Dexter Sinister presents ``Scratching the Form to Reveal the Content''

[open-reading-group at o-r-g.com]

Dexter Sinister presents ``Scratching the Form to Reveal the Content,'' 
tomorrow WEDNESDAY JANUARY 27, 7 PM at Artspeak, 233 Carrall Street, as 
part of the exhibition An Invitation to An Infiltration at the 
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. We will be screening Erik van 
Zuylen's film ``Stefan Themerson and Language.'' This is the second of 
five consecutive evening events. Details for each will be announced the 
night before together with a brief preparatory text:

Calvino is describing (and promoting) the process of making a form 
strange in order to resist both one's own preconceptions and the weight 
of others opinions. (``Make it new,'' as Ezra Pound famously translated 
Copernicus.)  A usefully exaggerated example of this is Semantic 
Translation, a poetic technique conceived by Polish writer, film-maker 
and publisher Stefan Themerson, which manages to be at once ferociously 
ironic and straight-facedly hilarious. According to its inventor, 
Semantic Poetry Translation, is ``a machine made using certain parts of 
my brain'' which was demonstrated most prominently in a novella, Bayamus. 
In essence, SPT takes a grey area of meaning and attempts to pinpoint it, 
to clarify it. Themerson introduces the process as an attempt to reclaim 
poetry from the mouths of ``political demagogues,'' who in the twentieth 
century began to adopt the tools of poets --- repetition, alliteration, 
etc. towards their own dubious ends. The idea is to restore emptied-out 
words, cliches and platitudes with their fullest, specific meanings by 
supplanting them with their precise, verbose dictionary definitions. The 
method is usually demonstrated by comparing existing poems or songs with 
a semantically translated version, although the technique extends to 
prose, and Themerson generally writes with the same deadpan scientific 
demeanour.

But Semantic Translation is more double-edged than this brief description 
suggests. Although it is ostensibly an attempt to reclaim the ``truth'' 
behind words, the proposition is essentially ironic, not proselytizing. 
It's more accurate to say that Themerson is after the truth about 
``truth,'' that at best ``truth'' is more accurately ``belief,'' and that 
beliefs should be treated with the utmost suspicion. One of the great 
benefits of the technique is to be reminded that ``the world is more 
complicated than the language we use to talk about it.'' The nature of 
reading through the pedantic extent of a piece of Semantic Translation is 
to experience language made strange, to perceive both its technical depth 
and its limitations. Themerson referred to the process as ``scratching 
the form to reveal the content.''

See http://www.artspeak.ca
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