Joseph Grigely: Conversations and Portraits
Douglas Hyde Gallery, February-April 1998
Coloured post-its, receipts, envelopes, match-boxes, dollar notes, scraps, all inscribed with writing in different hands, are arranged in groups on the walls of the gallery. The lines of pencil draw the eye on like thread through a needle. The explicit meanings of the words are often banal. Why then is it then that each fragment of paper seems strangely imbued with eccentricity, glamour, and wit? They are 'vapid, profound', like Morrissey's music as it is described in one of the conversation pieces.
These pieces are not of people talking: they are the 'talk' itself, the stuff of the conversation. Each grouping is accompanied by a story, narrated in the engaging voice of the artist. The colloquial tones of the artist's narratives jar with the funereal aspect of their visual presentation: their black frames, standard rectangular format, glass covering, and formal typescript give them an air of authority which sits heavily and incongruously on the walls beside the fluttery, chaotic fragments they expressly introduce.
At the far wall of the gallery, a large photograph of a hand in the process of writing is framed in glass above a sofa and two tables. On one table is a conical lamp and a set of propped-up framed photographs of hands in the act of writing. On the other, two flat unframed images of writing hands. No faces appear in any of the photographs, although one of the fingers wears a conspicuous eye ring.
The neatness of the above 'tableau' contrasts with the disordered festive 'still life' scene in the centre of the room. A large Christmas tree is festooned with flashing coloured lights, streamers, and coloured pages inscribed with fragments of conversation. The large wooden table beside it is strewn with pencils, colourful mounds of notes, empty beer cans, wine glasses, coloured straw, plastic wrappers, and, bizarrely, needles and spools of brightly coloured thread. In a crisp bag leaning against one leg of the table is a ball of multicoloured wool. One of the three chairs is slightly pulled back as if urging the viewer to sit down. Squarely facing it, a party invitation lies on the table. The invitation is conspicuous by its officious stance, its blankness, and its inclusion of the surrounding colours in its flowered border. A good girl, I ask the security guard if I may sit at the table, but nothing is to be touched, not even the papers so casually – and callously – strewn over the other conversations. What looks arbitrary is actually intended: in another piece, Grigely says that the direction which each conversation takes is unpredictable at the time of its inscription but inevitable afterwards. The verb becomes substantive.
In a corner are two chairs. A title on the wall reads 'Should we go? I desperately need a pee'. Voices babble and merge into one another in a space beside a blank white wall. The continual, circular banter – largely about bodily functions and appetites – provides a strange counterpoint to the silent visual conversations which occupy the rest of the gallery space.
In another corner, beside a window, is a postcard stand. The viewer is invited, at the expense of the gallery, to take a card, write to a friend with whom s/he hasn't been in contact for a few months, and deposit it the mailbox on the wall. The gallery will pay postage expenses.
Joseph Grigely is a deaf American artist. His work celebrates the specificity of writing as a mode of interpersonal contact. His exhibition was stunningly original. 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 a conversation with someone. Although he himself can speak, Grigely finds it nearly impossible to lipread names, so he must ask his interlocutors to write their names down on paper. It is the fruits of such exchanges that are stuck on the walls of the gallery, hung from the tree and scattered across the table.
Although the history of deafness as a disability is touched upon in one piece about the Enlightenment suppression of sign language in deaf institutes, deafness is treated in this exhibition far more as an enabling condition or, as Grigely calls it, a 'physical subversion'. There is a sense in which deafness is offered as an 'excuse' for a fascination with the act of writing and the textual trace which Grigely is aware might border on deviancy in a society which considers writing to be a parasitic substitute for the vitality and immediacy of speech. His deafness, while it obviously makes written communications necessary, also makes these communications possible, functioning as a disclaimer. At several points in the exhibition, Grigely points out that his interlocutors might have justifiably suspected that he was lying, that he was using his deafness as a disingenuous pretext to trick them into committing themselves to paper.
The seductiveness of Grigely's work lies largely in its appeal to the viewer's desire to enter into contact with others. Somehow, despite all the apparent obstacles to a lively and interesting exchange – the artist's framed stories lack visual interest; the individual names and faces of the other writers are unknown; many of the communications are utterly banal, and even where they are not, are extirpated and transplanted from their original context into the sanitised space of the art gallery – despite all of this, the scraps of written conversation manage somehow to convey a palpable sense of the presence of the individual writers. Grigely himself, in the explanatory text which accompanies several music sheets inscribed with the erratic handwriting of an artist friend of his, points to this quality of the written word: Tamara's accent when she writes is distinctive, he says, 'and I often wonder if her voice sounds like it looks'. The trace, though faceless and often nameless, distinguishes.
