Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan Translation Workshop: Translating Art Writing

Date&Time: Tuesday, November 15, 10:00‒11:30 am (JST)
Live streaming: Zoom Webinar
The speaker: Andrew Maerkle
Language: English

Combining elements of journalism, literature, history, and philosophy, art writing is a broad and constantly expanding field of expression that encompasses everything from artist statements, manifestos, and interviews to exhibition reviews, critical polemics, catalogue essays, academic papers, and even artworks themselves. As with any genre, art writing has its jargon and tropes, but it rewards close and engaged reading. At its most powerful, art writing has the capacity, like art itself, to change how we perceive the world. Moreover, the innovative approaches to language employed by many artists and art writers, the rich references to other cultural and world events that inform much art writing, the multilingual internationalism that has shaped contemporary art discourse over the past century, and the alchemy of putting artworks into words are all factors that position art writing at the cutting edge for thinking about translation practice. In this workshop Andrew Maerkle, the founding editorial director of Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan’s translation project, will introduce some of the distinguishing features of international contemporary art writing and share important techniques for translating Japanese art writing into English. In particular, much art writing is concerned with two intertwined processes—the artist’s process of making the artwork and the viewer’s process of interacting with the artwork. In the context of Japanese–English translation, recognizing the primacy of these processes informs how one reads subject–object relations in the source text and also necessitates cross-referencing descriptions of artworks in the source text against images of those artworks (and even the actual work itself) when available, or alternate descriptions of those artworks (such as can be found in exhibition checklists or exhibition reviews) when not. Drawing on examples from historic texts, Maerkle will show how consideration of the inherent intertextuality and referentiality of art writing can lead to deeper readings of the source text and facilitate the translation’s reception by its target audience. Ultimately, this entails taking a dialogic approach to translation that opens up the text to multiple viewpoints and voices. This workshop will be conducted in English.

Andrew Maerkle

©Koshima Yukiko

Andrew Maerkle is a writer, editor, and translator based in Tokyo. He is Deputy Editor of the bilingual Japanese online art platform ART iT and a contributor to international art journals including Art & Australia, Artforum, and frieze. From 2006 to 2008 he was Deputy Editor of ArtAsiaPacific magazine in New York and part of the team that created the annual AAP Almanac. His translations from Chinese and Japanese into English have appeared in numerous publications and catalogues. Book-length translations include Hu Fang’s Towards a Non-Intentional Space, vol. I (Koenig Books, 2016) from the Chinese and Koki Tanaka’s How to Live Together: Production Notes (Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017) from the Japanese. His book of translations of the writings of Mono-ha artist Kishio Suga, Kishio Suga: Writings, vol. 1, 1969‒1979, was published by Skira, Milan, in 2021. In 2019 Maerkle was a founding committee member of the Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan project and from 2020 to 2021 was founding Editorial Director of the Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan’s translation project. He teaches in the Graduate School of Global Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts.