Lerm Hayes, Christa-Maria

English

This was first time a delegate from the UK or Ireland spoke at a conference organized by UNESCO's International Council of Museums, sub-group Literary Exhibitions.I took the opportunity to speak about the strengths of Irish literature and the relative underdevelopment of the literary museum sector here.The form of the mobile museum, developed by such groups as Art and Research Exchange, Belfast, or Joseph Beuys' Office for Direct Democracy. These ideas appeared as new and creative.ICLM members agreed to come to my IAWIS conference, further opportunities arose

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Peripatetic Joyce – Peripatetic Joyce “Museums”Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, University of UlsterHow does one remember (even honour) writers if they travelled or emigrated, due to an antagonism with one’s ancestors’ values; if the writers’ home countries censored them, stifled them and drove them away?Irish writers are internationally known, but Ireland’s centuries-long economic brain drain and its once restrictive Catholic mores have much to answer for in providing creative people something to write and create against – often from afar. In comparison with (Central) European cultures, writers and artists were not so much enlisted in forging the Irish nation (the exception would be W.B.Yeats), but marginalized, as the Church had taken up the role of nation builder. It may be a sign of the risen but now again faltering self-consciousness of the cultural establishment in Ireland that Dublin is applying for UNESCO city of literature status. I hope this bid will be successful. Indeed, Dublin has much to celebrate: James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and others – all of whom left in order to excel.It seems to be necessary to reflect critically and humbly on the changes that the country has undergone – and it is a possibility that celebrating these literary emigrants could provide an excellent opportunity to educate the public in matters of tolerance, not glossing over that not all has been sustainably achieved and that there may still be reasons for creative people to leave.How does one convey such subtle messages? What is the state of play in terms of honouring or exhibiting these canonical Irish writers? The writer’s house or museum does not have such a long tradition in Ireland, despite the well-known Grand Tour pattern among not only the English-, but also Irish-based ascendency, which established the success of the writer’s museum model on the Continent. There is nothing like a Goethe House that has remained intact since a writer lived there. There is an Irish Writers’ museum in Dublin that follows the traditional pattern of literary museums, showing first editions, memorabilia and portraits. It is a quaint museum, whose café is well visited, but which does not set itself the task of addressing the peripatetic nature of its subjects, let alone reflect on the critical points just raised.There is a Joyce centre, housed in a building that once belonged to a dancing teacher, whose name appears in passing in Ulysses, and a Joyce Tower, which is the setting of the beginning of Ulysses in a beauty spot outside Dublin, Sandycove. This follows the Writers’ Museum’s approach, and they are jointly directed and funded by Dublin Tourism. Some of the houses that Joyce occupied in Dublin bear plaques and Dublin’s streets have brass quotations set into the pavement. They may reflect Joyce’s own conventional taste in visual matters, but have nothing to do with the Modernist achievements of his works. If this is what commemorating Joyce looks like, it may not be such a bad thing not to have a “Joyce museum”. What seems to be more relevant – and valued in Ireland - is scholarship: a new research centre and an established Summer School (both run by Joyce’s alma mater, UCD). There is living space for exchange, hosting lectures and holding what would otherwise be displayed in a vitrine as usable foundations of new scholarship and appreciation. This may, indeed, keep a peripatetic writer’s legacy alive in a more meaningful way.Joyce, who has spent almost all of his adult life in European cities (Trieste, Zurich, Paris) and who was a formidable iconoclast, whose influence on scholarship, theories of migration, displacement, post-colonialism et al. far outweighs the visual interest of the memorabilia one could look at in say the Joyce tower: the Zurich Joyce Foundation is the world’s foremost research centre in Joycean matters. There are, of course, regular Summer Schools and international symposia outside Dublin, too.Wilde and Beckett seem to follow the pattern: Trinity College sports a Beckett theatre and archive, and Oscar Wilde’s parents’ house is the American College in Dublin, although the Wilde world is held together by Paris-based scholars who run the Oscholars website.But is all well when considering the representation – visual or otherwise – of Joyce as an emigrant writer, who commemorated a Dublin that is far from the Celtic Tiger one visible today? When in Dublin, the local references invariably gain the upper hand when dealing with Joyce and his European modernist or proto-post-modernist, even post-colonial credentials are easily forgotten. To the Dublin tourist today, he may as well never have left. The impression of rootedness that any Dublin display of Joyceana gives has to be misleading.To show artists and their works then has certain advantages over literary museums with permanent displays. When on their “pilgrimages” to the Joyce tower, artists have for a long time felt compelled to perform this space as though it was a museum. Joseph Beuys performed in his own “tower” below “the” tower. Gary Coyle through almost daily swims, documented through photographs of the surface of the water