Joe Hanly

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In an interview entitled ‘The Meaning of Coincidence’ — which is, in part, about the troubling meaninglessness of coincidence — the late W.G. Sebald spoke about his approach to writing in a manner that emphasised the necessity of drawing on dramatically disparate ideas. “One thing takes you to another” Sebald said, “and you make something out of these hapazaradly assembled materials”. But what was critical within this process was for Sebald a disruption of expected tendencies and trajectories of association. If striving to assemble things in “a random fashion” was understood as a creative priority (his work cultivating effortful haphazardness in a manner that corresponds, perhaps, to Edgar Allan Poe’s seemingly paradoxical wish to “calculate” upon the “unforseen”) this was because the crucial effect of such a strategy was the challenge of having “to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things”. These are not then, conditions of casual randomness, of leisurely imaginative linking: this is an artistic proposition involving a necessary level of intellectual strain, requiring especially testing conditions of connection and comprehension. Sebald’s method aimed, as much as possible, to coax forward the unanticipated. Making connections as part of a process of intricate stylistic patterning could have little point or purpose if it involved working from essentially familiar, already compatible resources of culture, history, geography. Moving beyond the obvious transactions of meaning-making had to involve an assertion of, and a search for, “heterogeneous materials”; there had to be an ambitious leap between proposed points of affiliation — “in order”, Sebald believed, “to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before.”

In Joe Hanly’s recent art-making, there has been a related (and at the same time thoroughly dissimilar) sense of urgent, unexpected and uneasy connection-making. Hanly’s pre-occupation of late has been an idiosyncratic investigation of new possibilities for painting to function as “an art of radical juxtaposition” (to borrow Susan Sontag’s memorable slogan for Allan Kaprow’s happenings — a reference that, perhaps somewhat aptly, sits a little oddly in relation to Hanly’s work). Viewing Hanly’s current art is to be faced with eccentric accumulations and combinations of seemingly mis-matched images — clusters of variously superimposed and interlinked visual signs within single picture planes, constellations of found pictures and diagramatic forms pointing towards assorted places, people, creatures or objects, some readily recognizable, many more very obscure in their meaning and provenance — and this is, undoubtedly, an encounter which involves a specifically-induced experience of intellectual strain. For from one perspective, there is an immediate challenge here, one arising out of our habitual need to discover some degree of intelligibility within the image — and yet in Hanly’s work we are often presented with selections of distinctive and separate object-images that have been brought into awkward contact as a result of their seemingly wild irrelevance to each other: they are deemed appropriately ‘compatible’, in other words, because of their utter lack of sympathy and synchrony. ‘Intelligibility’ as a possibility in some ways runs counter to the guiding impulses behind the creation of the work. Some of these pieces arise out of an interest in combining random cuttings from a found archive of zoological drawings (belonging to a distant French relation of Hanly’s who had, incidentally, lived during the Paris Commune) with other more mundane, or less meaningfully sourced, visual allusions, including components of industrial machinery and forms of technical drawing. There might be, given the family history involved in the genesis of these works, some private meaning informing these inscrutable and absurd couplings. Or there might not: just as likely, these are perversely meaningless visual ‘messages’. At the same time, however, we might also conceive of the task of contemplating these montage-paintings as one of initiation and imagination — and so maybe, as a source of pleasure as much as troubling perplexity. Rather than ‘discovering’ a connection between the juxtaposed and compacted pieces that compose each distinct image-collection canvas — in the sense of recognizing the presence of an authentic, latent, pre-prepared meaning that is waiting to be released from within the work — Hanly may instead wish to offer opportunities for viewers to themselves creatively ‘sync’ these unlike things, each observing individual being the originator of something that draws these discordant components together, subjectively locating points of convergence from his or her own perspective on these initially disconcerting arrangements of this-and-that and who-knows-what.

If there is, then, something in common throughout these recent series of willfully abstruse combinations, it may well be located in an experience shared by viewers: that is, the consistent desire to find connecting meanings in the world: to draw the disparate elements of perceptual reality together into comprehensible form. Despite creating works overtly characterized by the diversity of their content, there is a type of ‘universality’ suggested by Hanly’s strategies — a universality that is nevertheless grounded in the expectation of endless difference. Citing Noam Chomsky’s notion of a “universal grammar”, Hanly has commented that his art emerges out of an interest in the commonality of an aesthetic relation to the world — the notion of the ‘aesthetic’ being understood in a way that is freed from limiting art historical categories to instead refer to questions concerning how all people, in all societies, mediate “their sense experiences in life into bodies of knowledge and belief” (This is, Hanly notes, a pre-Kantian concept of the aesthetic, affiliated to the philosophy of a thinker such as Alexander Baumgarten). What connects Hanly’s experiments with “heterogenous materials” is thus, a fundamentally aesthetic desire — felt in all experiences of the world’s variety and multiplicity — to make meaningful connections, to somehow make sense of the world.

Such speculation on a combined, paradoxical notion of aesthetic continuity and contingency can also perhaps be found to loosely connect with interests evident throughout the various stages of Hanly’s life as an artist. To haphazardly invoke various significant moments in the development of his practice is to quickly spot (despite definite differences of artistic orientation at certain moments) correspondences to the present concerns. Glancing back at Hanly’s work from the early 1980s, for instance, reveals painterly situations of collision and division — we see in his large paintings of this formative period evident contrasts between unruly unpredictability and patient consistency of style. Many such works are considered choreographies of controlled scribbles and energetic stripes that manage to include acknowledgements of Pop’s chromatic boldness with hints of the expressive dynamism of (for example) de Kooning. In later works, this superfluity of gestural and sensory potential gives way to more spare formations, to more muted, even melancholic configurations, but an aesthetic interest in concentrated contrast persists. Alongside abstract elements, figurative features begin to appear — letters, numbers, even zig-zagging doodles suggestive of bodies and other organic forms. Later, a concern for occasions of aesthetic comparison leads, first of all, to the creation of conjoined combinations of paintings, creating a very pronounced, physical form of “radical juxtaposition”. While later again, well into the 1990s, these side-by-side experiments become radically extended, or indeed deepened, through a 3-d breach of the flatness that was deemed insurmountably central to the modernist account of painting. Works of this type began to increasingly approach the space of the viewer, culminating on one notable occasion at Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery in an elaborate sculptural installation that paired the bulk of giant wooden beams, and a huge heavy boulder hung ominously from the ceiling, with two-dimensional components more traditonally appropriate to the formal investigations of a painter.

Hanly’s twenty-first century endeavours have taken him back to the putatively constrained surface-only space of the flat canvas. Yet in a way, his work remains engaged in considering conditions of disorientating depth. His current series create ‘impossible’ spatial conjunctions, possibilities of side-by-side and near-and-far are explored in terms of conscious, methodical muddling. These are visual situations that are obviously ‘shallow’ — made only of simulations, of layer-upon layer and one-after-another appropriated visuals — but they are also spaces in which to get lost, in which we lose our sense of perspectival bearings. In various ways, and through his studied co-ordination of ‘variety’, Hanly has developed a tantalisingly ‘deep’ form of art that simultaneously confounds our standard expectations of artistic depth.

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Declan Long 2012