The viewer's curiosity is stimulated by the words on the page, not in and for themselves, but in so far as they function as clues or pointers to specific communicational contexts and personalities. The material upon which the words are inscribed is scrutinised for printed designs and logos, accidental imprints and spillages, anything which might give a clue as to the story behind the fragment. Indeed, curiosity enters into the very content of the work, many of the messages either asking or responding to questions: 'Do you "hear" poetry in your head?' and 'Can you feel the music?' Curiosity also provides the impetus for much of Grigely's work: one of the groups is composed of responses to his inquiries about what different kinds of music sound like, while another, a single wine shop card inscribed with the word 'sex', was given to the artist in response to his inquiry as to the content of a very pleasurable looking conversation between two clerks.
The curiosity which motivates and is produced by the exchanges is presented as an obscurely erotic craving. Desire, sexual or otherwise, is a recurring theme in the displayed snatches of conversation. The erotic potential of the written communication has been exploited in the past by libertine epistolary novelists. In such novels, the message and its support function as virtual incarnations of the correspondents, whose presence they materially translate. Certainly, the tantalising physical traces of so many enigmatic personalities appeals to a fetishistic impulse in the viewer. The written fragments materialise, or render carnal, a usually invisible desire to know the other person. The spools of thread, needles, and ball of wool in the central tableau can be understood as an allusion to the mysterious lure of the written trace, or to the spinning of yarns (stories) as a form of enticement: one of the disembodied voices from behind the wall extemporises on the 'kinkiness' of the art of spinning: 'tactile', 'orgasmic', 'spinster'…
Grigely exposes the usually hidden but strangely widespread assumption that written exchanges somehow constitute dangerous liaisons. One intriguing piece is introduced with the words 'This isn't a conversation': the piece in question is a taut reel of black tape, incarcerated in a square black box. The artist's text explains that as his interpreter had not turned up for a lecture on 'Words and Wounds' by the deconstructionist Geoffrey Hartman, he sat and amused himself by studying the facial gestures of the author in the absence of the text. Hartman refused Grigely's request to skim through the manuscript of the lecture after its delivery, on the grounds that he didn't have time and that the book would be published soon anyway. Later, he was given a tape of the lecture in compensation, a tape which he would never be able to listen to without an interpreter. Grigely attributes the prudery of the deconstructionist with regard to the unpublished, uncopyrighted written word to a common fear of one's words being stolen and disseminated. A similar experience with the poet Marge Piercy is described as less surprising, presumably because poets do not make a career of deploring the phonocentrism of Western culture, and its debasement of all writing that does not present itself as a metaphor of speech. Piercy gives a different excuse: the words would no longer 'evaporate' if they were read from the manuscript. The black reel of tape, pinned like an ugly dead insect to its cardboard casing, provides its own ironic visual commentary on Piercy's apotheosis of the ethereal, evanescent voice.
Grigely has sympathy, however, for the reluctance of others to betray themselves by committing themselves to paper: after all, his own contributions, although intimate and whimsical upon actual reading, are iconically suggestive of shrewd guardedness beside the fragile, unprotected self-exposures of his interlocutors. The artist's 'voice' is carefully framed off from the chaos of the surrounding writings.
Some people, like his nine-year old friend Nadine, have an 'intuitive understanding that speech and writing are different', and take the time to talk with pictures as well as words. As a possible explanation for this tendency on the part of some people to supplement their writing with drawings, Grigely cites a story by Paul Auster, who missed an opportunity as a child to get the baseball player Willie Mays' autograph because he couldn't find a pencil: 'And that is how he became a writer: because, if you carry a pencil around with yourself so much, some day you will be tempted to use it.' But how does the story of how Auster became a writer explain for Grigely the phenomenon of the admixture of drawing and writing? The answer might be found in Jacques Derrida's reminder, in the context of Lévi-Strauss' dismissal of the writing attempts of the Nambikwara tribe, that the practice of 'drawing lines', is not so far removed as many would like to think from writing in its Western guise: 'As if "to write" in its metaphoric kernel, meant something else.'
Not only does his deafness provide Grigely with a sanctioned means of asking others to write their thoughts down, it also gives him an interesting perspective on contemporary theories of language. Exploiting these theories for their potential for play, and definitely not for their jargon, Grigely turns a keen sense of humour on the conventional hierarchical opposition between speech as life and lightness and writing as cumbersome dead-weight and speech-substitute. He reverses and subverts with aplomb, although always insisting on the irreducible difference between writing and speech. Similarly, in an essay accompanying the exhibition, he compares his deaf man's voice with the spelling mistakes in his interlocutors' writings: both are usually invisible signifiers of 'difference'. I found it exhilarating to see an artist engaging so unpretentiously, unobtrusively, and openly with current trends in theoretical discourse – trends which are themselves raising questions about the prestige of discourse with regard to the visible image. Grigely re-roots theories of transgression in everyday experience, re-appropriates them as enabling, subverting devices rather than treating them as obstacles or handicaps.
