Polyhedra
(a room in which
to read Joyce's Ulysses)
Polyhedra (a room in which to read Joyce's Ulysses)
Cardboard, wood, neon, plastic flowers
300 x 300 x 300 cm
Collection Museo Cantonale d'Arte Lugano
Polyhedra
(a room in which to read Joyce's Ulysses)
Cardboard, wood, neon, plastic flowers
300 x 300 x 300 cm
Swiss art awards
2004
Polyhedra
(a room in which to read Joyce's Ulysses)
Cardboard, wood, neon, plastic flowers
300 x 300 x 300 cm
borgovico33, Como-I
2005
Convergence: Literary Art Exhibitions
Curated By Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
with Julie Bacon, Ecke Bonk, Pavel Buchler, Tacita Dean, Cerith Wyn Evans, Maria Fusco, Rodney Graham, Joanna Karolini, Sean Lynch, Simon Morris, Brian O'Doherty, Tim Rollins, Andrea Theis. Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Ireland
2011
and
Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland
2011
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
Polyhedra and Joyce a room for thought
Davide Cascio’s Polyhedra (A Room in Which to Read Joyce’s Ulysses) is a complex work, even without its title. In the following, I will sketch a number of the references that present themselves, before embarking on a Joycean reading. The work, despite the complexity just claimed, is formally simple, clearly geometric. It sits perfectly well both with a constructivist use of scaffolding (Tatlin) and minimalist art’s obsession with geometry (Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith et al). Dan Flavin’s use of neon lights is echoed, as well as customized space a la Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, including much of the legacy of such Modernist work in more recent installations by Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham and even Liam Gillick.
The poster publication that has previously accompanied Davide Cascio’s work, however, points to the Renaissance, thus also including Classical Antiquity: Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is thus a particularly apt case in point, as human anatomy has lent Cascio’s work its scale, if not more: as a study for Polyhedra, one is, of course, presented with a Le Corbusier-like drawing of a man with outstretched arm measuring the space inside. In Renaissance geometrical studies of intricate polyhedra, space recedes and protrudes in very Modernist, indeterminate ways, revealing the very Medieval uncertainty that one had set out to eradicate. Alchemy comes to mind as much as Chemistry’s own “sculptural” output in the guise of neatly constructed atom structures. Most certainly, the similarities between micro- and macrocosm are reflected, when the viewer is led to consider Polyhedra as just one atom in an indefinite series of more such structures, where the “scaffolding” can easily provide support to the next polyhedron on all sides – or we find our thoughts traveling to the universe’s holes (or self-similar Mandelbrot functions), where inside- and outside views become confused. As in a Gothic cathedral, here we see the light shining inwards and outwards, while the space itself is characterized by clarity in form and concept (a Heavenly Jerusalem perhaps?), while the supports (buttresses) are outside. Flowers mark the summit of the vaults. On the other hand, the artist reflects on floral motifs in Arabic de- sign, where again an infinite series of the individual elements can be found. The cubic clarity of The Kaaba at Mecca gives a meaningful counterpoint to what one was for long used to consider as purely formal play with geometry in minimalist art – until Georges Didi-Huberman unearthed the other aspects of the minimalist cubes of artists like Tony Smith: deepest meaning about life – or more precisely: death – in the inextricable associations of that work with coffins. He did so by retaining the formal(ist) gaze as valid also, speaking of oscillation – and linking that inclusion of heretofore incompatible opposites (through a lengthy introductory quotation) with none other than James Joyce. 1 One could also speak of influence – if that was not such a difficult concept: Tony Smith is among the minimalist artists, who particularly admired Joyce.2
The writer was no stranger to geometry: The first page of Dubliners contains the word gnomon, an image of both cosmic meanings (the sundial), as well as about the best illustration of the space between the micro- and macro-cosmos. Finnegans Wake then, Joyce’s last, difficult work is also a geometric “machine”: one to square the circle, since the square book contains the “round”, re-cycling text, which begins and ends in the middle of a sentence. External and internal views also play a role, as this “night-book” may be set inside a body or inside a “museomound”, a space like that inside a megalithic passage tomb that contains all of history. Already, Cascio’s far-reaching references seem slightly less confusing and their breadth more motivated. And still: I have not even