Say what?

[Richard]: Chelle's "Arts galore" post (10/20) unwittingly raises an interesting point. When you're in a foreign land, particularly when you don't speak the local language, the impressions you take away from an event often turn out to be highly subjective. Regarding the graffiti arts event she mentioned in that post, we communicated with the show's curator only through an interpreter, as he spoke essentially no English. And until I read Chelle's description of the graffiti in the show, I had no sense that it featured "hateful Serb graffiti in Prishtina." I gathered just the opposite: that it was anti-Serb, anti-Milosevic sloganeering and such.

I'll admit I was sort of on the periphery of the conversation with this guy (the curator). So it's not surprising that I might have missed some things or even turned a few key points on their head. In the fogginess of the intermittent translation, I just assumed that this Kosovan curator, who was almost certainly appalled by the actions of the Serbs during this period, had presented graffiti that mirrored his point of view. But now that I think about it, why would he have necessarily gone that route?

The curator is a psychiatrist. And it's easy to imagine why a psychiatrist, or any critical thinker, would find pro-Serb, pro-ethnic-cleansing graffiti fascinating. The thoroughly populist nature of graffiti provides a unique window into the roots of cultural and political phenomena -- in this case, a particular Serbian strain of rabid nationalism and hate-mongering. It's almost like looking into a petri dish at a strain of bacteria that was responsible for, say, a virulent outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. And this insight retroactively makes the show a lot more vital and compelling.

My original point, though, was how clueless you can be when your thread of communication is vague and sporadic. Aside from the inevitable misunderstandings, this situation also breeds boredom and alienation. This is what happened with me during the show. The work wasn't particularly "artistic" -- instead, it was rigidly message-oriented. So it wasn't like being at a standard visual-arts event, where the imagery can work on you without the mediation of language. In this case, literacy in the language was central to experiencing the show with any intelligence. And in my illiteracy, I found myself drifting off toward the margins of the space ... toward the cafe's book and magazine corner. There I discovered a copy of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. And I effortlessly fell into Elroy's hardboiled prose:

"He'd been running a week; he'd spent fifty-six grand staying alive: cars, hideouts at four and five thousand a night -- risk rates -- the innkeepers knew Mickey C. was after him for heisting his dope summit and his woman, the L.A. Police wanted him for killing one of their own. The Cohen contract kiboshed an outright dope sale -- nobody could move the shit for fear of reprisals ... "

Compared to indecipherable Serb graffiti, it was no contest. In fact, a few pages of Elroy left me feeling so nostalgic for more Americana, I thought about just making off with the book ... borrowing it without asking, as I knew that the language problem might again present itself in posing the question about borrowing the book for a week. Easier just to palm it to my side as I left. But did I end up doing that, or did I grit my teeth and try to bridge the language/culture gap like a respectable multi-culturalist? Stay tuned ...