Joyce Smithy: A Curated Review of Joyce in Visual Art, Music, and Performance (2016)

The JJQ's initiative to list works of visual art, performance, and music that reference James Joyce is necessary at a time when artists often view their work as an analytical practice. Our ambition is to feature Joyce-related art year by year.¹ In order for a work to make a contribution to the interpretation of Joyce—and Joyce to art/music/performance history—it is necessary to determine a level of ambition in the work that at least gestures towards that with which Joyce pursued his practice. We hope to provide Joyce scholars and students with explanatory and interpretive notes on work that they would not normally encounter. We welcome suggestions and submissions for consideration.²

Visual Art

Anna Lena Grau exhibited From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay at the Rehbein Galerie, Cologne, Germany.³ Ambivalence and changeability characterize her works: one finds a circular watercolor and a grid-like 3D structure with swirling shapes inside, made of bandages. Both combine looping, biomorphic shapes with geometrical form (a re-creation of a minimalist sculpture by Sol Lewitt but in turquoise, not white). The fact that one can turn the gridded cube renders this work not just a squaring of the circle á la the Euclidian diagram in Finnegans Wake but also an approximation of Joyce's turning sigla and a creation of visual portmanteau formulations. The watercolor circles embrace chance as John Cage did—not least in his responses to Joyce's circular novel. The exhibition title's Wake reference adds a useful lens, yet the writer's presence is mediated through previous interpreters and seems to look on at some remove, possibly paring his or her fingernails.

Another Joyce quotation, Modality of the Visible, served Michael Kane as the title for his retrospective at Dublin City's Hugh Lane Gallery.⁴ Work shown ranged from Expressionist-inspired woodcuts from the 1970s and 1980s to recent paintings of semi-abstract fields of color, often referencing houses, hoardings, and walls. The multi-stylistic diversity, even "generation gap" in the oeuvre, could have been seen as related to Ulysses. The museum's website uses both the title and Ulysses to stand in for Dublin.⁵ While Dublin can be found in the work, no interpretation of the writer seems to be attempted. Such a nod to canonical culture also seems to take precedence in Corita Kent's work (formerly Sister Corita), where quotations from Joyce among various sources are given a professional design treatment.⁶ The phrases take on the status of a kind of uplifting catechism—a Church-related activity toward which we know the writer had at least an ambivalent attitude. Thankfully, there are others who steer that course well, such as the following examples.

In 1965, Mary Ellen Bute made a Finnegans Wake film in 1965,⁷ and Michael Kvium and Christian Lemmerz created another in 2000.⁸ The latter project exists in different formats and contexts: as a multiscreen projection in a gallery or a single-screen showing, accompanying drinking and talking in a pub until the early hours. We are thus reminded that artists can be competent Joyce researchers.⁹ Jakub Wróblewski and Katarzyna Bazarnik's web-based Firstwefeelthenwefall project, launched at the 2016 London Joyce conference, is a highly ambitious collaboration among art, technology, and Joyce scholarship.¹⁰ Bazarnik was the author of the book Joyce and Liberature before collaborating with Wróblewski,¹¹ and the results of their interaction are, happily, at once solid and liberating: when previous projects placed (or had to place) more emphasis on faithful, linear "illustrations" of the Wake, in Firstwefeelthenwefall, the effect of the Wake is approximated. Working with extracts, evocatively read and sumptuously accompanied by images of very different origin, aesthetics, and proximity to the verbal material, Wróblewski and Bazarnik give the viewer as much freedom as possible through the latest web-based means, accessible to everyone with a computer. This liberty reflects the ways that words and images intersect, contradict each other, or cooperate...