mentioned the title of the book that Cascio specifically quotes: Ulysses. Cascio himself refers to the contracted and expanded narrated time in Joyce’s most celebrated work: a novel that is set in a single day, but takes over 600 pages to do this day justice, most certainly adopts a microscopic perspective. If it then also repeatedly links the minutest every-day detail (in the Dublin of 1904) with cosmic events and Antique mythology (Homer’s Odyssey), a picture emerges, where Cascio’s proliferation of allusions and coincidents appear entirely in keeping with Joyce’s procedure. In fact, the artist has literally taken up Joyce’s claim to have used the Odyssey as scaffolding for his Ulysses. That pronouncement may betray an allegiance with the constructivist tendencies of his time, but it nevertheless seems almost uncharacteristically bereft of the multiplicities of meaning that other metaphors about his writing display. To call his practice not trivial but “quadruvial”, or the squaring of the circle image are far more replete with meaning and thus closer to the work. Scaffolding to me so far only related to Dublin life in 1904. Now, however, I am inclined to read Joyce’s comment in more complex ways, including consideration of the writer’s possible refection on Renaissance geometry, the framing of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man and possibly other reference points since. The jury of the Vordemberge-Gildewart-prize, which Cascio re- ceived in 2005, reflected on Polyhedra as a “thought form”. Joyce was a contemporary of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, who drew energy forms and colours at the beginning of the twentieth century. The writer was very skeptical about such esoteric games. However, it seems to me now that, far from having to con- form to the absence of right angles, thoughts have really found more regular, geometric forms in Joyce’s and Cascio’s universes. Far from losing in impact and diversity of meaning, they clearly gain.
They also gain an experiential space. Inside Polyhedrais a room (not merely space), where some would possibly see thoughts literally bouncing off all sides and going in more directions than is the case in most other scenarios. In the first instance, however, Polyhedra’s room is a concentrated space. It could be thought of as a continuation of the line of reading rooms from the British Library’s dome to the ellipse of that of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg. I always thought that Joyce, asWarburg’s contemporary would also be at home in an elliptical, “non-binary” room, rather than one with just one center. Cascio, however, provides the necessary expansion in the space’s multi-directedness, as well as in the continuation into different plateaus and spheres (rhizomes?) that the scaffolding lets one think likely. As a reading room, Polyhedra functions as a time capsule, a room that bridges the 100 years between the “Bloomsday” of Ulysses and its creation with ease. Neon as the quintessential advertising light also refers to Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s Odysseus, who sells ads, while his name and mentioning of the language of flowers (or “flow…”) explains Cascio’s use of flowers in his work. The use of neon may or may not constitute a reference to the fact that Dan Flavin referred in his work to Joyce.3
Polyhedra is a capsule also in another way: reading isolates, it takes the reader out of this world and lets him or her develop their own internal pictorial one. Reading Ulysses stretches anyone’s powers of imagination. Joyce worked in the book with several versions of some occurrences, leaving it up to the reader’s (hopefully perfect, but never sufficient) memory to assemble the world and literally to make sense. Cascio does not offend this active Joyce-experienced reader by presenting his interior cinema as illustrations. In fact, he encourages active engagement and the greatest possible variety of interpretations through the simplicity of his work and by offering it as an experiential space. Depending on what the viewer/reader is seeking, the platform or case study is presented for discoveries of a fundamental and personal kind. In this way, Cascio’s Polyhedra has some similarity with Tania Mouraud’s Initiation Room No 4 (1969/89), a high but narrow space for viewers, illuminated from above. There, neither the multi- faceted geometry, nor the reference to a literary world were given. Cascio seems to agree with many of Joyce’s readers that reading Ulysses in particular represents an occasion for a modern-day rite of passage.4 He is unlikely to let any of us leave his Polyhedraunchanged, with intact and un-reflected ideas about the remits of current installation art, the phenomenological and conceptual ambitions for architecture and our built environment, as well as the scope of current art practice. Cable-ties and cardboard may be relatively familiar sights in