or the subject. (1973: 142-43)

Gurney’s relation o her paintings and photographs to the multiple Englishtranslations o Marcus Aurelius is one o presence that depends on the textitsel. Te text is absent rom the images but present as a trace. Gurney has madereerence to the past and the present through her use o translations rom dierenttime-periods, but she has also let room in the blackness o her work or a uturetranslation. In this way Gurney is ambivalently playing with the conception o a xed location o meaning by undermining the possibility o an original andauthentic interpretation o a text.

Tis brings us back to the theme o the impossibility o an origin that runs throughGurney’s work. As Cheetham states in Remembering Postmodernism, Gurney investigates “the status o originality, the putative uniqueness o artistic images …and the sense in which an artist is an origin or a work. [J]ust as it appears thatthere is no essential, original subject in Screen, so too Te Damage is Done makes itimpossible or us to nd either an essential work within its layers or an essentialartist” (Cheetham 1991: 75-76). Gurney’s mixed media work Screen (1986) is asix-panel work consisting o manipulated ound images. Te central image is an

appropriated still rom Erich Von Stroheim’s lm Foolish Wives, which shows a young woman holding an inant. Te two cibachrome photographs that rame the

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Von Stroheim still are out-o-ocus photographs by Andy Patton, across which isa quotation rom Marguerite Duras’s text Te Lover , printed in red. Te originaltext that Gurney re-presents is:

At that time she’d just turnedthirty-eight. And the child wasten. And now, when she remembersshe’s sixteen(qtd. in Cheetham 1991: 56).

Te text on the let panel reads:

At that time she’dTirty-eight. And the

ten. And now, whenshe’s sixteen.

Te right panel reads:time she’d just turnedAnd the child wasNow, when she remembersshe’s sixteen.10

Te dierences in Gurney’s visual translation o Duras’s text occur across the

uture/past, presence/absence o memory. Te three photostatic panels placedbeneath each o the above listed images are o textured abric. In Te Damage is Done (1986) Gurney has appropriated our paintings. Tree small paintingsare mounted in a row across a large oil painting by Joanne od called Te Upper Room.11 It is important to note that od is part o Gurney’s social network withinthe Canadian art scene—as A. A. Bronson points out, it is the ormation o aCanadian social network by artists that allowed us “to see ourselves as an artscene” (Bronson 1983: 30). wo o the smaller paintings, damaged landscapesthat Gurney ound in a junk-shop, fank the third monochrome painting by Andy

Patton across which Gurney had silk-screened the words “Te Damage is Done.”Gurney is not only drawing upon the social network o the Canadian art scene,but she is literally inscribing hersel upon it. Tese two works illustrate Gurney’stendency to undermine the notion o an original and an “author” through artwork that has a discontinuous and multi-layered history, combining and convoluting thesingular or original artistic gesture. Gurney’s Screen and Te Damage is Done tracethe manner in which a single gesture can resonate in a larger artistic context.

Likewise, in Punctuation in ranslation there is no origin or author to be oundin its layers o possible meaning; instead, we are presented with the double

possibility and impossibility o translation in a single meditation o Marcus

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Aurelius translated twelve times (including Gurney’s visual translations). Gurney embraces the impossibility o this origin because

on the basis o what we call the center … repetitions, substitutions,transormations, and permutations are always taken rom a history o meaning … whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the orm o presence. (Derrida 1978: 279)

Gurney eliminates the possibility o a xed interpretive meaning—punctuation inthe absence o the text it is meant to punctuate does not really convey any meaningin particular—and instead calls upon an endless history o meaning, representedas both presence and absence, in which a beginning and end are not to be ound.In this way Gurney plays with the absence and presence o the origin—that is theabsence and presence o Marcus Aurelius as author—through her substitution o punctuation in place o the words themselves she engages in “ reeplay , that is tosay, a eld o innite substitutions in the closure o a nite ensemble” (Derrida1972: 260).

