Joseph Grigely

Critical text

Joseph Grigely (b. 1956, East Longmeadow) is a professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. In 1967, after an accident, he lost his hearing completely. He studied at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester, N.Y., and then obtained his DPhil at Oxford. In 1995 he published the book Textualterity: Art, Theory and Textual Criticism. Since the early 1990s, Grigely has been creating conceptual installations on the motif of conversation (Conversations with the Hearing). His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms, including sculpture, video, and installation. Grigely has participated in two Whitney Biennials (2000, 2014) and is also a Guggenheim fellow. He develops an archaeology of his own relationship to the everyday world and its difference. With humour, he highlights the problems and misunderstandings that affect deaf people. He exhibits handwritten conversations with friends and others that he has collected over the years: fragments of dialogues on intellectual matters, private and banal subjects, sometimes also humorous absurdities. These traces are staged pictorially on the wall or in piles of unordered sheets on a table, which visitors can consult (for example, Listening, presented at the Istanbul Biennial in 1997). His installation You is composed of large sheets of paper covered with handwritten names and messages, accompanied by a soundtrack of several different voices. His work leads the viewer into the middle of a silent conversation. He deconstructs language and makes it visual.

Text by Mouna Mekouar