In a former essay of Grigely's, he argues for an understanding of the Peircian triad of icon, index and symbol as a non-hierarchical dynamic interplay instead of as a static system, as it is often – mistakenly – interpreted. Grigely's essay explicitly challenges the traditional opposition between painting as iconic and writing as arbitrary: the act of reading or viewing requires mobile frames of reference, he says.
The exhibition itself requires a considerable perceptual/conceptual mobility on the part of the viewer. The writings are both symbolic, in so far as they evoke conversations, and iconic, in so far as they are treated as portraits. In a third move, writing functions as an index, in that it points to the physical context and bodies involved in the exchange: 'I'm a smoking leather-wearing vitamin-eating scotch drinking vegatarian' (sic), or 'leg hairs'. Imprints of the body disrupt and resist any fixed opposition which might otherwise establish itself between writing as speech and writing as image. They point us elsewhere.
Indexicality is visually and symbolically thematised in 'Conversations and Portraits', suggesting the links between gesturing and deafness. Indicare, indicere: one of the 'conversations' on the wall is a Latin grammar class given by a priest – Grigely claims he was a poor student. A framed story tells how the artist explained to a man trying to sell him a suit on the street that he was not really a stockbroker type of guy. The man pointed up to the dusky city sky. At first, the artist was baffled by the gesture, 'but', the story ends, 'not for long'. Referred upwards thus by the narrative (is it part of the conversation piece or is it external to it? Or is it part of the frame?) to the single piece of paper it accompanies, the viewer reads the symbolic explanation of the visual gesture: 'Jesus will heal your ears'. The reference to Jesus, who performs symbolic, iconic and indexical functions in the Christian tradition, points irresistibly to the Christmas scene in the middle of the room, whose used cans and glasses themselves act as indexical signs of a party. The various icons of indexicality in the exhibition – the photographs of index fingers holding sharpened pencil tips, the 'Silver Eye' needles, pencils and green wine bottle on the central table, the pencils pointing upright in the cup beside the postcard stand, the postcard stand itself, the conical lamp on the table at the far wall – all of these are echoed and amplified by the supreme indexical icon: the giant Christmas tree. The indexicality of the tree does not take away from or dominate its iconic or symbolic status: it is simply another frame of reference, another way of approaching the visible trace.
Grigely's gift with words and for telling stories might be interpreted as playing a more prominent role in his exhibition than the visual aspect of his work: is he visual artist, storyteller, theorist, poet … or something else entirely? No definition is possible, and none, I suspect, is desirable.
Writing a postcard to an old friend to put in the mailbox before I left the gallery, I couldn't resist the temptation to illustrate it with childish doodles. Several hours later I realised with shame – my doodles were woeful – that my postcard, devoid of envelope, would have to be stamped and transported by hand to the nearest official mail box. That it could be read by anybody.
The moment passed.
A thought strikes me a day after writing this review. I go back to the exhibition with a friend. Sure enough, the items on the table betray more than the fact that a good party has taken place there – a fact which was always a fiction anyway.
We count the beer cans and wine glasses on the table: one wine glass and ten beer cans, one unopened, each bearing a logo of three intersecting circles. We have picked up the (metaphorical) thread and we follow. The pleasure of this ('Language is a lot like electricity', says the artist 'in' one of the other pieces). A 'Hard Rock Café' coupon offers to redeem a free souvenir. It blocks most of the words on the fragment below it, but it is to Joseph from Mary. There are references to Paul, to the 'new good collectors' at the synagogue, to teaching, to the musicians of the 'Holy Trinity D.C.', and so on. One paper, which I had read before but not like this, makes us both explode with laughter: 'It's just hard to be a rock star after say, 33'.
The rock icon (all those musical scores and references on the walls, the stars and flashing lights on the tree) betrayed by symbols (cymbals?). Commodity goods, gold and silver threads, eye of a needle (the rich stockbroker, good threads). Can't still life. Betrayal and redemption. Communicants. Birth, sex and the ferment, body and blood, death. Still life. Everything rhymes.
Or almost. Some of the words resist. And then there are the conical tubes of sticky looking coloured fluids, which may or may not be glue. References to a repulsive physicality abound, reminding the viewer that this is, after all, the remains of a feast: plastic biscuit wrappers, the 'Nutrional Facts' exposed on a crisp bag advertising full bold flavour, scribbled references to poor table manners, wicked acts, the cooking of a 'discusting' pot of mucus. The bodies of the people who sat here are absent, but their imprints remain, making our own flesh crawl. Is this consubstantiation for consumers?
Various arrow motifs, like the pointing fingers in Da Vinci's painting, are inscribed on papers as well as formed from bits and pieces on the table. They seem to point towards a scribbled message in the centre. Someone will be coming back at noon. The word 'o.k.' is encircled, followed by the words 'that's it!'
The exhibition ended on the evening of Holy Thursday.
Joseph Grigely, musician.
Maria Scott
Research student in the French department in Trinity College, Dublin.
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