Hypertextualist Michael Joyce on Alexandra Grant, Hélène Cixous, and Carolyn Guyer
Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest is a multi-faceted project by Los Angeles-based artist Alexandra Grant encompassing a series of public drawing sessions, reading groups, artist collaborations and an installation at 18th Street Arts Center.
As part of KCET’s mapping of Los Angeles artist Alexandra Grant’s interdisciplinary and collaborative project “Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest,” Grant has invited writer Michael Joyce to create an innovative piece of writing about the project. Joyce is known as the pioneer of hypertext fiction, which means that in the late 1980’s he was using the newly invented internet as a place to write fictions that were non-linear, moving forward and backward according to each readers’ choosing. Grant and Joyce have collaborated for many years, he writing original texts or scores for her to use as the basis for her paintings and drawings which have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) among others. A long-time fan of the French writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous’s writing and teaching — Cixous wrote the afterward to Joyce’s book “Moral tales and meditations” in 2001 — it was Joyce who introduced Cixous and Grant recognizing that she too was a “Cixousian.” Joyce’s contribution below is two-part, first an introduction to Cixous’s work “Philippines” and the central role that book plays in Grant’s “Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest,” and the second part an original work of fiction around the central theme of the exhibition, the “perfect other.” In “Une meditation isomorph,” Joyce’s “perfect other” is his wife, the artist Carolyn Guyer, whose work is also included here.
