Jeff Gabel - The Reading Room

The three projects in this room are based around translations into English that the artist has made from texts in German, Finnish and Veps. This strand of his work has developed out of the artist's day job as a librarian at the Long Island University in Brooklyn.

These are by no means languages that the artist is versed-in (indeed, he admits to being ill versed in English too). Gabel's translations, rather, can be best read as energetic attempts to excavate their source material, based on thorough from-scratch research. They represent a genuine attempt to bring cultural expressions that are on the periphery of the artist's vision, back into his and our cultural sphere.

For The Alma Project, Gabel has translated a contemporary German biography of Alma Mahler, major mover-and-shaker in early 20th Century Vienna, wife of composer Gustav, and sometime lover of Klimt, Kokoska and Gropius. Not letting his only so-so German hold him back, Gabel builds up his basic literal translation into a 'common' English version elaborated with curses, meta-comentary on the text, and unexplained fissures in the narrative, where he has skipped-over recalcitrant passages. What we are left with is a brilliantly energetic text that flips between the categories of canonical biography, trashy exposé, and artist's 'text-piece', presenting some of the great figures of early modernism in an entirely fresh light. The book also includes a suite of drawings featuring characters and incidents from the book.

Also on show here are illustrated translations from German of texts by early 20th Century writers Stephan Zweig and Ernst Junger. The latter's Horror has been incorporated into a text-drawing, while a story by the former, 24 Hours in the Life of A Woman, is presented as a 9-page 'comic book' in the display case in the main space.

In The KISS Albums, Gabel takes as his source material a website created by a Finnish teenager devoted to the rock band KISS. Using a Finnish-English dictionary, allied with his own murky memories of being a fan growing up in Nebraska, Gabel has pieced together the ups and downs of the band's career. The piece is being presented as an audio CD featuring Gabel himself dryly recounting tales of rock and roll excess as if they had been deciphered from tablets of Linear B script unearthed in an archeological dig.

And in Four Short Vepsian Works, the artist attempts the melancholy - and what could turn out to be historical - project of translating a series of poems from Veps, an obscure endangered Finno-Ugric language. In this case, due to the unavailability of a reliable English-Veps dictionary, the artist was forced to translate much of the text from Veps to Finnish, and then to English. Further complicating matters, is the existence of several regional dialects of the language, none of which were specified in the source material. In the process, Gabel looked to whatever source he could as an aid:

"I found a children's reader in the Vepsian language, which helped for getting familiar with simple grammatical and sentence forms. The last story in this book is from the children's reader. I also had the Book of Mark from the Bible to compare Vepsian and English texts."

This translation and re-translation of the original material, coupled with the inherently fluid nature of poetry itself, might seem to make for a result that is unverifiable to the point of being meaningless as a referent to it's source material. Yet, the artist sticks as rigorously as he possibly can to a literal translation, and what is remarkable is that his versions of the poems maintain a vividness and beauty, opening up a window onto a dwindling culture.

Gabel's translation projects are not about the randomness of language or the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified. On the contrary, through setting up maximum obstacles to the task of translation, by 'starting from scratch' each time, the artist demonstrates his commitment to a core of meaning at the end of the process. He challenges us to take his endeavor on good faith.