Joseph Grigely at Massachusetts Museum — fantastical gardens of words

“Imagine if every word we spoke became palpable and dropped from our lips,” the artist Joseph Grigely suggests. “Think about what would happen and the places we would find the residue of our words. Imagine scraps of language lying on countertops. Drawers full of sentences. Peelings of words in the sink. Imagine the dashboards of our cars covered with everyday conversation.”

That fantastical garden of verbiage nearly becomes reality in Mass MoCA’s vibrant Grigely retrospective, In What Way Wham? (White Noise and Other Works, 1996-2023). For decades, he has made visual poetry out of the detritus of language, accumulating scrawled phrases and jottings and assembling them into works as vast as medieval tapestries. He gives us access to his social interactions and so to his perceptions.

Grigely was 10 when an accident left him profoundly deaf. Ever since, he has experienced the absence of sound as a positive presence, heightening his awareness of how communication can be seen even when it can’t be heard. Over the years, friends, family members and acquaintances have showered him with messages on cocktail napkins, torn notebook pages, hotel stationary, receipts, postcards, index cards and sticky notes — a compendium of one-sided interactions in which his voice is usually absent, except by inference.

He could have discarded these scraps along the way, just as the non-deaf among us forget most of what we’ve been told. Instead, he realised that fleeting exchanges added up to something large and deep. He came to see the notes as drawings of speech, sometimes silly and often fragmentary, but always expressive. Handwriting is movement, a form of recorded dance that implies a soundless speech. 

In a pamphlet essay that accompanies the show, curator Denise Markonish refers to Wordsworth’s poem “Airey-Force Valley”, in which a silent breeze slipping through a glen produces “a soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs, / Powerful almost as vocal harmony”. Grigely, like Wordsworth, asks us to narrow and conflate our senses, to absorb the aural world through vision alone.

In the 1990s, he began assembling what he calls Conversations with the Hearing, an ongoing series of installations made up of his interlocutors’ disjointed comments. At Mass MOCA, two works, conceived more than 20 years apart, occupy conjoined rooms. “White Noise (monochrome)” (2000) and the recent “White Noise (polychrome)” embody equivalents to the static produced by random frequencies across the entire audible spectrum. White noise blots out all meaning and music; it is at once every sound and nothing at all, an empty overload of acoustic stimulation.

Grigely’s version of that concept is a pair of walk-in oval spaces plastered with notes — on white paper in the first room and, in the second, on an enfolding mosaic of brightly coloured sheets. Thousands of scribbles line the walls, some at eye-level, many more legible only by stretching out on the floor or growing taller. This silently raucous room thrums with observations, arguments, gossip and private jokes collected and organised into a voiceless choir.

Whether written on white or on the rainbow storm of paper, the chattering rooms have an ascetic feel: you could pass through quickly and register only a minimalist grid, inscribed with elusive runes. But linger for a while, and the cacophony resolves into a quasi-comprehensible soundtrack. 

“With your presentations you create the experience of eavesdropping for the viewers,” one of the anonymous contributors remarks, and that’s exactly right. The display offers the same mix of mystery and insight as a dialogue caught on the fly and only half understood. We “overhear” plans to get married, half-discussions, confidences, banal assertions (“Men are assholes. Get me some wine. red”), and possibly profound statements. “Communication is the essential part of Art,” one note reads. “Things written seem more important than things (ideas) spoken.” 

We get glimpses into moments of weird wit and salacious glee. Someone with elegant handwriting begins: “She feels kinda self consc + weird asking you, so she asked me to ask you if you could please put the toilet seat down when you’re done. She’s afraid she’ll not look down sometimes + fall in . . . ” A sloppier hand responds: “It’s awful when that happens!”

We are not meant to grasp these situations fully or know how Grigely’s spoken side of the conversation goes, or whether some of the notes are in his hand. Maybe he’s dictated some messages or edited them to ramp up the quotient of whimsy or pensive reflection. Our uncertainty emulates the position of a deaf person trying to lip-read in a crowded room, a notoriously inexact and treacherous process. 

“White Noise” is a tribute to idiosyncrasies expressed both in language and in handwriting. As I crouched, squinted, stood on tiptoes and strained to decipher note after note, I wondered how Grigely’s life and art have been affected by the convenience and uniformity of the text message. Texting, I imagined, may have smoothed his interactions but impoverished his art. The variations of cramped and expansive penmanship, the deliberate stroke and the furious scrawl, supply ornamental detail and hints of character. What would he do without them? 

An answer arrived promptly in “Travels with Tess” (2023), photographs of hands holding out phones emblazoned with text messages. The words, as I feared, lose energy in the translation to a generic glowing font. “You missed a very engaging conversation between the people behind us at security about what glass they decided to use for their chicken coop,” one message reads — and it feels like the rest of us are missing something crucial, too. 

Grigely occasionally wanders away from writing to other forms of silent communication. Among his most poignant works is a life-sized fibreglass model of one of Canaletto’s minor characters: “Dog from ‘Riva degli Schiavoni” (2003). In the original view of Venice from 1734-35, a little white dog in the foreground is riveted by . . . something. Grigely’s sculpture of the painting of the pup strains against the quiet. Nose and tail aloft, head tilted, ears cocked, the animal is poised to receive crucial information crackling through the air.

In an Instagram post, Grigely explains that a succession of family dogs has served as his ears, alerting him to the arrival of the mailman, the chattering of squirrels, the rustling of a moose on the trail or the flapping of fish. He sees Canaletto’s canines as giveaways to a sonic landscape, their bodies absorbing and rebroadcasting yells, songs, whipping sails, the scrum and scuffle of the crowd. Whether living, painted or cast in fibreglass, a dog can provide a way of visualising sound.

A substantial part of the show is devoted to the artist’s life-long fight for accessibility and equal rights. He documents encounters with entrenched disrespect: a train trip where the “discounted” fare for disabled riders was higher than the regular tariff, a Modern Language Association conference where he was informed that, although no sign language interpreter was available, he was welcome to a seat in the front row. “As a disabled person, you spend a lot of time advocating for yourself,” he writes. “You are frequently negotiating, not just for access, but also, as part of the process itself, for a basic level of dignity.”

Sometimes the struggle becomes too much. “Between the Walls and Me” (2023) summarises the aftermath of battle. A cast-stone version of his own head has been hurled — or hurled itself — into the gallery wall. The broken and scarred effigy lies beside the pitted plaster in a field of debris, wreckage offered in evidence of the artist’s violent frustration not with his own limitations but the world’s.

To March 2024, massmoca.org