Wordlessnessless of the miteneinander
Michael Joyce and Alexandra Grant
Transcription of collaborative talk with slides given at CalArts and Notre Dame's &Now Conference
March and April, 2004
Slide 1: Odyssey
Michael Joyce: The writer collaborating with the visual artist is nowadays so commonplace that its
repertoire of gestures seems clichéd, its vocabulary an echo. On the other hand it is nothing less than
an obvious and necessary recognition. In our time the image text is inextricably linked, the cupola only
a silence, sans and, slash or hyphen's stitch, an unvocalized breath. Image text.
Yet even this admission, this suture of exhalation in place of the explicit connection, seems an attempt
to rob the image syntactically. Image text hangs in the air (or ear) as a kind of text; and the inversion–
text image– only relocates the word from pleine air to the enframement.
What shall we do then when we have no choice but to fail? This, at least, is a shared advantage, a
shared vantage, of image and text alike and un-alike, different and differing. What we can do, all we
can ever do, is to parse the difference, not seeking the roots of difference but, Deleuzian Andalusian,
slicing the eyes of the rhizomic potato (a congenial image for an American-Irish yet probably too
fundamental, too loamy, for the everyday Deleuzian who thinks instead of gingerroots or dahlia's).
Slide 2: Drawing without paper, 2001
Alexandra Grant: As an artist, curator and writer, I have explored ideas of translation, identity, and
dis/location not only in drawings, sculptures and painting but also in conversations with other artists
and writers, such as poet Wislawa Szymborska and now with Michael Joyce. Having grown up in
Mexico, France, Spain and the United States-- multi-lingual not necessarily by choice but by
circumstance-- I am constantly engaged in investigations of translation not only from language to
language, but also from text to image, from spoken language to written words, from representations in
two dimensions to three dimensional objects. Naturally I find myself concerned with questions like:
how do we "read" and "write" art? How can I render in space the thought process? How does
language place us?
What brings me to this encounter is curiosity, which the dictionary definition qualifies as “a subjective
quality of people…having a wish to see or know; eager to learn, esp. about what doesn’t concern one;
inquisitive.” Perhaps the definition is apt, writing could be said not to concern me, yet here I am
talking about the relationship of image to text, and in particular my collaboration with a hypertext
author. My curiosity is about the role language plays in the causality of things and emotional states,
and in my own work: that text can be the score for an image, an image that is both a thing and
emotional state.
MJ: In recent years my artistic work has moved away from the field of electronic (hypertext) literature
out of concern for, and uneasiness with, the current state of such work in which the image has– as
admittedly it has sometimes previously in history– taken ascendancy over the word. Literary works
increasingly take on the guise of games or captioned interactive images and video. However what
brought me to computers and new media in the first place was my writing. I was and am a writer, albeit
one who wished to extend the scope of writing within a century-long tradition of subversion,
experimentation, and polyvocality. Mine was and is a longing for new being and new communities as
expressed– and often created by– new texts. Thus, while continuing to write "traditional" fiction for the
page, and doing research and teaching which critically considers hypertext and new media, I have
also engaged in a series of collaborative media projects which investigate the continuity of literary text
in a networked world. These projects for me describe a continuum of resistance to diminution of the
word, seeking instead to situate it as central to a kind of interactive work concerned with human
presence, embodiment, and continuity.
Slide 3: Palimpsest (Pink), 1999
AG: My interests echo Michael’s, though from a different side of the image-text looking glass. I am an
artist, chiefly a painter, whose concern is primarily with expanding the scope of painting….
Reading led me to the problem I wanted to engage, the query that would stimulate my work from both
aesthetic and noetic ends - that of the artist/writer, the problem of the image/text.
My recent work “drawings without paper” as well as this collaboration both developed out of a visual
language that began in work like this Palimpsest (Pink),1999-- work which mapped and parsed poetry,
found text and my own thoughts in reticulated forms across the surface of the canvas. The
diagramming of language helped me find a “space” that was both and between words and images.
Slide 4: Ithaka, after C.P. Cavafy, 2003
AG: “L’eclat de l’etre,” Helene Cixous calls it. “Toujours l’eclat de l’etre qui me donne le la.” It is
always the thunder of being that gives me the “here,” the middle C….
In Cixous I found a conspirator. Reading every word she wrote about trying to create a
language/place that was big enough for her world view, I breathed a sigh of relief. That is what a
conspirator is: from the Latin con-, with, and spirare, to breathe.
Slide 5: Ithaka, detail
AG: “I have no roots…. no legitimate tongue," Cixous wrote, "In German I sing; in English I disguise
myself; in French je vole [I fly/thieve]. On what would I base a text?” Reading her I allowed myself this
breath of freedom, to pun, to trip, to live….
Slide 6: Gego, Reticularea, 1977
AG: Years ago traveling for the first time to Caracas, Venezuela, I encountered the work of Gertrudis
Goldschmidt, known in Spanish as “Gego.” Here was another woman, Jewish, from Germany, who
had translated herself to a new continent, a new language, a new culture, and from architecture, to
become one of the most inventive sculptors of the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Her Reticularea, shown here, is
her ‘obra maestra’. Taking the idea of the grid, and introducing ‘accidents’ to its rigid geometry, she
transformed space into a constellation of points, all joined by a fragile wire lattice.
Gego also constructed many “dibujos sin papel” or drawings without paper out of wire, hanging them
against the wall to cast a drawing in shadow.
Slide 7: Reach (after Michael Joyce), 2003
MJ: Alexandra found me on that limitless, yet heavily encoded, map wherein we often find ourselves
these days, Google. "I am currently putting together a small exhibition on domesticity," she wrote "and
through Google found your poem 'domesticity' on-line…I was wondering whether you would allow me
to use your poem in a sculpture or drawing, and perhaps even reproduce it... My gallery work, in
contrast to yours, seems a wire-based analog or model of hyper-text." I heard next from her in August
as I was sitting in a steaming room in Italy checking email. What she described was again a map and a
set of encoded transformations.
Slide 8: Reach, detail
AG: I startled onto Michael’s reach from googling the word “domesticity.” That small link, that word,
transported me not to images of women and irons or the cult of, but into a new terrain, a new space, a
time that slid in waves backwards and forwards. I knew this writing was the basis of my next work. If I
was an actor who had been developing my craft , then I found the writer, the play, the filmscript, from
which to play to my gifts.
I wove the initial piece, Reach, in orange wire and then installed it on a blank wall in my studio. I
traced the shadow in pencil and colored pencil, reds and yellows emanating out from the original
words chains, increasingly unreadable and pattern-like. I thought that if I could show the affect of
language in the same way that water droplets wave out from the center of their “splash” – I could give
the words “waves” in the form of topographical lines. I wrote Michael : “In rereading your work, I could
not get over the fact that your description - of a topography - could describe what I am doing in
drawing."
Slide 9: “In Def” Reach Screen
MJ: The description of topography Alexandra had in mind, I believe, was a brief paragraph which
follows a set of dictionary definitions and etymologies of the word, "reach," in the single space entitled
"By def," which stands (by color and location) as a preface to that work: "The principle of composition
here is topological. Once the first screen was laid out with successive spaces placed by chance and
opportunity both, the successive edges and accumulations formed from spaces added in some sense
in response to the proximate edges. The motive something of a conversation with the nearest edges
and the emerging center alike."
Slide 10: # Drawing without paper (after W.S.), 2001
MJ: Alexandra and I have only just begun work on a series of collaborative text-image artworks called
"indécritions," which examine the flow from image to text and vice-versa, looking at ideas of coding,
correspondences, and the like. Indécritions takes its name from a punning backformation in the
manner of Cixous, who has influenced us both. The layered French/English pun indécritions plays
upon the notions of unwriting and undrawing alike. Given its suggestion of indiscretion and the
indiscrete, we believe that calling our work indécritions also casts a sly look at what any collaboration
between a man and a woman becomes almost despite them.
In practice the indécritions series means to explore a set of transformations and additions which
involve both seeing each other and seeing through each other in words and images, where seeing-
through has the double sense of lens and persistence. Working from and with texts of mine created in
response to visual works of Alexandra's, we mean to explore illustration as a (paradoxical) kind of
shadowing which un-writes, impinges to the point of erasure, takes the focus, even washes out
shadows themselves (canceling them in the way of light on light, word on word). Our works explore
such alternating and inverted relations as a kind of coding, within which words are in a constant
process of oscillation, the word becoming the medium against which the illustration is written and vice
versa. We intend to explore the coded technologies of the word and image whose ghost formations
and transformations (for which perhaps Photoshop layers and filters stand as metaphor) have in our
time become both a cultural ideology and an increasingly naturalized understanding of human
perception.
Slide 11: Light In This New York Twilight, 2003
AG: I do not use my own writing as a script, or score, for my artwork because I believe that would
short-circuit the system; or even more defeatingly, would make my work only models of my own short-
circuited imagination. I do write, but I do not consider my journals or poems to be suited to be scores
– there are texts and there are poetic texts. However, I do keep visual journals – drawing helps me
listen. These are notes, fleeting thoughts – where line flitters between word and drawing.
I have made work using Michael’s texts as scores, and conversely, Michael has written text based on
my drawings. Here is one of our first “reverse collaborations”: Light In This New York Twilight.
"We had it all backwards and that made it more interesting. Or so we thought. We met in dreams, or
so she said. I used to imagine she was untrue to me, shielding someone there in the hollow she
cradled beyond the soft hills of her vertebrae, a child for instance or a postcard of a second rate
superhero from a classic comic book."
MJ: The other who is ourselves is whom we are looking for, the person who is present beneath the
word or image. We want to know our own names. "There is in the human mind a craving after
etymology," Max Müller wrote, "a wish to find out, by fair means or foul, why such a thing should be
called by such a name." But knowing the name we have not found the face for the other we are. The
word and image, name and visage, need each other, even as they are destined– in time and by time–
to fail each other. "Language as saying is an ethical openness to the other," the philosopher Levinas
says, preferring the saying over the said, the craving over the naming.
Slide 12: Lentement, 2004
AG: "Lentement the plock, the smooth stones tossed into echoing canyons, less attention paid to the
erasure, sailor lost, sonogram, a calm smoothing over where the fingertips, slow, first alight in the
caress, like seabirds touching down on the shifting surface."
MJ: The visual image offers a frictionless resistance to fixedness, a timeless presence which
insistently peels back the rose to the bud form of what in a long ago image on a lost homepage of
mine I called our wordlessnessless. In the face of Lessing's famous distinction between the visual arts
and poetry in Laocoön, where he suggests that for poetry "the action is visible and progressive, its
different parts occurring one after the other (nacheinander) in a sequence of time," while for the
visual arts "the action is visible and stationary, its different parts developing in co-existence
(nebeneinander) in space"; we now find ourselves in a simultaneity which becomes a constant
singularity– wherein repeatedly appears as differently. Simultaneously called to-- and drawn to-- each
other we enter into an undrawing which writes us in.
Slide 13: Domesticity (after H.C.), 2004
MJ: Presence presents itself not in what we see or how we say what we think to see but in the
leaning toward, the reach, the deepening effort, the relation of moment to afterward and after word.
This is the present intimacy we seek in our indécritions, a miteneinander, the openness of being one
with another, the after word which puts us before what we see presently.
Slide 14: A Layer of Tracing Paper, 2004
[Alternating lines with images of Nimbus, 2004]
AG: I lay a placer of original text above your tracing paper, sorry. I
MJ: Illustration as light upon the shadow of adumbration? So be it. My
AG: placed a layer of tracing paper above it, concatenating
MJ: first reaction was a resistance, the one against beauty, whether in my
AG: words......I traced a saying of concatenation upon the uneven
MJ: own in writing or the beauty of pastel illustration. Then I began to
AG: light of your words. Worry about the uneventful words of my
MJ: think that, if a score, it is not for me to name the playing. If there is a
AG: imagination. Could we? Your original text displayed my uneven
MJ: shade, then cast whatever light upon it (especially given the erotic
AG: image Above it I placed my sorrow about the image of the
MJ: fable wherein the woman shields light, holds it to her beyond the soft
AG: uneven lighting and spaced a tracer over her head. We
MJ: hills of herself, the pattern of the morning bedsheets illustration,
AG: could display your original text? Cat and mouse words,
MJ: labanotation, dreams of dancing with(in) ourselves).
AG: catamount to nothing, but wonder would you could we
Final Slide: Helene Cixous Questions from the Dernier Caravanserail Program