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Visual Word/ks, a joint exhibition by Barbara Penrose and Nameer Davis, was most impressive for me in terms of Davis' main installation- a rather baffling three-dimensional textual construction based upon an exchange between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Partially reminiscent of the metallic bricolage of the American sculptor David Smith, and partially reminiscent of such lettriste sculpture as the early work of the French artist Paul Gette, Davis' installation could also be mistaken for a rather disorderly variation upon some monosyllabic graphic theme by Edward Ruscha. But whereas Ruscha tends to draw or paint the individual noun or imperative, Davis' installation takes the unusual step of orchestrating an anecdotal exchange between the two masters of early and late modernism:
James Joyce: "How could the idealist Hume write a history?"
Samuel Beckett: "A history of representations."
Put very simply, Davis presents a three-dimensional, typographical-and virtually calligraphical- orchestration of this question and answer, projecting its signs into space, somewhat as Robert Wilson's adaptations of past dramatic classics project and re-orchestrate sections from lbsen 's, Shakespeare's and other precursors ' texts across a variety of media.
What one confronts in Wilson's work is dramatically dislocated word and gesture, as several representatives of a single character dismantle and reassemble segments of utterance and action at different speeds. Abandoning explicit continuity, Wilson's adaptations of past works provoke intensified awareness of the molecules of habitual communication, as opposed to the banality of its superficially meaningful momentum. Watching Wilson 's productions, one is constantly exposed to marginalised creative energies, such as the shock of slowly disintegrating film-frames, when the reel stops turning, and the cinematic 'real' starts burning.
Davis' work, I think, has something of the