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Joyce’s Artistic Effects is an exhibition of contemporary artists’ responses
to James Joyce’s work.
It evidences that Joyce has had a considerable effect on visual artists and
that they in turn have kept his legacy alive, interpreting him in many original
ways. Since Joyce turned away from the narrative traditions of the 19th
century, artists have felt that they, too, had to do more than illustrate. They
were inspired to be innovative and push boundaries. Just like other readers,
they have often felt personally attached to Joyce’s characters and places.
They have honed in on some of Joyce’s motifs and procedures, e.g. his way of
conjuring the materiality of objects and language and the ways in which he
used his sources. Joyce’s thinking, both his conceptual and accumulative use
of detail have become paradigmatic.
John Cage chose music as his realm, as a career in literature did not seem
viable: Joyce had already done it all. His understanding of everything being
music, including the “shout in the street” to use a Joycean expression led
Cage to embrace chance and orchestrate sound and silence in a fabric as rich
as Finnegans Wake, through which he also “wrote” by arranging Joyce’s
words, so that the letters of the writer’s name appear in a row.
William Anastasi, a friend of John Cage’s, is one of the conceptual innovators
in art from the 1960s. He let his surroundings do the drawing, e.g. when he
travelled on New York’s subway. This way, he records the “signatures of all
things” in Joycean ways. He has also carried out extensive research on the
correspondences between Joyce, Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Jarry. Zbigniew
Gostomski combines the penchant of conceptual art for rule-governed
processes with the appropriate minimalistic aesthetic – and exceptionally
manages also to encompass Joyce’s accumulation and sedimentation. John
Latham’s The Roller, here dismantled, points to conceptual artists’ interest in
Finnegans Wake in particular, not least because of its musical nature, here
represented by placing the roller on the grand piano.
Joseph Beuys read Joyce’s works in the late 1950s, which arguably helped
him to overcome a deep depressive crisis. In six exercise books, he worked
independently on Joyce and thus created a nucleus for his seminal practice
over the following decades. The layout of the beginning of Finnegans Wake’s
Anna Livia episode became Beuys’ “Penninus motif”, substituting Leopold
Bloom or Odysseus for a walking mountain man. The book as an object is
addressed, and designs can be found for a monument for sculpture to be
placed in Auschwitz. This links Joyce with Ireland’s megalithic monuments
(dolmen shapes in his oeuvre).
John Cage, Kenneth Goldsmith, Gereon Inger, Simon Popper and Brian
O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland have all included in their different oeuvres the rewriting of Joyce’s prose. This is useful, as one innovative element of Joyce’s
work is the stretching and contracting of time, whereby the relationship of
narrated time and reading – or writing – is being made aware. Joyce’s
accumulative strategy and interest in every-day detail is particularly well
reflected in Goldsmith’s recording and publishing of all he said in a whole
week. A conversation with Pavel Büchler on such work is aptly entitled
“extreme reading”. Popper’s idea to order all or Ulysses alphabetically also
turns the book into something that Joseph Beuys would have called a
“battery”: an accumulation of energy. In this context, it becomes obvious
how interesting Joyce’s work has been for typographers and designers such
as Ecke Bonk and Owen Griffith.
Joyce’s commodified face on bank notes and shops (Büchler) demands
cotemporary reminders of at least three easily forgotten aspects of the
canonical writer: his poetic potency, which is the focus of Jürgen
Partenheimer, his notoriety (Amanda Coogan) and also the socially engaged
trajectory of his work that Beuys can represent and which Lenir de Miranda
translates into an artist’s book that doubles up as a fictional passport.
The specificity of Joyce’s spaces and time is well captured by Man Ray’s
portrait, as well as Ian Gunne’s Bloomsday newspaper, Gary Coyle’s Holy
Water from the Irish sea under Ulysses’ Sandycove Tower, where the artist
performs the Joycean (or anti-Joycean?) ritual of swimming there daily.
Outside of Dublin, Hannes Vogel has collected typographies for a space in
Zurich’s university hospital, where Joyce died. Artists in Leopold Bloom’s
fictional birthplace of Szombathely also celebrate the annual recurrence of
Ulysses (Bloomsday: 16 June). They have created a project consisting of a
folder of multipe artworks. Conor McGarrigle uses GPS to take the itineraries
of Ulysses all over the world: everyone can contribute and document a walk
at www.joycewalks.com.
The exhibition is framed by Joyce’s own publication in transition of found
visual work, the Fluviana, alongside Constantin Brancusi’s photographs of his
studio on the one hand – a gesture that is to be seen in the wake of artistic
ready made strategies. On the other, Royden Rabinowitch evokes Brancusi’s
portrait of Joyce alongside his own Joycean grease cone, which parallels
Beuys’ simultaneous use of that material that was also established in a
Joycean context in the 1960s. Rabiniwitch places both in a recent (quasi-?)
scientific publication of the artist.
Joyce’s effects are considerable; they are not one effect, but exceedingly
diverse. They are also – in another sense – his personal effects that
transcend disciplines, entering into all aspects of culture and always do so in
challenging and enriching ways.