Hot shades in the summertime … — #Berkshireweekend

The ear is the way of the heart. The words are tacked up on a bulleting board in the hallway at Mass MoCA, and they’re in French, printed on a scrap of paper in a collage of past conversations.

Some of them are casual thoughts, and some meet each other with unexpected honesty — notes slipped across the table — in Joseph Grigely’s In What Way Wham? White Noise and Other Works — Mass MoCA’s newest summer show. He explains that people have written them to him when they don’t know sign language. He has been deaf since the age of 10.

Walking into the rooms he has made here, walls lined floor to ceiling with these moments, feels like sitting with him as an art student at lectures, joining him for a drink in a bar or a studio at night in New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin. Someone picks up a pen and a flyer or tears a page out of a notebook and leans over to jot an idea.

And he has been able to preserve those exchanges across decades. They run together here in vivid snatches, like the experiences on the bulletin boards outside — where a French saying overlaps an art opening in Sweden, a magazine spread asking a question about Rumblefish, a photo of a old red red jeeplike car with a European license plate and white roof and white bumper, and the word ‘Ofili’ on the hood …

But instead of post cards, these are conversations in real time. You can feel them happening, sometimes on the edge of another, or under its cover. Like passing notes in class or annotating a book … they bring a sense of honesty, of slipping under the surface remarks and saying what you think — unexpected flicks of raw response.

the touch is wonderful
it was designed for the blind
to help with maps
we can pretend not to hear him
it’s too bad we can’t dance in here
you don’t have the time to concentrate or get into something taking your own time
now the truth comes out I was studying for the priesthood
my Scorpio collection

A poet could find infinite prompts, seeing and feeling a way through words without contest, without context.

Taking them in slowly, I begin inescapably to wonder … when he is sitting in an artist’s talk, or having a beer in a crowded auberge, how does Gridely think about the experiences he is recalling here?

The title of the show, white noise, implies something blurred and impenatrable. In his work Blueberry Surprise, he has lined the long hallway with phrases in black, red, yellow, moving from idea one to another without a break, as though he’s navigating a book with an infinite number of storylines, Italo Calvino to the tenth power.

‘Do you want to take a shower and rest while I get dinner ready? Spinning in the bright spring sun — the sun warms up lanolin on the wheel. … Ramps? I don’t know I get flustered in front of the broccoli …

And how beautiful these words and thoughts and textures. How much care implied in that first question — how much gentle exchange.

Grigely tells curator Denise Markonish, in her notes to the show — “language is transformed into what is visible: glances, gestures, movements of the mouth … the beauty of being deaf is the privelege of watching the world with the sound turned off.”

And she asks us to think about how we would experience a world in silence.

“Would you, like South African poet David Wright, who became deaf as a child, depend on the cues of movement to understand the sound associated with a bird’s wing?”

Wright choreographs the world, translating sound into movement. Grigely sees feeling on the page, and in the faces and bodies of the people writing to him across the table.

The phrase that stopped me at the opening, ‘L’orielle est le chemin du coeur — it’s not not le chemin au coeur, the way that leads to the heart, but le chemin du coeur — the path belonging to the heart. In silence that path seems encompassing here, patient and attentive and finely attuned.