renders himself as a sea-bound Odysseus,​[1]​ transposing what Joyce had displaced onto land, the cityscape of Dublin, back into the water. The literary space of the site indeed functions as a museum, demanding a similar level of attention to the auratic gallery space, while the inside with its porcelain panther standing in for a scary, fictional dream appearance overdoes it, becomes comical. The auratic literary space is what Christo and Jeanne Claude wished to capitalize on when they proposed in the late 1970s to wrap the walkways of St Stephen’s Green, which Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus called “his” green. This proposal was not understood locally and was never executed.The temporary, fleeting and ephemeral strategies of artists seem to match well the peripatetic lifestyle of the writer himself. They also manage to abstract from the hyper-realism of finding oneself in the very spaces that Joyce described so realistically and let one remember that the writer employed his “realism” to larger ends – as one would now say: conceptually. In fact, contemporary art with its inherent critical trajectory (Rancière), very well matches the critical work by Joyce, Beckett and other emigrants.Considering then that Joyce developed through his works concepts of the permanence of change and the void, it is almost possible to interpret positively what would otherwise be a mere scandal: the most evocative house of Irish literature, what would have had the potential to become the world’s foremost literary museum, 7 Eccles Street, the home of the Blooms in Ulysses, was demolished in 1982, the centenary year of the writer’s birth. Every other space (including the tower) is second best. If the literary or writer’s house model is thus rendered impossible – who can then (if not Dublin City Council or the Irish Government) and how can they credibly represent the writer and the patchy history of his legacy?James Coleman, who has spent some decades in Italy, to where Joyce had emigrated half a century earlier, created an incisive work, his Ulysses Project, 1982. He consulted the language of flowers (appropriately following in Leopold Bloom’s footsteps) and attached a wreath of Xeranthemum to the then bricked-up door of 7 Eccles Street. The plant means “cheerfulness under adversity”.​[2]​ A silver cast of such a wreath was placed in the small centenary exhibition at a local gallery.When I asked James Coleman to contribute to my Joyce in Art exhibition in 2004, he accepted and was allocated the second-largest room at the Royal Hibernian Academy, together with the approaching corridor, which he had blacked out. He took the silver cast and mounted it onto a tinted Perspex pane that blocked the entrance to the room. This room he left empty: 7 Eccles Street is no more; the void in the centre of the show was a scathing political commentary, but also a very apt one. The void points to Joyce’s work in several ways, including how he places the reader’s activity at the centre and how he has also been a great disabler, a nuisance and inhibiter of artwork, owing to his exacting standards and the impression that reading his work left with artists like John Cage: he could not become a writer, but turned to music and visual art, as Joyce had already done it all.In contemporary art, Modernist megalomania, certainly the canon has been contested. Artists have turned instead – again to Joyce, who is in this sense a very exceptional canonical / anti-canonical writer: he does not come in a chocolate box. With his ever-changing, scavenging styles or identities and emigrant, marginalized, censored existence artists sympathize. They consider the small, daily miracles that Joyce’s epiphanies capture and his linguistic wit as something to aspire to in what is now called “relational aesthetics”.Within this current, broad movement, artists are more humble than Joyce may have been, but the themes are again his: human displacement, compassion, hospitality and relationships. Finnegans Wake calls for reading groups (as we need the background and experiences of our fellow human beings – as diverse a group as possible – in order to make any sense of the over 40 languages employed and various areas of knowledge that Joyce used).The reading group has become an artistic format, just as the guided tour has (with Andrea Fraser as the most prominent exponent). In terms of the time-bound nature of reading and its linearity, the walk is another form congenial to literary themes. Walking in a group of like-minded people can prompt one to trace important, mobile trajectories of literature like the journey of the characters in the various chapters of Ulysses. (Joycean walks can even reference his penchant for circularity).Conor McGarrigle has traced on the Google earth map of Dublin where characters in Ulysses walk – and he invites international art audiences (he hasn’t had much luck with Joyce scholars as yet) in re-tracing these Dublin routes, super-imposed onto the maps of any city. It is collaborative work that he asks his “participants” to document. The conversations and relationships developing on these walks are – as in Ulysses – of more immediate interest than the topography per se; “correspondences” to Ulysses when found are intriguing and inevitable.One may create virtual walks or cycles through letters like Jeffrey Shaw has done in a Joycean spirit, but such new media interactivity only goes so far, often excluding first-hand relationships. Tim Rollins created with his students, the “kids of survival”, a long term collaborative project, begun with youths in the Bronx in New York in the early 1980s. They read canonical texts and discuss and visually comment on what it is that these texts still have to give to the participants in what only superficially seems to be an entirely different context to