Paraphrases - Containment (Kissinger)

Paraphrases - Containment

This is one of a series of short films which combine video footage of an artist building a studio with audio recordings of spoken paraphrases of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of containment.

The artist built the studio to create a space that would be private and contained, in which to develop new art work. It took several years for him to build it.

Containment is a widely used term that has several meanings, each of which is specific to a particular context and discourse community. Each of the articles paraphrased in this project is from a different field.

For this project I asked several people to tell me a paraphrase of an article. These participants range widely in age and academic-mindedness. Their paraphrases vary in terms of how close they are to the original text. Some participants made careful and accurate representations of the subject matter in the article; others used the article as a starting point and invested their paraphrase with more of their own ideas.

The practice of paraphrasing can be seen as a key part of our engagement with art. The Italian philosopher Della Volpe wrote about what he called 'critical paraphrase', a process of identifying the core of a piece of work, or what remains of it when we strip away superficialities. By extension, the sense a viewer makes of a piece of work could be seen as a paraphrase of the actual work she sees; and, for the artist, the work he makes could be seen as a paraphrase of the intensions he had for the work.