Limerick, Ireland
Conor McGarrigle, Unreliable Narrations, 2007, DVD, 12 minutes

Conor McGarrigle

b. 1966, Ireland

Unreliable Narrations is a 12-minute text-title roll, scrolling the text of the first chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses in which all the vowels have been censored in the style of Government documents released under Freedom of Information rules. The work is a comment on the stifling and censoring effect of copyright and the corporate enforcement of intellectual property on contemporary culture.

By censoring the vowels, the work avoids infringing the Joyce Estate copyright, but in the process removes all meaning from the text, transforming it into a puzzle which the public are invited to solve in an attempt to restore its meaning.

It is a truism that while Ulysses is acclaimed as the greatest work of Irish literature, very few get beyond the first chapter. However, as the first chapter is well known, most people will find it relatively easy to decode the text. Thus the work acts as a tactical public exhibition of the Ulysses text by circumventing the de facto ban on such displays, mirroring the everyday tactical resistances to the increasing corporatisation of culture, and highlighting the paradox of Joyce, the celebrity genius, whose work most find very difficult to decipher.

(Text: a sense of place catalogue, 2007)

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