an exhibition of recent art, but that the latter was the medium, in which Constantin Brancusi chose to create a portrait of James Joyce does not usually become meaningful in post-minimalist work. The oscillation of which Didi-Huberman had written also ex- tends to abstraction and figuration in Joyce’s work that has been claimed by critics and – even more vigorously – by artists on all sides of the various artistic and art historical divides over almost a century. East and West, “high” and “low”, the mind sets of alchemy and chemistry, both historically and in the present: Joyce provides a distinct possibility to creators to combine theoretical rigour and historical interest with a possibility to create an almost indiscriminate universe. As a last question, puzzlement may remain that a structure as simple and geometrically reduced as Cascio’s would refer to James Joyce, rather than, say, to Samuel Beckett’s reductionism. James Joyce, there is no doubt, was an encyclopedically inclined writer, but he used the great variety of detail that he accommodated in his (later) works in a conceptual way. The “scaffolding” metaphor (concerning Homer) is expression of this very fact. Following then what has been outlined about Cascio’s Polyhedra, it is certain that even the formal appearance of the work, showing what is usually hidden and thus foregrounding how something was made – literally and through the title – has to be understood as a correspondence to Joyce’s procedure. The variety of possible interpretations, the interest in activating the viewers etc.: all of this occurs through the simplicity of the geometric shape and the media chosen. It is there in the possibilities for interpretation offered. If the polyhedron itself had taken a more complicated shape, the effect would have been to narrow down meaning, not to enhance it. In this way, Cascio, like so many artists since the 1960s, follows Joyce’s ways of thinking, more than his choice of motifs. He uses the freedom that changing the artform can provide when commenting on cultural traditions. Nicolas Bourriaud’s category of postproduction can both be applied and stretched here: Cascio certainly uses Joyce freely, commenting and extending more than illustrating or idolizing him. He uses him “to probe the contemporary world,”5 but he achieves more. Being deeply knowledgeable, he can take a position that is again (in keeping with the by now familiar move to encompass opposites) entirely of the minute and at the same time a Modernist – as well as a Renaissance artist and a time capsule architect. One can, for example, think of the space as a (“postproduced”) minimalist (or Renaissance?) space that en- ables relational activities – like focusing a squatting “Ulysses” reading group, a new offshoot of such a long-standing international tradition.6 Cascio confidently owns the writer, something that he is not supposed to do in “postproduction” mode, while also showing that Joyce’s work “takes on a script-like value”, enabling ever new thought forms. With “Polyhedron”, he squares the circle.
1 G. Didi-Huberman, Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes, Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1999.
2 For this and other references to artists, who have created artworks in response to James Joyce’s writings, please see: C.-M.LermHayes, Joyce in Art.Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce, Lilliput, Dublin 2004.
3 Dan Flavin. A Retrospective, catalogue of the exhibition edited by M. Govan and T. Bell, National Gallery ofArt,Washing- ton/Dia Art Foundation, New York/Yale University Press, London 2005.
4 I thank Antje von Graevenitz, whose research concerns art and rites of passage, for drawing my attention to Davide Cascio’s work.
5 N.Bourriaud, Postproduction.Cultureas Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Lukas & Sternberg, NewYork 2002, p.9.
6 See my forthcoming essay in R. Brown (ed), The Blackwell Joyce Companion, where the institution of the Joyce read- ing group is offered as a form towards which contemporary visual art practice is developing an affinity.
Polyhedra and Joyce a room for thought
Davide Cascio’s Polyhedra (A Room in Which to Read Joyce’s Ulysses) is a complex work, even without its title. In the following, I will sketch a number of the references that present themselves, before embarking on a Joycean reading. The work, despite the complexity just claimed, is formally simple, clearly geometric. It sits perfectly well both with a constructivist use of scaffolding (Tatlin) and minimalist art’s obsession with geometry (Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith et al). Dan Flavin’s use of neon lights is echoed, as well as customized space a la Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, including much of the legacy of such Modernist work in more recent installations by Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham and even Liam Gillick.
