Small Talk

And besides, the last word is not said - probably never shall be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Joseph Grigely is occupied with the gentle art of conversation. He talks to people, they talk to him, and he preserves the exchanges. An inconspicuous art, it risks being swamped in our high volume world with its ever proliferating modes of communication. The power of Grigely's work lies sotto voce - literally, below the voice.

Artists before Grigely have tried to counter the muteness of the art object through direct methods of communication. On Kawara's gloomily existential communiqués, Douglas Gordon's mystifying mailshots... the epistolary genre, with its one-sided outpourings, is tinged with a neo-romantic sense of the artist's solitude. Grigely's work is more sociable, for there are always two parties to the conversation.

The substance of his work is the dialogues he has with others in the form of notes scribbled on pieces of paper: he talks, they write back to him. Grigely has been totally deaf since childhood. What started as a practical method of bridging the two worlds of sound and silence has evolved into an artistic testament to the enduring human will to communicate. Examined individually, his Conversations with the Hearing can be deeply poetic ('Speech', reads one, 'is shaped breath'), frustratingly fragmented ('I think the suburbs are a little erotic. sshh! people are listening'), and numbingly banal. But Grigely is drawn to the ordinary, fascinated that someone wrote 'bye, bye', 'because it's something you don't need to write down, and the compulsion to do so is what holds the mystery of it all'. He gathers the Conversations into different works. Sometimes they are presented alone; sometimes qualified by Grigely's anecdotal 'editor's notes' telling us where and how the particular conversation occurred; and sometimes, as with the piece Lo Studio/The Study (1995), amassed inside layered installations which replicate places where verbal exchanges have, may, or will occur - the scholar's study, the artist's studio, the restaurant, the meal table. Here the Conversations jostle with everyday ephemera: a work, like a life, in continual progress.

Grigely's dramatic protocol touches on a range of literary forms: the musing recollection, the touching anecdote, the historical archive 1 - also, once, the epistolary form, in a work consisting of 35 letters called Postcards to Sophie Calle. Prompted by Calle's photo-text work Les Aveugles, Grigely offers a gentle but trenchant critique of Calle's use of blind subjects to lay down his own thoughts about the visualisation of difference and disability. The correspondence ends with the words: 'Perhaps, Sophie, you might someday return what you have taken, might someday undress your psyche in a room frequented by the blind and let them run their fingers over your body as you have run your eyes over them. Yours, Joseph.'

Classic doctrine has it that speech is what divides humans from the silence of plants and the inchoate utterings of animals. From Aristotle to Derrida, speech has always enjoyed a special esteem in Western thought above and beyond its close relative, writing. For writing, and the novel in particular, begat the solitary individual and the fragility of mutual comprehension between author and reader. Text, a silent, printed, object, is lifeless and culturally processed: the voice, on the other hand, is spontaneous and instantly clear about its source and subjects. Speech shares in the actuality of an event, while writing is a mere substitute for it.

In Grigely's Conversations though, these easy distinctions wither away, since they are both speech and writing. Speech, because they necessarily occur in real time, between two people, and thus forcefully dramatise the presence of both speaker and listener (or interlocutor and writer). But, like writing, and unlike speech - which dies as soon as it is spoken - they are committed to paper. 'They are written images of things that usually do not get written down - slips, secrets, whispers, spontaneous insights - thereby preserving ... the evanescence of speech.' Like the visible speech of sign language (speaking through seeing), or the tactile vision of braille (reading through touch), the Conversations are a synthesis of diverse perceptual and representational modes.

Added to their confusion of the categories of speech and writing, they also pose the strong possibility that they are images - visible forms, literally figures of speech. The Conversations are drawings - so many pen and pencil marks placed on a sheet of paper - which find a visual language to parallel the tonality and texture of the spoken word: hastily expressive scrawls ('I talk very fast!' scribbles one); noisy smears of ink and graphite; emphatic underlinings; crossings-out (another note is simply a succession of obliterated words - it's difficult to erase what you've just said); and expanses of blank paper, as elliptically articulate as the hole driven through a modernist sculpture. It's unsurprising that they have been likened to the urgent calligraphies of Cy Twombly. 2 But where Twombly's textual abstractions are firmly framed as images, by virtue of being orientated to the vertical, the field of vision, rather than the horizontal, the field of writing, 3 Grigely's Conversations - sometimes pinned to the wall, sometimes casually strewn across the table - collapse the two fields into one another, refusing to situate themselves as either image or text.

In another sense, though, Grigely himself invokes the tradition of gestural abstraction. He likes the term 'markmaking' - 'more abstract and more permissive', he says, than 'writing', or 'speech', or 'images' - because it connotes how the subjects of the conversations are physically inscribed in their writing. The mark, as we all learnt in art history, is what a subject leaves behind. It is the trace of a body, and a peculiar sign of both its presence and its absence - 'Even at the time the marker strikes, he strikes in a tense that is over.' 4 Grigely explains that 'everyone is, in a sense, both present and not present' in the Conversations, 'and as an interlocutor, I'm also present and not present, even if my words aren't there.' Perhaps this is why he also describes them as 'still-life': they leave a residue of lives temporarily stilled and inanimate, fixed in a moment of social exchange. 'Drawings of speech. Really ordinary speech too ... like still-life drawings. Instead of baskets of blemished fruit, bottles of half-drunk wine, and cabbages and carcasses, think of it this way: scraps of language lying on the table. A vase full of sentences. Peelings of word on the edge of a plate.'

It's a wild goose chase trying to define the Conversations as they oscillate between speech and writing, image and text, presence and absence, significance and insignificance. And perhaps that is ultimately what they are: an emblem for the impossible pursuit of meaning, and from there the futility of trying to define and categorise difference. As one of Grigely's conversationalists puts it, rhetorically, 'Where are your edges?', knowing that there are none, and that even if they could be found, they wouldn't be important. The Conversations, with their misspellings and their fractured syntax, point to the fact that a certain lack of clarity is one of the more indispensable aspects of human life.

All uncredited quotes, the artist in dialogue with the author, December 1995.