Dear friends and colleagues
In 1963 the poet W.H.Auden wrote a preface for a book of English translations of Hungarian poems. ‘I have had to listen in my life to many discussions of the role of the artist in society and very boring and fruitless they all were. Every writer has, of course, certain social and political duties and responsibilities as a citizen like other citizens: what these are will depend upon the age and society in which he happens to be living. But the only political duty – by duty I mean an activity which takes up time which he might prefer to devote to his own writing – which I can see as falling on a writer, in all countries and at all times, his duty, not as a citizen but as a person with literary talent, is a duty to translate the fiction and poetry of other countries so as to make them available to readers in his own. I consider translation a political act because the relations between any two countries are not determined by economic and political interests alone, but also by the degree to which the inhabitants of each are able to understand what the inhabitants of the other are thinking and feeling, and the novelists and poets of a country are the only people who can give one this understanding.’ (Ilona Duczynska & Karl Polanyi, The Plough and the Pen, London, Peter Owen, 1963, p. 10).
I strongly believe that this also applies to writers on art: that it is their political duty to translate art from other countries to their own. By “translating” here I mean showing, discussing and explaining – whatever you need to give some understanding of art from other countries – and hence some understanding of other countries and cultures. I understand my duty is to show that artists here are neither merely exotic, not making diluted versions of things from New York or London, they are thinking for themselves. Take, for example, Yee I-Lann’s Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I and II, a work on my mind because I had to had hand carry it back on the plane from Kuala Lumpur (KL) last week.
I-Lann is an artist from Sabah[1] currently living in KL who works mainly with photographs. In this work we see an early and not untypical anthropologist’s photo of an indigenous person exposed and displayed for analysis as an example of his species. John Lamprey was a vocal proponent of photographing types of varying ethnicities nude against a portable silk thread grid so that scientific measurements and comparisons could be made. As I-Lann noted in an accompanying text the Malayan’s nakedness is “demeaning”. The photographer, like other colonisers, is in control, invisible but surveying all that he rules. As you would imagine, the legacies of colonialism and race have remained an important issue for artists here.
In response to this “demeaning” posing of her countryman I-Lann firstly, laboriously by use of Photoshop, adjusted him so he no longer holds a spear, no longer looks away with his hand open as if not quite sure what is going on but, right hand now clasped into a fist and standing straight, he stares back at us. Secondly, I-Lann cut the Malayan out of the third picture entirely, leaving nothing but a white hole. ‘I wanted,’ she said, ‘to release him from this past.’ Finally, she places herself, in modern, everyday clothes, staring across the two middle picture frames to the man in the original photograph so they can catch each other’s eye and have a conversation, as if she too has entered John Lamprey’s studio. As she said, ‘the date of the photograph makes it the earliest photograph I have seen of “us”. So, I wanted to see how that gaze may have been inherited by us today.’ Made in 1869 it is, she has said, one of the first photographs of a “Malayan.” (Though, paradoxically, the original photograph by Lamprey has very recently been reclassified as a portrait of a Madagascan – who were designated as “Malay” by nineteenth century anthropologists. As I-Lann herself noted when I told her this, it is just another step in a long process of mis-identification.)
Why, you may ask, was I carrying it back from KL to Singapore? Because I had borrowed it from Silverlens Galleries in Singapore for my exhibition last year of Malaysian art in London. I even thought, I my innocence, what a fantastic piece this would be for the Tate to acquire: as a teacher there is so much that I can say about this work! But the Malaysian government agency that was underwriting the show couldn’t approve of showing full frontal nudity. So, the work has been languishing in KL for the last three months.
Auden was writing in a tense year (the Cold War, the murder of Martin Luther King and J.F.K. Kennedy, a coup in South Vietnam, the burning down of the British embassy in Jakarta), our year seems equally tense. It may be but a small thing in a big world, but we have a political, or moral, duty to try to get people to understand one another.
Have a good Tuesday!
Tony
Sabah is one of the two provinces of Malaysia situated not on the Malayan peninsula but in the north of Borneo. Their ethnic mix is very different. They often feel exploited by the government and big businesses in KL (Kuala Lumpur). ↑