Lost in Translation
Thursday, May 24, 2007
I got this press release off re-title.com's newsletter, about Nicolas Hlobo's debut in Rome. I enjoy Nicolas Hlobo's work generally, and I'm glad that he is getting loads of international attention. What concerns me though is that a public that needs to have the word "Xhosa" contextualised by a comparison with Nelson Mandela, might lose a bit of the humour and linguistic subtlety of his work: 'Hlobo's ethnic origin is Xhosa (like former South African president Nelson Mandela) and the artist makes frequent references to the idiosyncrasies and idioms of his culture, employing the metaphoric values and 'plasticity' of the language to add new levels of meaning and associative stratifications to his work.'Labels: Nicolas Hlobo
posted by Robert Sloon at 2:07 PM
12 Comments:
well yeah, nelson mandela is probably the only black man they ever heard of. it probably helps them a great deal, making the discovery that you actually get two different kind of black man: one kind that goes to jail a lot, and the other kind that has sex a lot
Sloon
Its a shame you're all "concerned" about contextualising a word.
Fuck. get a life.
Is dickface a person or a publicity stunt? I think he's very probably hairy. A hairy Luther Blissett
i agree with tyred the rest of the world is ignorant about us as we are about them. the press release is written for romans and (europeans) not us. im sure sloon they will also quote de klerk, botha or basson, ja one of those felas when writing about you.
i know, i know,...we all look the same...
by the way did you know that the production processes around manufacturing film and video tape are ALL based on making white skin look good? plus the basics of film lighting and set dressing established by Hollywood and pervading the rest of the planet.
yup we did
So what about film making white people look good.
Should it make white peole look bad??
What the fuck??
People have very small minds.
Sloon.
What have you done about your "concern" about the contextualisation of the the word "Xhosa."
Started a rally or had a wank?
And some of your other pronouncements really suck.
You were really alot better when you first started this blog.
How about something fresh instead of the samo limp commentary about the same old limp people.
Fuck you
Dickface
I can hear Dickface drawing in a ragged breath between every eloquent sentence. Let it out, dickface, this is your chance. What do you want to see discussed on artheat?
monotone (standing on the doorstep of knowledge) - take a photograph of a banana against a bright sky, then in the shade. Do the same but using a grenadilla. Feed the four photros into your computer. Now, slide the exposure modifier from minimum to maximum. Do this with all four photos. See, its a technical problem which yields meanings. In a way you are right, if the black characters in a film or black subjects of a doccie are badly exposed ( usually, failing to render subleties of facila detail) it would be a sure sign that the film makers did not give a damn.
But the physical problem doesn't evaporate when you 'politicise' it. The camera is not capable of rendering up a banal 'real' world - a picture is a representation: the distortion, or angle or meaning of the picture may be achieved by the artist's cunning, or may derive somehow from the circumstance of the event or subject, but it could also merely result from unforeseen tec hnicxal problems, problems of light for instance. It is not natural. If it was, we would have been born with shutters between our eyes and our brains.
ps.
fuck off dickface
Dickface,
If you read a little more carefully you'd see that what concerned Sloon is not the contexualising of the word, but that the Roman public would not get the humour and subtlety of the work.
Now, tell me is your shouting on this site a rally or a wank?
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