Displaying Language in Public Art

Displaying Language in Public Art Sherry Simon In Montreal, all public language is signage. In addition to conveying its message, language names itself, proclaims its identity. The language of public art is no exception. And what of signage when it becomes a form of art? Consider the examples collected by a group of researchers at Concordia University—a collection of defunct iconic signs like that of the famous Ben’s restaurant or Warshaw’s grocery store—withdrawn from public display because the business has gone under, or, in many cases, because the sign did not comply with Bill 101. On display once again, this time in museum spaces, they are admired for the quality of their lettering.  See the Web site of Matt Soar, professor at Concordia University (Montreal), which addresses signage, branding and lettering in public space: http://www.logocities.org. Especially noteworthy are a whole category of signs whose downfall was caused by the presence of the ’s, the fatal indicator of their English-language origins, now conspicuously absent from the city’s scriptory landscape. Featured in the Concordia University collection is a sign with an emblematic message. The sign in question comes from a grocery store (Simcha’s) on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, on which the recently overpainted letters in French have slowly peeled away to reveal the original English underneath. ,, , This palimpsest epitomizes Montreal, where English, the language thought to have been brought under control, rears its head as an irritating but persistent presence in the public sphere. A ghostly figure from the past unexpectedly reappears in the present, haunting Montreal with its playful yet menacing reality. The Simcha sign tells a story; it tells of the city’s recent history, while displaying an uneven, fragmented surface. It presents itself as an exemplary model of the genre that will be explored here—the part-informational, part-artistic message, in which language points to itself, and where forms of deviant translation reflect social and historical issues. In the same way that the store sign becomes art, art has its own message to convey. This is the case in Gilbert Boyer’s work La montagne des jours (1991), situated on Mount Royal in Montreal, and those of Michel Goulet, whose texts, if we take the example of the work Elsewhere (2002) installed on the beach at English Bay in Vancouver, proclaim their French origins. It is the historical and urban context that determines the intensity of meaning accorded to language. Montreal’s specific history, its past as a city divided between Anglophones and Francophones, means that each element of the urban landscape is marked by language. Architecture is also a form of language which, in certain contexts of national fragility, takes on heightened importance. The public learns to read cultural codes and their meaning in the context of local rivalries. Buildings counter each other in a constant battle for symbolic space. It is in this way that Complexe Desjardins was conceived as a response to Place Ville Marie, and that Université de Montréal (the building’s location, style and even building materials) was constructed in opposition to McGill University. Rare are works that make use of more than one language or the effects of translation—in the manner of the Simcha sign, whose palimpsest effects are fortuitous, however. There are certainly works like Linda Covit’s Give Peace a Chance (2010) on Mount Royal, in which a single sentence is translated into forty languages—embracing an ideal of universality—or Sans titre (also known as An Explosion of Letters) (1992) by the Effets Publics collective  The members of the group were Rose-Marie E. Goulet, Alain Paiement, Saharuni Randy, Bernard Denis and Guy Bellavance. at Concordia University, which introduces other languages and letters, or the chair inscribed with a poem in Inuktitut in Michel Goulet’s Rêver le nouveau monde (2008)—yet here, it seems to me, it is a question of a simple juxtaposition of languages rather than their interaction. In this context, Henry Tsang’s work Welcome to the Land of Light (1997) in Vancouver is especially significant, as it juxtaposes, along a sea wall handrail, texts in two languages—on top, Chinook Jargon; on the bottom, English—in a surprising translation relationship. The texts are composed of aluminium letters that are illuminated at night by means of fibre-optic cable. As the artist himself explains, Chinook Jargon was a pidgin trade language, a nineteenth-century lingua franca born of intercultural needs and possibly used by nearly a million people along the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska. Based on the language spoken by the Chinook people of the Columbia River, this language was enriched by borrowings from English, French and Nootka. The product of an era of encounters and fusions, Chinook Jargon represents, in particular, the experience of working on the railways where Europeans and indigenous North Americans met.  Henry Tsang explains the origins of the Chinook language on his Website: http://henrytsang.ca. Tsang’s texts make visible an almost forgotten language, now spoken by only a few. The very form of this language says a lot: it speaks of the coexistence and codependence of groups in a milieu in the process of being created. Like the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, which embodies the trade links that united the cultures of Western Europe with those of the Levant, Chinook Jargon, through its structure, bears witness to a history of reciprocity. Improvised and rudimentary, it is nevertheless an affirmation, the trace of collaborations between peoples who laid the material and immaterial foundations for contemporary society. The English versions of the phrases in Chinook Jargon have an enigmatic quality. They are in fact a series of greetings for new arrivals, but the formulations are strange, expressed in broken English: “Greetings good you arrive here where light be under land,” “Future it be now,” “Here you begin live like new,” “Come to time where people talk different but good together,” “If you heart mind open you receive new knowledge,” “You