Joyce in Art
Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce
Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria
Catalogue edited for the exhibition
(ISBN: 1 84351 052 9
Versions: pb 285 x 240mm/240pp
Publication Date: June 2004)
Joyce in Art accompanies the exhibition of the same title (at the RHA in Dublin), curated by the author for 16 June 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday. It is the first historical account of visual art inspired by James Joyce …
(page 67) Responding to Joyce´s viewer-activating prose in Ulysses, Gereon Inger created a set of 95 rubber stamps in 1994. They come in a box with nine inkpads and can be applied to a copy of Ulysses or to any other surface. The motifs are Inger´s own drawings, images from the turn of the nineteenth century, or what he calls
underhand picture citations. They were chosen to visualize on the one hand the wandering of leitmotivs, on the other hand, remain, however, so universal that they are usable for letters, pictures, graffiti and every other remaining book.
One acquires a good piece from the picture inventory which Joyce has picked up in his world – to gloss book and world with it again.
The works playful and humorous aspects are in keeping with Joyce´s practice, as is the irreverent use of sources. Both hope to provide enjoyment through understanding and active engagement. Inger has evaded many pitfalls of illustration and created a work that is furthermore art-historically evocative – as a commentary on Saul Steinberg´s stamps, fluxus boxes and Duchamp´s boite-en-valise to which miniature works of art inevitably refer. The Conceptual, post-Duchampian aspects also create a witty tension with realistic, motif-centred images on the stamps.
(p163f) Gereon Inger´s Finnegans Fake, 1994, seems to make a similar point. The artist says – similar to John Cage´s motivation for his Writing through work – that he cannot read Finnegans Wake, only copy it. Just as medieval scribes, mistakes are impossible to be avoided in Inger´s painstaking miniature work, whose outline takes the shape of Dublin Bay: on four hinged panels of a screen – hence Finnegans Fake.
(p168) John Cage This reminder of earlier discussions brings the present chapter to the typographical work on Joyce that is best known: John
Cage`s repeated Writings Through Finnegans Wake. Cage, as both a composer and a visual artist, was inspirational for many Conceptual and
Fluxus artists. That work helped Cage to muster up the discipline to read
the work in a way similar to Gereon Ingers stated experience and how, I argue, Beuys also used his Ulysses-Extension. The Writings Through Finnegans Wake take on the form of poetry or the understated typographical elegance of the textual manifestations of much Conceptual art.
(p231) More pertinent is another related aspect, one that has been alluded to when dealing with typography: the time that writing takes. Gereon Inger, Jean Willi and On Kawara could be cited. Hanne Darboven’s practice of filling walls with hand-written sheets in diary format and the like has been interpreted with reference to Joyce’s lingualization and extualization of language in Ulysses. However, by far the most uggestive and inspiring element for artists working on Joyce and time is his Manipulation of it. When in Our Exagmination, Marcel Brion writes about „The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce“, he states „one of Bloom’s minutes might have filled a library. This is the mystery of relativity of time.“ Contemporary physical and mathematical worldviews in relation to this theme should be explored at a later stage.
(p238) Matisse/Macy and Robert Motherwell with their lavish illustrations, Susan Weil, Mimmo Paladino, Gereon Inger, Verena Schindler and Paul Heimbach have created book objects on Joyce, which have been discussed under various topics. They already present a wide range of approaches to the book in Joyces wake. Susan Weil’s square „frames“ for Brideship and Gulls and cut-out pages in object shape for The Epiphanies, 1987, and Giacomo Joyce, 1989, are bibliophile gems published by Vincent Fitzgerald. Sandymount Strand should also be mentioned in this context, a collaboration between Felim Egan, Seamus Heaney and A. R. Penck with the Kaldewey Press. It is a book of circular shape, bound in green calf leather, which includes some passages from „Proteus“. All the participants live on Strand Road, Sandymount and are aware of treading Joycean ground.
(p293) He has continued to work in a quasi scholarly and simultane-ously cartoon- and popular culture-inspired manner. His The Ondt and the Gracehoper and Wather Parted From the Say, 1997, are two „Little Picture Book[s] of Rhymes from the Pages of Finnegans Wake“, augmented by an exuberant array of stickers which brings to mind Gereon Inger’s stamps on Ulysses.
(Fußnote zu 275 -87) (16) It may be symptomatic that two Joyce-inspired artists have elevated the drip-cloth or drip-sheet that by-product of artistic creativity, to works in themselves: Gereon Inger used them for his Finnegans Fake rewriting and presents them alongside as drawings, and Jürgen Partenheimer bound their text-like fragments into a book object, 1980.