The New Yorker:
For decades, Joseph Grigely has collected the notes that people use to communicate with him. What do they show us?
By Max Norman
It’s around one in the afternoon, and Joseph Grigely is bashing his head against the wall. The wall is a white expanse of Sheetrock in a vast, high-ceilinged room on the ground floor of MASS moca, a contemporary-art museum in North Adams, Massachusetts. The head is a cast-stone replica of Grigely’s skull, whose classical monochrome makes you realize that the artist, despite his black polo, green cargo shorts, and Scarpa approach shoes, looks quite a lot like Socrates: balding, bearded, and often bearing an ironic grin. The head weighs thirty pounds, and Grigely, a bearish man of sixty-seven, is winded by the exertion. “It’s a sweaty job,” he says, panting. Then he hefts the piece into his hands. “It just kind of does feel good to smash the son of a bitch!”
The head-bashing is part of a new work commissioned for “In What Way Wham?,” Grigely’s biggest show to date. The piece transforms the wall with a cluster of dents and gashes, leaving a scree of detritus beneath it; the head itself lies among the rubble. Grigely called it “Between the Walls and Me,” evoking a feeling familiar to anyone trying to navigate the opaque institutions of the art world. But, in Grigely’s case, the frustration wasn’t just the result of the powers that be. The artist is, as he likes to put it, “deaf as a doorknob.”
Grigely is many things besides deaf—a professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a writer and literary scholar, an avid fly-fisher—but his work always comes back to the agony and the ecstasy of communication, which deafness amplifies. His œuvre, represented in the collections of moma, the Whitney, and the Tate, is sprawling and diverse. “He’s built up these extraordinary bodies of work, without compromising, really,” Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, told me. “I actually think he is one of the great artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I don’t think he fits any label.”
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