Visual voices - the use of writing in the works of artists Sean Landers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Grigely

Art in America, April, 1996 by Raphael Rubinstein

As one is exposed to more of Grigely's work, with its myriad human scrawls and signatures occasioned by the artist's activities, there gradually arises a global vision of the human rage for communication, our need, using any means, however faulty, to trade words. Through the lucid, empathetic, transforming process of Grigely's arrangements and narratives, even a page of faltering, obliterated words like the pathetic document in (Panhandler) takes on a resonant, expressive power.

The conjunction of two pieces of paper in (Panhandler) is quite different from works like the 1995 installation Lo Studio/The Study Grigely did for the "Transculture" exhibition at last year's Venice Biennale. There, several large tables and desks were covered with what initially seemed like a scattering of papers, with framed texts holding groups of them down like paperweights. The apparent chaos extended to sheets of paper littering the floor or overflowing from nearby wastebaskets. It's important to realize that Grigely's messy desk installations, which he carefully orchestrates, are not simply replays of scatter art but his fullest attempt to render the complexities of human conversation.

In works like this Grigely is clearly creating "hypertext," using not a computer but the simplest of materials--handwritten notes, printed texts in inexpensive black frames, a few sticks of furniture. His installations are hypertextual because they refuse linearity, instead offering the viewer/reader a multitude of paths toward meaning. It's possible to move from commentary to note, and from one note to another, in whatever sequence your eyes and curiosity lead you. The textual order of the work is also reconfigured when elements from the installations reappear, with a new context, as pages in the artist's catalogue and book projects. A conventional book could never contain all the permutations of Grigely's writerly oeuvre.

In addition to chronicling the exchanges between the hearing and the nonhearing, the Venice installation touched on differences of culture and language. Among the multilingual notes, one desktop array of papers addressed the difficulties Grigely encounters lipreading in foreign countries where he's not sure what language people are speaking. Venice, with its international hordes of tourists, was especially challenging. In another text in Lo Studio/The Study--one of the few passages of narrative without an accompanying handwritten document--Grigely recounted visiting relatives in Sicily where he met an Italian who happened to be deaf. Grigely writes that

using sign language--Toto's Italian Sign Language, and my American Sign Language--we talked, and talked, and talked. Neither language is in a strict sense mutually intelligible, but because both share a common and recent etymological origin--French Sign Language--we were still able to find enough cognate signs to have a good conversation. It felt a little strange to be situated in southern Italy and to find another deaf person who knew sign language, but in retrospect it wasn't strange at all: deafness isn't "visible," so we're not always aware there are deaf people near us, even if they're standing right beside us. I don't have any inscribed conversations from my time with Toto--neither of us, for obvious reasons, had any need to write.