have same like electric eye and heart mind and talk sound,” “You live fast like light,” “See talk be here there and everywhere at one time,” “Us make this community good indeed,” “You not afraid here,” “Here you begin live like chief” and “World same like in your hand.” Although Chinook Jargon is in essence a pidgin language, English—here a translated language—seems to have been contaminated and weakened by this encounter. The result is two mixed languages: the first, a trade language; the second, a form of English that has been corrupted by its encounter with the other. Neither language is dominant here; both have been subjected to the influence of other languages and serve as a metaphor for the intercultural relations in the region. The imperfect translation recalls the pithy use of common languages, where grammar is sacrificed to the imperatives of communication. Actually, only the negative aspect of Chinook Jargon’s intercultural richness remains: the halting expression, the sense of poverty and linguistic incompetence. Yet here and there, a sort of dignity emanates from this pidgin tongue, contaminated and damaged by English, that evolved at the crossroads of influences. The significance of Tsang’s work is heightened when we learn that the expressions written in Chinook Jargon were in fact translated from Englisha detail that was kept hidden. The phrases in question were those used by property developers in False Creek to sell luxury condos. This part of Vancouver has experienced a particularly intense real estate boom, and through this twofold translation, Tsang wished to highlight the relationship between nineteenth and twentieth-century business transactions. The presence of Chinook Jargon also underlines the polyglot nature of Vancouver as a whole and the growing importance of Asian languages, especially Chinese. Not to mention the fact that this modern city has been shaped by translation relationships between languages of unequal power. By reviving a devalued language of the past, a language at once indigenous and foreign, at the heart of a neighbourhood now associated with upward mobility, Tsang draws attention to the contradictory values of this social diversity. Can today’s English become a language that bears the positive effects of the meeting of cultures? The linguistic confrontation associated with social issues and public space is also expressed in a work of public art in Barcelona, Spain, where, once again, we find an example of a diverted or deviant translation. Mounted on a wall next to the brilliant white building of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) designed by Richard Meier is a plaque titled Ravalejar, transforming El Raval, the name of the neighbourhood, into a verb conjugated not in Spanish but in Catalan. Conjugating the name of this neighbourhood in accordance with Catalan linguistic rules is somewhat provocative, suggesting that this traditionally Spanish-speaking quarter (today inhabited by a significant immigrant population) could one day be integrated into the Catalan linguistic sphere. In fact, the term ravalejar originates from a public relations campaign launched in 2005, aimed at reviving and restoring confidence in the El Raval district. The plaque is also presented in Spanish, Tagalog and Urdu. Its location is significant: it hangs on a wall separating the modernist museum from the exposed walls of half-demolished apartments. The white hulk of the museum stands in a clearing surrounded by a labyrinth of neighbouring streets and their densely populated buildings. The Ravalejar plaque is located precisely at the border between a space created by the demands of gentrification and the vestiges of previous disorder. This fragile boundary between social classes reflects a tension similar to that which exists between speakers of Spanish and Catalan—forming an uneasy point of contact between communities that hold conflicting interests and memories. As in the work by Tsang, the tension between languages, embodied in a relationship of deviant translation, also reflects conflicting interests in urban space. Evoking Vancouver and Barcelona’s fragile spatial and linguistic borders is a reminder that the linguistic competition present in Montreal is far from exceptional. But it is in Montreal that we perhaps find the most numerous examples of linguistic-artistic expression. Take, for example, the remarkable steel sculpture by Lisette Lemieux, Regard sur le fleuve (1992), erected on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Stoney Point Park on St. Joseph Boulevard in Lachine, Quebec. While acting as a screen in front of the river, it identifies the St. Lawrence as a river of French. The solidity of the letters evinces the confidence of this unequivocal label: fleuve is what this is called. Yet the inverted word below—the echo, the shadow, the reflection—seems to express doubt. The letters take on the consistency of water, the word fleuve becoming as liquid and mobile as the river itself. Fleuve (river) is not translated into another language but into its opposite, into its material, signified essence, water. As in the Simcha sign mentioned earlier, the sculpture introduces a double language, and thus doubt. Do these examples demonstrate a failure, the impossibility of naming anything with certainty in a language acceptable to everyone? The word fleuve dissolves into its aqueous signifiant, just as the Simcha grocery store sign was attacked by a rival code. In both cases, the certainty of a single code is put to the test. In neither case, however, does translation play a conventional role. One language does not replace the other but acts in counterpoint and in dialogue. The language that is materialized in public art may be less assertive than I suggested at the beginning. It is a precarious language, light and diaphanous like the discreet wording on Gilbert Boyer’s discs on Mount Royal. A language of neither certainty nor equivalence, but rather of questioning and doubt. This is an image true to the face of Montreal, a city marked by a perpetual conflict of codes, where the unequal status of languages often makes us lose our footing and where uncertainty obliges us to be constantly alert. 6