Joseph Grigely Alain K. December 16, 1995 © ArtNet Worldwide 1997 Joseph Grigely Paula H. January 12, 1996 Joseph Grigely Untitled Conversation at the Potato Cafe 1996 Joseph Grigley Untitled Conversation at the Potato Cafe 1996

joseph grigely at ac project room by Mia Fineman Joseph Grigely, an artist and critical theorist who became deaf as the result of a childhood accident, is best known for exhibiting compilations of scribbled notes written to him on odd scraps of paper by friends and acquaintances when he was unable to read their lips. Grigely's "Conversations with the Hearing" usually take place during noisy social gatherings-- at galleries, restaurants, bars--where passing notes leaves behind a visible residue of the ephemeral flow of cocktail- party small talk. Semiotically inclined critics have pounced on Grigely's "inscribed conversations" as a tailor-made illustration of the subordination of speech to writing, a notion that has preoccupied French theory for the last few decades. Clearly this is no news to Grigely, himself an academic who has just published a book on textual criticism, Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1995). The terse, scribbled notes in his work have also been justly compared to the bite-sized fragments of text rapidly proliferating in the moveable feast of electronic communication. The most tantalizing pleasure Grigely's work offers, however, is the opportunity for spying and textual eavesdropping, the chance to listen in on a conversation from the passively hidden perspective of a fly on the wall. Grigely's latest body of work consists mainly of small photographic "portraits" of his conversation partners' hands surrounded by the ordinary table- top detritus of coffee cups, cigarettes, books and notepads. Many of the hands are shown in the act of writing, a motif that certainly makes sense in light of Grigely's larger project. However, this work also contains a...well, heavy-handed reference to the early '80s critical trope of photography as a form of writing, which Rosalind Krauss has explicitly linked to the glut of modernist images of hands in the act of writing (see "When Words Fail," October 22, fall 1982). But ultimately, the central conceit of Grigely's photographs-- "diverting the traditional representation of character and identity from the countenance of the face to the countenance of the hand," as the press release puts it--requires, or rather elicits, an unusual degree of attentiveness. To a certain extent, portraits of hands may rely on common representational tropes (rough like a worker's, smooth like a dandy's), but these associations are less familiar and less immediate than the kinds of information we glean from faces. For all their gestural subtlety, Grigely's images stubbornly maintain a frustrating degree of anonymity not possible in more conventional photographic portraiture. The centerpiece of the show, Untitled Conversation at the Potato Cafe, is a trompe-l'oeil reconstruction of a Parisian cafe table calculatedly scattered with scraps of paper excerpting a conversation between Grigely and an anonymous dinner companion. The carefully composed tableau--including a red and white checked tablecloth, an empty bottle of Burgundy, wine glasses, coffee cups, a used ashtray, burning tea candles, and a dead red rose in a glass vase--does little except to evoke a timeworn set of American cliches about Parisian cafe culture. The notes on the table are only slightly less contrived: "This part of Paris is too hip for it's own good," comments one of the interlocutors. "I love you, you know," a scrap of paper partly hidden underneath a saucer mysteriously offers. Reading over the shoulders of the absent diners, one gets the sense that these fragmentary remnants conceal more than they reveal--that the real dirt is hidden somewhere between the lines. But as anyone who has illicitly perused forbidden journal entries knows, the promises of textual eavesdropping usually far outweigh its payoff. May 24-June 29, 1996, 15 Renwick St., NY, NY 10013 Mia Fineman is a New York writer.