e.g. Shakespeare. Here, the collaborative nature of the work and the writers’ canonicity generate empowerment – and art that in exhibition adds yet another social and spatial context.To the reading group, guided tour and literary walk as forms that aptly echo the temporal nature of reading, I here wish to add two more artistic methodologies that seem to answer to the problem of representing the peripatetic writer: the bookshop and the format of the art exhibition itself. If writers travel, so do books as mass-produced objects. For some time now, art exhibitions have included bookshops, either designed by artists like Franz West, or as curatorial interventions, showcasing artists’ publications and small art publishers’ outputs (Revolver at Manifesta 4). I can imagine this to extend to literature, as it appeared in another art strategy, that of Simon Morris, who asked artists for bibliographies of their libraries. These selections were then recreated and exhibited in bookshops rather than museums. Ulysses features Leopold Bloom browsing in a temporary, i.e. travelling book stall in Merchants’ Arch in Dublin. Should one contemplate book stall exhibitions in public spaces to answer to the travelling writer?The art exhibition format itself showcases works that travel and thus correspond to, as well as generate theories or concepts – Travelling Concepts is the title of Mieke Bal’s book that theorizes trans-disciplinary application of theories, the journeys of concepts from one discipline to another. The Mobile Museum strategy has been devised by curators for many purposes: to engage with peripatetic writers could be one of its uses.​[3]​Travel is a potent image for – almost a synonym of – legacy. It seems to me that it is not by chance that one writer’s museum that focuses on the travels of an author, the Casa Goethe in Rome, does tell the story of Goethe’s Italian exploits, and while it has the work of Winckelmann, who accompanied the writer in Italy on display, the focus are the travels of Goethe’s works through time and into art: a collection featuring Warhol’s Goethe portrait, as well as – of course – travelling exhibitions, where the works come together from all directions for a short while, are joined by their audiences and then all disperse – in true Deleuze and Guattari fashion. In fact the temporal coming together of rhizomatic elements (works, themes, characters) forming plateaux is a format whose political implications very well correspond to – almost solve the difficulties first outlined in celebrating a peripatetic writer in the place he or she left – or in fact in any institution. Collaborative, temporal solutions are called for: something that is very much current in art.I would like to close by introducing to you the work of the young Swiss artist Davide Cascio. His Space for Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses from 2004 borrows as much as the writer did: from Leonardo da Vinci, le Corbusier, Islamic and Jewish mysticism, anthroposophy (where it is important that thought here bounces freely back and forth) and contemporary kitsch visual culture with artificial flowers in the corners, as well as the neon works of Dan Falvin, who was himself interested in Joyce.The work is a temporary one that travels from exhibition to exhibition and invites the audience to use it, to engage and to read – alone, or ideally in a group. It is intimate, allows the concentration of reading and simultaneously reaches out to different times and spaces. It thus carries out what Joyce’s text itself demands, but for which it needs initiative and facilitation, as in Conor McGarrigle’s walks. Joyce explained his use of Homer as scaffolding for Ulysses. Here, Cascio, using scaffolding, highlights the temporary, constructed nature of all our endeavours at reading and interpreting. I like to think of this work as a transitory home for the peripatetic writer.PostscriptThe above observations were, as was probably evident, coloured by my own personal history of growing up with (in fact in) Goethe museums in East Germany, where the canon was read for its liberating potential. As an art historian I was then working on artists who have been critically empowered if not liberated by their reading of Joyce. In this, I was – very surprisingly for me – met in Ireland with the assumption that working on Joyce meant to feed the tribute industry. I am now heartened by the growth in interest of artists – and institutions exhibiting their work – in new, institutionally critical, liberating cross-overs between literature, literary spaces, art practice and hybrid exhibitions. This was one of the starting points for the IAWIS (International Association of Word and Image Studies) and ICOM conference “Displaying Word and Image”, Belfast 4-6 June 2010, with WJT Mitchell as the keynote speaker. It was conceived as a forum for ICLM interests to meet with IAWIS (International Association of Word and Image Studies) constituencies, as well as artists and curators.​[4]​PAGE  1^1	  http://www.goethe.de/ges/eur/prj/ody/ie/en2175469.htm^2	  For details on this work and others in this context, see: Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes. Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce. Foreword: Fritz Senn, envoi: James Elkins, design: Ecke Bonk. The Lilliput Press Dublin 2004.^3	  Deru Simic, Ljiljana (2003), What is Specific about Art/Cultural Projects? (July 2003). FEEM Working Paper No. 71.2003. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=463360 (accessed June 2007).^4	  Publications (and a meta-exhibition) arising from this very successful conference are planned.

"Peripatetic Joyce - Peripatetic Joyce 'Museums'"

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"Peripatetic Joyce - Peripatetic Joyce 'Museums'"

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