For Derrida, reeplay unctions as a “disruption o presence,” a disruption that helikens to the shiting movement o a chain (Derrida 1978: 292). By this he impliesthat the play o meaning is one o shiting presences and absences, this interplay o absence and presence is a never-ending reeplay o signication: an endlesschain o meaning that is always in process. Derrida makes the radical claim

that this notion o reeplay is something that “must be conceived as presence orabsence on the basis o the possibility o play and not the other way around” (292). As Stuart Hall explains while discussing Derrida’s concepts, “interpretations arealways ollowed by other interpretations, in an endless chain.... So any notion o a nal meaning is always endlessly put o, deerred” (Hall 1997: 42). As with theexample o the multiple translations o Marcus Aurelius, translation is an endlesschain that never arrives at a denitive meaning: Gurney presents us with a traceo that chain.

Freeplay is always inherent in any act o reading, interpretation or translation

because, to borrow Derrida’s example o the chain, there is always a play between what is present and what is absent, creating a fux in potential meanings. Meaningis not anchored around a xed point—an origin or “truth” that can be pinpointed, with translations landing closer or urther rom this point—but instead it isalways an interplay o absence/presence. What reeplay allows or, as James S.Hans explains, is “the need to think a non-centered world and the need to think the discontinuities o this non-centered world” (Hans 1979: 815). Tis lack o centre is derived rom the discontinuous nature o text that is not simply a copy o an original, but is also an interpretation, a translation.

In one translation o Marcus Aurelius, the reader is presented with a g seed, inanother s/he is presented with a grape seed, and in yet another s/he is given a

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grain o sand. What this demonstrates is that translation, interpretation, or evenreading is not subject to a xed centre o meaning, but is always subject to aninnite reeplay o signication or meaning, a shiting interplay o contexts and

readings, a disruption o presence and absence. Te reading o text cannot be xedin advance because o the undened contextual space that surrounds the reader,the rame that is there and that does not exist. Gurney plays within this shitinginterplay o semiosis revealing the discontinuities that structure the way we makemeaning and think about the world.

Endless(Amivalent)Translations

In their translators’ preace or Derrida’s Te ruth in Painting , Geo Bennington

and Ian McLeod observe that “the translator’s attitude to the reader is prooundly ambivalent, and this ambivalence can only be increased when s/he has learnedrom the author to be translated that the task is strictly speaking impossible”(Bennington and McLeod 1987: xiii). What this illustrates is that language, evenin the pared down orm o punctuation, is not xed; i we consider the act o translation impossible—as Derrida (evidently) told Bennington and McLeod alltranslations become ambivalent interpretations that play with the original.

Gurney’s multiple translations o Marcus Aurelius draw our attention to the way we interpret and make meaning through reading(s) o text even in the absence o

text. By isolating punctuation and representing it as a visual orm, Gurney showsthat visual representations are open to the same play o interpretation that attachesto words. Tis simple play o orms is a visual demonstration o Derrida’s concepto reeplay, which she illustrates through the play o meaning that occurs betweenher use o punctuation and the g seed or grains o sand that punctuate the varioustranslations she makes use o: the punctuation is the g seed rotating throughtime. She urther demonstrates this reeplay o the multiple levels o translationby placing the paintings in the oces o six people at the University o orontoamong the “jumble o books and papers” within the academic environment. Tisexpansion o Punctuation in ranslation into Meditation in Your Ofce again playsupon the boundlessness inside which these singular translations resonate androtate. “Tere will,” as ilman Küchler observes, “always be ‘more’ play, beoreand ater the conclusion, whose nal gesture will be suspended, inscribed into theongoing movement o play. Tis leads to the conclusion that there is no conclusionpossible” (Küchler 1994: 127).

