Among the collateral events of the 55th Venice Biennale, Dora Garcia’s “The Joycean Society” at Spazio Punch on the island of Giudecca is one of the most compelling, despite a presentation that looks forbidding at first glance.
Garcia is the winner of the 45th International Contemporary Art Prize (PIAC), which is awarded every three years by Monaco’s Pierre Foundation. For the first time, the winner’s work is being shown in Venice, though Garcia herself was also here two years ago when she represented Spain at the 2011 Biennale. The artist is also known for participating in international exhibitions such as Documenta 13 and the Lyon Biennale; her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, MACBA, and the Pompidou Center.
On the strength of her 2010 work “The Deviant Majority,” and with the support of art historian and curator Agustin Perez Rubio, Garcia received €40,000 ($52,000) from PIAC, with €20,000 earmarked for mounting an exhibition. With artistic direction by Abdellah Karoum, a permanent member of the prize committee and the future director of Mathaf in Doha, Garcia devoted several years of research to a project that consists of a show and a film about a group of readers of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”
The setting includes wallpaper with enigmatic diagrams and sketches and a table with several annotated works by Joyce, including “Finnegans Wake” and a book on the exhibition. In a video playing on a parallel wall, different protagonists are plunged into the hermeneutics of texts by Joyce, with some Freud thrown in.
“It’s a natural process where I translate my thinking into the physical space, so to speak. The books on the table are the three works by Joyce: 'Ulysses,' 'Finnegans Wake,' and 'Dubliners,' altered and annotated by me — enhanced, you could say,” Garcia told BLOUIN ARTINFO.
The video is the culmination of the artist’s lengthy observations of this book club over the course of several meetings where the commentators developed their interpretations. According to Garcia, “The Joycean community are all the book’s potential readers — this strange book was written for this enigmatic public.”
“The film’s structure is very simple: the length is determined by a reading session, almost in real time. Already this gives meaning, structure, and a time frame. Afterwards I inserted other conversations that helped me to construct the four characters of the story: the book club, Joyce’s grave, the academics, and the devoted Joycean,” Garcia said.
This installation thus becomes an invitation to the literary journey that is “Finnegans Wake.” Between the project's filmed scenes and the reality of the space and the tools presented by the installation, a “critical” space is opened up. Here, the viewer is confronted with the cognitive difficulty that this book represents and is led to activate his/her senses, especially the imagination. Garcia’s exhibition offers an exploration that is connected to knowledge without making knowledge its goal.
“‘Finnegans Wake’ is a book that chooses its readers; however, it’s not a book that touches everyone,” Garcia says. “It’s a book for people who want to understand the world absolutely, almost Indiana Joneses of language. So it’s an elitist book, but not for the rich or the beautiful, but for the brave who are skeptical at the same time.”
The uniqueness of this project lies in the deep understanding of Joyce’s writing and the dialogue that Garcia sets up with the Irish author's work: The viewer doesn’t learn anything, but something is shown that resembles a horizon for intellectual fulfillment. This, it seems, is what Garcia is getting at when she says, “I think that ‘Finnegans Wake’ is utopian because this text is written for the future, for a viewer who is not there yet…. I don’t question this utopia, I celebrate it.”
To this, we might add that this “viewer who is not there yet,” in addition to perhaps implying a messianic reference, also supports the idea that knowledge is developed not through a linear and discrete process, but through the interplay of connections within language itself.
“The Joycean Society” by Dora Garcia is on view through November 24 at Spazio Punch on the island of Giudecca in Venice.