The poster publication that has previously accompanied Davide Cascio’s work, however, points to the Renaissance, thus also including Classical Antiquity: Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is thus a particularly apt case in point, as human anatomy has lent Cascio’s work its scale, if not more: as a study for Polyhedra, one is, of course, presented with a Le Corbusier-like drawing of a man with outstretched arm measuring the space inside. In Renaissance geometrical studies of intricate polyhedra, space recedes and protrudes in very Modernist, indeterminate ways, revealing the very Medieval uncertainty that one had set out to eradicate. Alchemy comes to mind as much as Chemistry’s own “sculptural” output in the guise of neatly constructed atom structures. Most certainly, the similarities between micro- and macrocosm are reflected, when the viewer is led to consider Polyhedra as just one atom in an indefinite series of more such structures, where the “scaffolding” can easily provide support to the next polyhedron on all sides – or we find our thoughts traveling to the universe’s holes (or self-similar Mandelbrot functions), where inside- and outside views become confused. As in a Gothic cathedral, here we see the light shining inwards and outwards, while the space itself is characterized by clarity in form and concept (a Heavenly Jerusalem perhaps?), while the supports (buttresses) are outside. Flowers mark the summit of the vaults. On the other hand, the artist reflects on floral motifs in Arabic de- sign, where again an infinite series of the individual elements can be found. The cubic clarity of The Kaaba at Mecca gives a meaningful counterpoint to what one was for long used to consider as purely formal play with geometry in minimalist art – until Georges Didi-Huberman unearthed the other aspects of the minimalist cubes of artists like Tony Smith: deepest meaning about life – or more precisely: death – in the inextricable associations of that work with coffins. He did so by retaining the formal(ist) gaze as valid also, speaking of oscillation – and linking that inclusion of heretofore incompatible opposites (through a lengthy introductory quotation) with none other than James Joyce. 1 One could also speak of influence – if that was not such a difficult concept: Tony Smith is among the minimalist artists, who particularly admired Joyce.2
The writer was no stranger to geometry: The first page of Dubliners contains the word gnomon, an image of both cosmic meanings (the sundial), as well as about the best illustration of the space between the micro- and macro-cosmos. Finnegans Wake then, Joyce’s last, difficult work is also a geometric “machine”: one to square the circle, since the square book contains the “round”, re-cycling text, which begins and ends in the middle of a sentence. External and internal views also play a role, as this “night-book” may be set inside a body or inside a “museomound”, a space like that inside a megalithic passage tomb that contains all of history. Already, Cascio’s far-reaching references seem slightly less confusing and their breadth more motivated. And still: I have not even mentioned the title of the book that Cascio specifically quotes: Ulysses. Cascio himself refers to the contracted and expanded narrated time in Joyce’s most celebrated work: a novel that is set in a single day, but takes over 600 pages to do this day justice, most certainly adopts a microscopic perspective. If it then also repeatedly links the minutest every-day detail (in the Dublin of 1904) with cosmic events and Antique mythology (Homer’s Odyssey), a picture emerges, where Cascio’s proliferation of allusions and coincidents appear entirely in keeping with Joyce’s procedure. In fact, the artist has literally taken up Joyce’s claim to have used the Odyssey as scaffolding for his Ulysses. That pronouncement may betray an allegiance with the constructivist tendencies of his time, but it nevertheless seems almost uncharacteristically bereft of the multiplicities of meaning that other metaphors about his writing display. To call his practice not trivial but “quadruvial”, or the squaring of the circle image are far more replete with meaning and thus closer to the work. Scaffolding to me so far only related to Dublin life in 1904. Now, however, I am inclined to read Joyce’s comment in more complex ways, including consideration of the writer’s possible refection on Renaissance geometry, the framing of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man and possibly other reference points since. The jury of the Vordemberge-Gildewart-prize, which Cascio re- ceived in 2005, reflected on Polyhedra as a “thought form”. Joyce was a contemporary of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, who drew energy forms and colours at the beginning of the twentieth century. The writer was very skeptical about such esoteric games. However, it seems to me now that, far from having to con- form to the absence of right angles, thoughts have really found more regular, geometric forms in Joyce’s and Cascio’s universes. Far from losing in impact and diversity of meaning, they clearly gain.
They also gain an experiential space. Inside Polyhedrais a room (not merely space), where some would possibly see thoughts literally bouncing off all sides and going in more directions than is the case in most other scenarios. In the first instance, however, Polyhedra’s room is a concentrated space. It could be thought of as a continuation of the line of reading rooms from the British Library’s dome to the ellipse of that of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg. I always thought that Joyce, asWarburg’s contemporary would also be at home in an elliptical, “non-binary” room, rather than one with just one center. Cascio, however, provides the necessary expansion in the space’s multi-directedness, as well as in the continuation into different plateaus and spheres (rhizomes?) that the scaffolding lets one think likely. As a reading room, Polyhedra functions as a time capsule, a room that bridges the 100 years between the “Bloomsday” of Ulysses and its creation with ease. Neon as the quintessential advertising light also refers to Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s Odysseus, who sells ads, while his name and mentioning of the language of flowers (or “flow…”) explains Cascio’s use of flowers in his work. The use of neon may or may not constitute a reference to the fact that Dan Flavin referred in his work to Joyce.3
