feAture nina Katchadourian
posters in New York advertising ‘accent elimination’ – the erasure of arranging other people’s books in enigmatic piles: their titles forming
immigrant cadences in the name of social and professional assimilation laconic little prose poems or tragicomic vignettes. Thus: ‘A Day at the
– she thought the term at once alluring and sinister. In her six-screen Beach… The Bathers… Shark 1… Shark 2… Shark 3… Sudden Violence…
video piece Accent Elimination (2005), she records the ludicrously Silence.’ Or: ‘How to Write… Very Bad Poetry… Keep Watching the Sky…
convoluted processes by which her parents were trained out of their Unlock… The Origin of the World’. The conceit seems simple, but the
accents and into hers: the sort of educated, travelled accent that to photographed permutations are unexpectedly mysterious, suggestive
American ears may sound like no accent at all. In turn, Katchadourian of some self-involved or literally trapped individual who can find no
tried to learn the intonations of each of her parents’ accents. The result other way to signal his or her stories or distress but in this necessarily
is funny and painful: all three strain to mimic voices they have been limited lexicon of found titles.
hearing for years (in the daughter’s case, all her life), and still they fail: The sense of a language coming to us only haltingly, from
Katchadourian’s father, exasperated, notes that his daughter is getting beyond some debilitating divide, is everywhere in Katchadourian’s
his accent right, but still something is missing. work; its obverse, equally prevalent, is the sheer miracle of anything
Accent Elimination is in some ways a keynote work for getting successfully communicated to anyone, ever. Reading and
Katchadourian: it’s the intimate distance between the three individuals misreading are locked in a comically recursive relationship: messages
that makes it so complex and so affecting. This is exactly the quality are diverted from their proper destinations, but just as likely (and
she discovers in other kinds of kinship structure: family resemblance is impossible to tell from the first) is the arrival of a voice or a text from the
both absolutely necessary and strangely coincidental, even implausible other side: from another species, say, or even from inanimate objects.
or fantastic. Such is the absurd logic that governs structures we prefer Human speech slumps into phatic evasion, as in Indecision on the Moon
to think of as organic or integral, that it seems even the most abstract (2001), a recording of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, with all the coherent
affinities can constitute a family group, a dynasty or an ecosystem. In speech removed and only unfinished sentences, ‘ahs’, ‘ums’ and static
Genealogy of the Supermarket (2005), for example, Katchadourian left intact. Objects in turn start up a hectic discourse that constantly
framed 78 portraits, each taken from the packaging of an everyday verges on sense. In Talking Popcorn (2001), Katchadourian rigged up a
commodity, on a plush red flock-wallpaper background. Linking them popcorn machine with a computer that interpreted the patterns of its
in a hierarchical structure, she posited a vast family tree that included seemingly random pops as Morse code. Mostly the resulting text was
Uncle Ben, Paul Newman and the Jolly Green Giant. Unlikely siblings wholly enigmatic – ‘tttayeaeihe hltpwelbcrhg dttet a ki ahei hyvet eqqt i
and less likely spouses grin at the viewer in garish hues, oblivious to their he xvonttpwda’ – but at least twice the machine called her ‘mom’ and,
crossing of national, racial, religious and historical borders: a veritable alarmingly, once spelled out the word ‘silence’.
Family of Man that would fit in one shopping basket. In an interview with Ian Berry, published in the catalogue for
“I used to have an artist’s statement”, says Katchadourian, Katchadourian’s 2006 show at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs,
“that said ‘I collect, dissect, translate, mistranslate’, and so on.” The she comments: ‘I think that there is an incredibly creative act inherent in
processes, in other words, precede the diverse media in which she has mistranslation. It is a moment when you are expansively and creatively
worked: sound, sculpture, video and photography as well as the more interpreting something. It may end up completely wrong, but there
evanescent projects that persist only as documentation. One of these can be an immense amount of imagination involved when you don’t
last gives a clue to the taxonomic richness and formal lightness of much completely understand something.’ It’s this moment of being forced
of her work. Since graduate school in the early 1990s, she has been to adapt one’s language to a new and only partially understood reality
Artreview 70
Nina Kat.indd 70 4/3/08 10:10:38
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