Joyce Smithy: A Curated Review of James Joyce in Visual Art, Music, and Performance—Community and Elusive Understandings

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. The 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 important to ascertain 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, and we welcome hints and submissions for consideration.²

Visual Art

Considerations of Joyce's works in relationship to the visual domain and art's relationship to Joyce's literature are ever more present at Joyce symposia, which have become exhibition venues, and around significant dates and Joycean places. In the last installment of the "Smithy," I focused on the community-forging or collaborative creativity that reading Joyce appears to conjure. This time, I wish to highlight a dichotomy between more traditional illustrative responses and attempts to transcend these.

Recently, on 4 May 2019, Finnegans Wake's eightieth birthday was celebrated, and Judith Wilkinson, an art writer and curator, took the lead in London by tweeting a best-of list of ten artworks (visual and otherwise) relating to Joyce and Finnegans Wake in particular (<@J_Wilkinson_Art>). Bloomsday makes one expect to see Joyce-related artwork in Dublin. The culinary theme chosen by the Joyce Centre this year, led the near-by Oliver Cornet Gallery (beside Belvedere College) to exhibit work under the title "Olives, Oysters & Oranges." A strange mixture ensued between interpreting the fruity theme erotically and a beautiful, dry, and utterly relevant series of head-sized "portraits" of one of Ulysses's characters: the humble spud, with watercolors by Eoin Mac Lochlainn.

Odd juxtapositions and mixtures are what Joyce seems to be about: the multi-stylistic nature of Ulysses and the multi-lingual makeup of the Wake. How conscious, however, should one be of such approaches?

Krzysztof Bartnicki's various "translations" of Finnegans Wake continue—and this time he has transposed the first page of the book into hieroglyphics.³ He seems to say that it is, has, or should take a hybrid form, between word and image, possibly thinking of the sigla "hieroglyphics" that Joyce himself used for the conception of the Wake's characters. The difficult or undecipherable element is also discussed.

Most artists approaching Joyce, however—or most who align their work clearly with the writer—seem to take a uni-dimensional approach. Carol Wade, one of the artists speaking at the 2019 Mexican Joyce Symposium "Joyce Without Borders," has created page-by-page illustrations of Finnegans Wake, which unearth Irish historical detail and hone in on figuratively rendered motifs, in order to "help Finnegans Wake be … read by a wide audience."⁴ Alfonso Zapico, a comic writer, has done a similar thing in James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner, highlighting period detail via the aesthetics of a contemporary children's book illustration.⁵ One would expect this more readily in a comic format than in what used to be called "fine art." In any case, what concerns me about Wade's work is that she finds a microscopic perspective a valid approach to how the thunderwords were printed and has enlarged these, as though William Anastasi's Bababad series of paintings—which had already done that in the 1980s—were unknown in either the Joyce or the art communities.⁶ There is to me a difference between not knowing about the earlier iterations and Wade's comment in her talk that she enjoys Finnegans Wake "like an Italian opera": Wade's or Zapico's nearly uniform style appears to me to mistake visual or figurative identifiability for broad accessibility, as though there was a "neutral" style involved—this is a concept that Joyce...