Polyhedra is a capsule also in another way: reading isolates, it takes the reader out of this world and lets him or her develop their own internal pictorial one. Reading Ulysses stretches anyone’s powers of imagination. Joyce worked in the book with several versions of some occurrences, leaving it up to the reader’s (hopefully perfect, but never sufficient) memory to assemble the world and literally to make sense. Cascio does not offend this active Joyce-experienced reader by presenting his interior cinema as illustrations. In fact, he encourages active engagement and the greatest possible variety of interpretations through the simplicity of his work and by offering it as an experiential space. Depending on what the viewer/reader is seeking, the platform or case study is presented for discoveries of a fundamental and personal kind. In this way, Cascio’s Polyhedra has some similarity with Tania Mouraud’s Initiation Room No 4 (1969/89), a high but narrow space for viewers, illuminated from above. There, neither the multi- faceted geometry, nor the reference to a literary world were given. Cascio seems to agree with many of Joyce’s readers that reading Ulysses in particular represents an occasion for a modern-day rite of passage.4 He is unlikely to let any of us leave his Polyhedraunchanged, with intact and un-reflected ideas about the remits of current installation art, the phenomenological and conceptual ambitions for architecture and our built environment, as well as the scope of current art practice. Cable-ties and cardboard may be relatively familiar sights in an exhibition of recent art, but that the latter was the medium, in which Constantin Brancusi chose to create a portrait of James Joyce does not usually become meaningful in post-minimalist work. The oscillation of which Didi-Huberman had written also ex- tends to abstraction and figuration in Joyce’s work that has been claimed by critics and – even more vigorously – by artists on all sides of the various artistic and art historical divides over almost a century. East and West, “high” and “low”, the mind sets of alchemy and chemistry, both historically and in the present: Joyce provides a distinct possibility to creators to combine theoretical rigour and historical interest with a possibility to create an almost indiscriminate universe. As a last question, puzzlement may remain that a structure as simple and geometrically reduced as Cascio’s would refer to James Joyce, rather than, say, to Samuel Beckett’s reductionism. James Joyce, there is no doubt, was an encyclopedically inclined writer, but he used the great variety of detail that he accommodated in his (later) works in a conceptual way. The “scaffolding” metaphor (concerning Homer) is expression of this very fact. Following then what has been outlined about Cascio’s Polyhedra, it is certain that even the formal appearance of the work, showing what is usually hidden and thus foregrounding how something was made – literally and through the title – has to be understood as a correspondence to Joyce’s procedure. The variety of possible interpretations, the interest in activating the viewers etc.: all of this occurs through the simplicity of the geometric shape and the media chosen. It is there in the possibilities for interpretation offered. If the polyhedron itself had taken a more complicated shape, the effect would have been to narrow down meaning, not to enhance it. In this way, Cascio, like so many artists since the 1960s, follows Joyce’s ways of thinking, more than his choice of motifs. He uses the freedom that changing the artform can provide when commenting on cultural traditions. Nicolas Bourriaud’s category of postproduction can both be applied and stretched here: Cascio certainly uses Joyce freely, commenting and extending more than illustrating or idolizing him. He uses him “to probe the contemporary world,”5 but he achieves more. Being deeply knowledgeable, he can take a position that is again (in keeping with the by now familiar move to encompass opposites) entirely of the minute and at the same time a Modernist – as well as a Renaissance artist and a time capsule architect. One can, for example, think of the space as a (“postproduced”) minimalist (or Renaissance?) space that en- ables relational activities – like focusing a squatting “Ulysses” reading group, a new offshoot of such a long-standing international tradition.6 Cascio confidently owns the writer, something that he is not supposed to do in “postproduction” mode, while also showing that Joyce’s work “takes on a script-like value”, enabling ever new thought forms. With “Polyhedron”, he squares the circle.
1 G. Didi-Huberman, Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes, Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1999.
2 For this and other references to artists, who have created artworks in response to James Joyce’s writings, please see: C.-M.LermHayes, Joyce in Art.Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce, Lilliput, Dublin 2004.
3 Dan Flavin. A Retrospective, catalogue of the exhibition edited by M. Govan and T. Bell, National Gallery ofArt,Washing- ton/Dia Art Foundation, New York/Yale University Press, London 2005.
4 I thank Antje von Graevenitz, whose research concerns art and rites of passage, for drawing my attention to Davide Cascio’s work.
5 N.Bourriaud, Postproduction.Cultureas Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Lukas & Sternberg, NewYork 2002, p.9.
6 See my forthcoming essay in R. Brown (ed), The Blackwell Joyce Companion, where the institution of the Joyce read- ing group is offered as a form towards which contemporary visual art practice is developing an affinity.
Radiating affection,
In Thought-Forms,
Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, The Theosophical Publishing House Ltd, London, 1901.
The first published picture of the Mandelbrot set, by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Matelski 1978.
Constantin Brancusi,
Portrait de James Joyce, ca 1928, Cardboard and metal, 76,2 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Islamic geometric pattern.