The poetics of Joan Grounds
A man in a tree hangs by his mouth from a branch above the void.
The installation works of Joan Grounds leave the writer tongue-tied. Austere, yet enveloping, they leave language in a state of suspension. Not that they're undiscussible, simply that they require as much silence as talk.
The untranslatability of artwork is a bit of an affront to some theoretical coachparties, partly because underwritten by the kind of overfocalisation of Western knowledge. You see it too in the paternalistic review with its everyday terrorism of What-does-it-mean? Artwork of this kind calls for a different sort of apprehension. It's the Socratic method in reverse, not away from "knowledge", but a forgetting of it. It studies the void, before it studies atoms. Thinking through these works comes closer to breathing and listening with the skin, the intelligence is sub-sensory: deep imaging and deep sensing. This is at a time when technology is taking out a lease on our senses and on 3-D space (signal-compressed TV, holograms).
The work of Grounds, (and of Simone Mangos, Robert Owen, Wolfgang Laib, Eric Orr) recalls the poetic function, or those poets who celebrate the fact that we have nothing. A celebration of non-possession, or the intensity of the present at the heart of it. Joan's work is also about the conundrums of one woman's life.
In May 1986 Joan Grounds made Hourglass, an installation performance. It lasted six hours. In it there were two abandoned women's shoes lined with soft green moss; a fan scattering a heap of ash; a suspended chair draped in a cloth; a video of a fingertip touching the lip of a fine crystal goblet as it tilts and spills... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline