Talk hangs around in Joseph Grigely's work. Instead of 'evaporating', as the poet Marge Piercy is quoted as saying it should, its visible trace remains attached to the walls, scattered over a large table and hanging from a giant Christmas tree in the middle of the gallery space. These conversations stick around, though far removed from the people and contexts that produced them.
Joseph Grigely is a deaf American artist. The fact of his deafness intervenes, as it does in the very first explanatory text encountered upon entering the gallery, every time he enters into conversation with someone: because of difficulties lipreading, he asks his interlocutors to write their communications down on paper. In Conversations and Portraits Grigely's story-telling 'voice' is chastely framed and typeset beside thematic groups of unframed, unsigned scrawls, whose messages, written by a multitude of faceless friends and acquaintances, are simultaneously banal and alluring: "vapid, profound," like Morrissey's music as it is described in one of the pieces.
Deafness, for Grigely, is an "enabling condition" or "physical subversion" rather than a disability [1]. Firstly, his deafness makes these written communications possible, allowing him to observe and explore people's reactions to being asked to write their casual thoughts down on paper. Most are reluctant at first, but many end up enjoying the experience. Secondly, Grigely uses deafness as a deconstructive strategy, a way of challenging the conventional privileging of spoken over written communication. While writing a conversation demands time and effort, it also offers something crucially different to, but at least as valuable as, spoken conversation—as witnessed for example by the exuberant doodles of the artist's nine-year-old friend Nadine. By playing with popular prejudices against writing, Grigely gives practical expression to contemporary theories of subversion.
The seductiveness of Grigely's work lies largely in its appeal to the viewer's desire to enter into contact with others. The chaotic fragments of written conversation convey a palpable sense of the presence of the individual writers. Grigely himself, in the explanatory text which accompanies several music sheets inscribed with lush handwriting, points to this quality of the written trace: Tamara's "accent" when she writes is distinctive, he says, "and I often wonder if her voice sounds like it looks."
Many of the messages either ask or respond to questions: "Do you 'hear' poetry in your head?", "Can you feel the music?" These conversations begin and end in curiosity. The written trace functions as pure lure: along with Grigely's accompanying narratives, it spins yarns to draw the reader in, but generally leaves the stories incomplete. The reader/viewer constantly picks up threads of stories only to find that his or her imagination must do the rest of the 'spinning'. Tellingly, spools of thread and packets of needles lie invitingly on the central table, while disembodied voices from behind a wall in the corner extemporise on the "kinkiness" of the art of spinning: "tactile," "orgasmic," "spinster…"
The Christmas tableau in the middle of the room offers itself to be 'read' in several different ways. Initially, it looks like the disordered remains of a party. One chair, squarely faced by a conspicuously blank party invitation, is slightly pulled back from the table. But nothing is to be touched, not even the papers so casually—and callously?—strewn over the other conversations. The seemingly random has been fixed as an image.
The table is cluttered with objects and notes which point back to the themes referred to on the walls. For example, the pencils, needles, conical containers and arrow motifs on the table harmonise with other references to pointing in the exhibition: the Christmas tree, the photographs of index fingers, the conical lamp. Like the scribbled pages on the walls, the central table points to an absent physicality: plastic biscuit wrappers, scribbled references to poor table manners and the cooking of a "discusting" pot of mucus. Writing, as well as being conversation and portrait, also points to the human hand which gave issue to it.
Da Vinci's Last Supper, with fingers pointing across a table, comes to mind. I count ten beer cans on the table, each bearing a logo of three intersecting circles, and one wine glass. A Hard Rock Café coupon to redeem a free souvenir reveals the words 'Joseph' and 'Mary' on a scrap of paper below it. There are references to Paul, to the synagogue, to teaching, to Holy Trinity D.C. musicians. One paper makes me burst out laughing: "It's just hard to be a rock star after say, 33." Words, objects, and images begin to play off each other, resound. Eyes of needles, a rock icon, writing as betrayal, 'still life'…everything rhymes.
