Viewers prepared to abandon the baggage of identity-driven visual art and systematically realised essays and texts will best appreciate his work - yet on the other hand perhaps his images, particularly, invite a reading of them as a response to the work of both Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce since his work is intended to continue as a recognition of what they actually achieved as artists rather than what they have been said to achieve in popular mythology, and how Duchamp in particular has appealed merely to “popular taste” through a sickening reprise of his Readymades.
Duchamp undermined visual art in the name of poetics and language surrounding the Glass with notes like a web at the centre of which we discover mar-cel.
Likened to a spider himself James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (and Finnegans Web) encloses his own Ulysses and the body of man, mankind; woman and womankind; child and childkind in such a way that writers, philosophers and poets who follow him are led to a Genesis and quite literally an Omega of the narrative: Hays’ works reveals an indifference to the easily digestible objects of today’s mere fashions and fads.
Duchamp stated several times that he wanted to “return to an art of the mind” as so clearly did Joyce, such that the quality of both their thoughts and their ideas coalesce here in Hays’ works in an often “difficulttounderstand” visual poetics: Hypermedia Joyce and the work that goes under this banner.
Art for the Net and Web requires a work-in-progress apparatus for it to be a becoming. His image making is under-construction with additional texts and separate Essays that function at different levels to accommodate the various and diverse stripes of discovery brought about by his constant reading and re-readings yet which are always closely linked to the History of Art, Literature, Philosophy and Poetry.
One image under-construction is viewable through Zoomify on this site as are his new projects for other large works that are concerned with creating images and texts that cover the 628 pages of Finnegans Wake and the 933 pages of Ulysses, the Notes that Duchamp shaped to cover his oeuvre, and also essays on both artists by other academics.