The Conventional Book and Image Format

Ian Hays

 Finnegans Wake and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even take the format everyone knows and understands in the spirit of the traditional. It is this traditional acceptance of the work of both of these creative acts in the form of their occupancy of space – as book like any other book, and as a work of art in a gallery  – that does two things: firstly it pits the work of the authors of these acts against and yet within the traditions out of which they emerged; and secondly these acts are placed most aptly within the history of ideas as opposed to the history of aesthetics and the history of literature. However much one might wish to step outside of tradition (and perhaps the more one might struggle to think this escape) the fact is that language holds us to itself, sending us back from our thought journey to where we began it. The opening page of Finnegans Wake announces this order and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s, Even broadcasts this absorbing roundelay. The charm is in the philosophical undertones carried through by these two powerful creative acts that materialized in the early to middle 20^th Century. Duchamp had shown in his Boite en Valise, as one instance, that creative reproduction and language is key to any understanding in the visual arts, yet this function of academia remains unexplored even today against and for the history and theories of Art and Language. My visual and written work attends to the problem of working today against a poorly realized backdrop of visual art practice that has ignored Art History and Critical Theory, the workings of Language and Literature and the problems ingrained in Philosophical Analysis on the problem of Time and Quality.

UK Artist and Writer: email: ian@ianhays.net.