Notes on the Translation
Images of supplemental work relating to "Translation."
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"That she chooses to explore such a theme via a work of written literature that has been translated into English by multiple translators and edited in various editions--and an epic work written in a rather florid French that explores the ephemerally elusive nature of memory at that--invites a welcome sense of play to Spingfield's body of work, which runs the risk of feeling purely academic at first.
Springfield successfully torpedoes that coldly intellectual suspicion in her accompanying mixed-media installation "A Brief Note on the Translation." Consider it the messy background and mutating byproduct of her meticulous manual copies of mechanical copies of text. Here, Springfield includes multiple edits/versions of one of her own written introductions to her project, which explains and clarifies--and then re-explains and re-clarifies--her process, plainly showing how her own interpretation of what she does mutates over time. Assembled around these three intros are various Proust-related and her Proust-project related ephemera: a photocopy of an English translation of Walter Benjamin's introduction to his German translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens, a page from the April 6, 2008, edition of the New York Times Magazine offering a Madelaine cake recipe (the biscuit that infamously midwives one of Proust's memories in Perdu), and, just to be cheeky, a photocopy of an illustration of a Madelaine--a representation of a representation of an object--among other items. Also included: what looks like a hand-drawn copy of a photocopied image of nothing--i.e., a machine scanning itself. It looks like a blank slate, but it nicely articulates Springfield's coy endeavor: a bluntly literal example of how to see what lies where there's supposedly nothing there."
- Bret McCabe
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"That she chooses to explore such a theme via a work of written literature that has been translated into English by multiple translators and edited in various editions--and an epic work written in a rather florid French that explores the ephemerally elusive nature of memory at that--invites a welcome sense of play to Spingfield's body of work, which runs the risk of feeling purely academic at first.
Springfield successfully torpedoes that coldly intellectual suspicion in her accompanying mixed-media installation "A Brief Note on the Translation." Consider it the messy background and mutating byproduct of her meticulous manual copies of mechanical copies of text. Here, Springfield includes multiple edits/versions of one of her own written introductions to her project, which explains and clarifies--and then re-explains and re-clarifies--her process, plainly showing how her own interpretation of what she does mutates over time. Assembled around these three intros are various Proust-related and her Proust-project related ephemera: a photocopy of an English translation of Walter Benjamin's introduction to his German translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens, a page from the April 6, 2008, edition of the New York Times Magazine offering a Madelaine cake recipe (the biscuit that infamously midwives one of Proust's memories in Perdu), and, just to be cheeky, a photocopy of an illustration of a Madelaine--a representation of a representation of an object--among other items. Also included: what looks like a hand-drawn copy of a photocopied image of nothing--i.e., a machine scanning itself. It looks like a blank slate, but it nicely articulates Springfield's coy endeavor: a bluntly literal example of how to see what lies where there's supposedly nothing there."
- Bret McCabe
