Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the frame of relational art projects, the paper confronts the artistic self concept of "art as translation work" with the theoretical dimension of the term translation in the SSH, especially in anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Following the artist and theorist Peter Weibel art can be conceived as "translation work". With the term translation, he considers significant artistic approaches since the modern avant-garde which indicate the end of the artistic original. As main argument serves the observation, that the concept of the original is inevitable linked to the capitalist concept of property which is no longer fundamental to recent process and actor oriented works. Furthermore, art in the sense of translation work can never be an original, because it always borrows from the existing material, works with it, internalizes it and carries it onward beyond geopolitical and national borders.

Based on the research project "Aesthetic alliances. Translation moments in relational art", the paper offers a critical review of the concept of art as translation work from an anthropological point of view. It is based on a theoretical exploration of the term translation in the SSH and confronts their academic approach with the increasing practical and metaphoric usage of the term translation in the art field. More and more artists and curators conceive their work in the frame of participatory approaches as conversation, mediation or just translation work between the different involved actors. Taking three recent examples of relational art in the frame of urban regeneration in which the author participated in a double agency as citizen and anthropologist, the paper offers an insight into the hierarchies and conflicts in such projects which question the harmonious self concept of art as translation work in a multiple way.