In her role as an ambivalent translator, Gurney is translating translation in aninterconnected chain o meaning that is repeated without ending. In his translator’snote or Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitz writes:

Tere are inevitably trade-os along the way and never an end in sight.Set in motion, the mutational process stops or no one. So while its

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transgressive lure may be ormally irresistible, there is no denitivetranslation by denition. At some point one simply has to give up. Period.(Prenowitz 1996: 106)

What Gurney leaves us with in Punctuation in ranslation is the endless chain o punctuation. Comma.

Notes

1. Cited by Vincent B. Leitch (Leitch 2001: 1815).

2. For an interesting discussion o the manner in which Gurney makes endings indeter-minate, deerring the arrival o the end through her use o erasure, see Lebredt (2003).

3. For example, i we look at the humorous ramications o the sale o Gurney’s work acomplex and unwieldy ormula emerges. Te sale o

Cancelled (Te Surace o Behaviour,1988) would be a complex one with percentages o prot to be divided up between Gur-ney, Sheila Ayearst, Gordon Lebredt, Yam Lau and the galleries that represent each o the artists. What this hypothetical sale demonstrates is the diculty in pinpointing theownership o an artistic product.

4. Although it is uncommon to present punctuation divorced rom text in artworks, Gur-ney is not the only artist to do this. Other examples o artists who have used punctuationinclude: Arthur Renwick and Laurel Woodcock. In Delegates: Chies o the Earth and Sky (2004) a series o eleven black and white photographs o the South Dakota landscape Arthur Renwick used punctuation marks to highlight the lack o xity between language

and the land. Laurel Woodcock’s Quotation (2006) isolates quotation marks in blue neon,leaving the quotation blank or the viewer to ll in.

5. Tis inormation is taken rom a personal conversation with the artist and her partner Andy Patton in oronto in August 2006. Andy Patton is a oronto-based painter whooten enters abandoned buildings illegally to paint the walls “in the manner o ‘rescoes,’but only with one colour” (Fischer 1995: 5). As a point o interest, the collaborativepoetry group Pain Not Bread—which consists o Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Pat-ton—published Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei , a collection o poems thatplay upon the nature o translation by engaging with and recontextualizing the work o the Chinese poet Wang Wei.

6. Tis quote by Janice Gurney is taken rom her press release o 8 September 2006, by Wynick/uck Gallery or Punctuation in ranslation.

7. As a point o interest, each o these academics—all at the University o oronto—hasdierent areas o study that undoubtedly infuences the manner in which they “meditate”upon Gurney’s paintings in their oces and rames the way each individual “translates”her work. Mark Cheetham is a Proessor in the Department o Art and is the Directoro the Canadian Studies Program at University College. David Galbraith is an Associ-ate Proessor in the English Department o Victoria College. Pat Fleming is a Proessorin the Faculty o Inormation Studies. Linda Hutcheon is a Proessor in English andComparative Literature. Elizabeth Harvey is a Proessor o English and Barbara Fischer

is a curator and lecturer at the Centre or Visual and Media Culture.

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8. It should be noted that I have played with Derrida’s words in my connection o thesetwo quotes. In the rst Derrida is acknowledging the “shortcomings o translation” inrelation to the presentation o quotes by himsel rom his unerary oration or Paul de

Man, whereas in the second quote Derrida is commenting on the content o his ownquote. I elt that this mixture o commentary on meta-commentary was appropriate inrelation to the meta-translation in which Gurney engages.

9. Tis sentence is a play on Maxwell Staniorth’s 1964 translation o Marcus Aurelius, which reads: “Let your mind constantly dwell on all ime and all Being, and thus learnthat each separate thing is but a grain o sand in comparison with Being, and as a singlescrew’s-turn in comparison with ime” (Aurelius 1964: 157).

10. For an in depth discussion o the ragmentation that occurs with memory seeCheetham (1991: 56).

11. Joanne od is a oronto-based artist and lecturer in the Master o Visual Stud-ies program at the University o oronto. Her paintings oten re-present appropriatedimagery rom advertising or the popular media as a means o critiquing the constructiono eminine identity.

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