ust prior to 2004, while a full-time lecturer in the History and Theory of Art at Coventry University, the visual works I had been creating using Photoshop had also led me to the point of liberating myself from the chronic notion of thinking of art works per se as autonomous phenomena that somehow transcended the experience and fact of language, such that the years of work I had spent reading Duchamp and reading on Duchamp led me to embark on a project that had been in my mind, almost as a shadow for years, without my knowing it as such: that the most interesting visual artist of the past five centuries and the most interesting literary artist of the past seven centuries - Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce - had much in common, and that if it were possible to take on such a challenge of learning and creating as an extension of what they had achieved in the field of art then I would be Reading Joyce Reading Duchamp in the way one says “I am reading for a D. Lit in…”.

Having no idea if anyone else anywhere had also had a similar thought as myself I looked on the Internet to learn that William Anastasi, who had been a colleague of the composer John Cage and had also met with Duchamp, had written for the Duchamp site tout-fait on Joyce and Duchamp, but that his position vis-à-vis this subject was totally different from my own.

The same year of 2004 brought about an idea that I should perhaps present my visual works in their primitive state alongside a paper at a strong conference somewhere, and on discovering the annual Joyce Conference also from the Internet sent in a proposal for the Dublin International James Joyce Conference and had the proposal accepted at once.

My argument was and still remains this: that the challenge for the visual artist is to understand that no work of art stands outside the contexts of language, and that as writers and visual artists both Duchamp and Joyce exemplify two sides, as it were, of one coin: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ulysses offer a reader a cosmic conceptual and visual array of interpretations to realize in detail while scrabbling through the ruins of past literature upon which Joyce’s texts are built; and not this alone because the very finest or flimsiest spider-web-like-subtleties are couched ready to be rediscovered in Joyce and that this is what I had found in the oeuvre of Duchamp at the centre of which his Large Glass and Notes shape the same or similar experiences that simply exists nowhere else. And there was more since both protagonists were rapt with the same philosophical and ironic attitude toward art itself as a discipline, sharing approaches to a world that recognizes the prominence of technology, science and pataphysics that Anastasi had grounded in Alfred Jarry, a penchant for the devices of alchemy and chemistry, for the newspaper and detritus, for the Hegelian contradiction concerning art and individual talent. (1)

f course many artists have attempted and have been successful in combining image and language in varieties of ways and the Images and Essays on this site represent a body of my work in progress from 2004 through 2009 (at present), that one hopes represents the mere beginnings of an ongoing delight in the possibilities of communication, miscommunication, the musical and poetic, the Advert and the Artwork, the reproduction of the classical work of art and the cartoon as well as creations of new alphabets (or “alphabites” (FW.263.F1), “alphybettyformed” “alphabetters” (FW183.13; 107.09), and “alpheubett”s (FW.208.20) in as prismatic a fashion as Joyce used language: and likewise as the “image” becomes a case for mental-effects in the way a letter, a word or a text becomes a new mental-effect in the hands of Duchamp when combined - as all his works are - with the curiosities of language and its potential within or with an image to effect both the non-presence and presence of the Other.

he visitor to this site will find an image titled A Collection of Potentialities in Progress on ‘Image’ and ‘Language’ which is a large-scale work offered here using the Zoomify Tool.

This work itself is actually so large that as the creative manager of the site Mark of Mark Coates Software Solutions has anecdotaly suggested to me “it would cover 75 football pitches, require 200 elephants to move it, and would be visible from space if printed in conventional format”, which of course is impossible at present even at a 95^th of such a size.

Our own imaginations are the creative tools with which to scan this image and perhaps to loose oneself inside its full and hard-won subtleties that, as I have indicated above, are also located in the works of Joyce and Duchamp.

While Duchamp ‘measured’ with bent strings and Joyce with “meansigns” (FW.369.01) (an allusion to the Golden Mean or Golden Section as well as letters that gauge) one understands why everyone - and particularly on TV - ‘measures’ anything and everything large by comparing it with the football pitch or several pitches. But the language of the Wake is both, so to speak, personal to Joyce, and simultaneously “wordwide” (FW. 419.07) and “worldrenownced” (FW. 341.28), “whirrld” (FW. 147.22) like “whirlworlds” (FW. 017.29) in its own wordhoard.

Other images include various series of individual works that stem from my readings of the HCE (Here Comes Everybody) family, all of whom Joyce represented in his Notebooks as Sigla: for instance HCE is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Everyman or the Paternal E. His wife ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle) is a delta of a river Δ and all of the world’s rivers, more or less, are gather into a chapter of Finnegans Wake. The visitor to our site might like to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake as a source supplement here.

he “worldroom” (FW. 100.29) (worldwomb) sexual motifs in the Wake, the effects of note making and also writing in the manner of idioglossia or cryptophasia, Duchamp’s Notebooks that swell up the sexual, sensuous, “hilarious” and technologically impotent Female and Male components of the Large Glass (otherwise more properly titled La Marie mise a nu par ses Célibataires, meme or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even…”) lead us to an almost infinite number of possibilities for “interpretation” and analysis of Duchamp’s and Joyce’s artworks, and allows us to make moves in our imagination as in a chess game, chess being Duchamp’s favourite hobby besides that of art but which he incorporated into his work.

And as Margherita Maleti writes in her Rejoyce in Peace: A Study of Finnegans Wake III.4

e can see from this introduction to Reading Joyce Reading Duchamp that this is not a site, nor is my work, the kind of art that lends itself to the Gallery or the Book too well at first blush, and in fact as a matter of principle the work of the work of art here in its already mega-reproductive Internet form functions on the pun of reproducibility: the pun in other words that both Joyce and Duchamp, in surely the most common of all denominators, employed as fundamental to an experimental approach to the visual, to the written, to the spoken and to the gestural in the work of art. What we see is a move toward an interest in Time in the Wake and the Glass and beyond these to the works of Joyce and Duchamp as lives lived inside art.

The visitor to this site will also be able to read my Essays that are attendant upon these visual works

(1) “About one hundred fifty years ago, a man who had the highest idea of art that anyone can have - because he saw how art can become religion and religion art - this man (called Hegel) described all the ways in which someone who has chosen to be a man of letters condemns himself to belong to the “animal kingdom of the mind”. From his very first step, Hegel virtually says, a person who wishes to write is stopped by a contradiction: in order to write, he must have a talent to write. But gifts, in themselves, are nothing. As long as he has not yet sat down at his table and written a work, the writer is not a writer and does not know if he has the capacity to become one. He has no talent until he has written, but he needs talent in order to write”. Maurice Blanchot. The Gaze of Orpheus. Station Hill. p.23. [However, perhaps the term “contradiction” is less appropriate than the word “paradox” here for our time and knowing what we do concerning “modern” literature and perhaps particularly Joyce and Duchamp among others].

(2) See Fusion Anomaly, an interesting site on the works of Marcel Duchamp and the impact the technology of the day had on his output and particularly on his writings: http://fusionanomaly.net/marcelduchamp.html.