The Brooklyn Rail

Artists as diverse as Dieter Roth and John Cage have found James Joyce’s modernist texts a rich reservoir of source material. In the six-movement hour long performance to forget and begin again,the multi-media conceptual artist Carol Szymanki draws on what the author referred to in Finnegans Wake as “thunderwords”—a cacophony of sounds from myriad languages evoking the noise of thunder when spoken—to intensify her ongoing inquiry into the relationship between orders of visual, spoken and textual language.

Over decades, Szymanki has gradually assembled her own personal visual vocabulary by roaming across a panoply of mediums—including sculpture, drawing, video, painting and performance. A constant has been the development of brass wind instruments—think unusually elongated trumpets and strangely curled tubas—each one carefully articulating a letter of the alphabet in a font of her own design. While The Cardinal Vowel Marching Band (1998) develops them, 2017’s The Phonemophonic Alphabet Brass Band refines these instruments. Putting them to work, a performance at Park Avenue Armory with renowned trumpeter Jaime Branch four years ago, together with last year’s The Fall (Recirculation) at Torn Page and in winter 2025 with the Talea Ensemble, coordinated the instruments with either elements of performance or film to fashion a series of complex, dense, multi-media installations.

Receiving its debut at e-flux, to forget and begin again finds Szymanki probing even deeper into parallels in visual, spoken and textual language. Adding a vocalist and both live and recorded passages of spoken word into the set-up, Szymanki transmutes the first of Joyce’s ten hundred letter long thunderwords into sound by dividing it into its etymologically distinct parts. Played in the order that spells out the first thunderword— bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk—the sounds become an addition to her vocabulary as a conceptual artist.

On the evening, spectators are organised around two semi-circular tables, each laden with spotlit brass instruments. Behind them is a screen displaying a moving image of dancer and choreographer Angelina Hoffman striking letter shaped poses against colored letters corresponding to those portrayed by the instruments. Directly in front is a lectern, while to either side are four further ones, illuminated during the live sung or spoken word sections. Speakers surround everything, enveloping the spectator in sound.

If the stage arrangement suggests a play, then the musicians and vocalists feel like actors, the text they read from serving as their script. As it begins, even though the brass players—Sam Jones to the left and Arda Cabaoglu Virtanen to the right—seem to randomly choose from the array of shaped instruments before them, their movements are carefully rehearsed. The rich timbre of jazz vocalist Fay Victor’s voice punctuates proceedings, while live readings, from the actresses and directors Di Sherlock, Canning Web, Anya Bernstein and Luan Rogers are interspersed throughout. Their live voices commingle with recorded voices, one of which is Szymanki’s long-time friend Joan Jonas. The texts they read are Szymanki’s own writing, with some passages translated into other languages. At around the five-minute mark I hear the phrases “Singularly, two people tripped today; fell over slightly, themselves reflecting peculiarities of self-consciousness,” and half-way through “The menu changed; fans were blowing; some replicate lost items as if they had never been lost.” With the texts being fragmentary and read by so many different voices, meaning is always elliptical. As a result, the design of the stage set-up and the arrangement of the voices and instruments point back at themselves. If Finnegans Wake is a text about writing, To Forget and Begin Again appears to partly be about the mechanics of conceptually based multi-media performance.

With the voices clashing against the instruments, cacophony persists for much of the hour, but at moments melodic passages do jump out of the dense sonic weave. During these passages, it’s as if the disparate performers and their respective mediums are speaking to one another in an unidentifiable tongue. That these feel random only makes them sweeter.

In texture, rather than the work of other conceptual multi-media artists emphasising sound—typified by, say, Christine Sun Kim—the frequent dissonance of the brass horns and the proto-rap-like voice of Fay Victor means to forget and begin again recalls the lineage of free jazz/spoken word experiments piloted by Charles Mingus and Kenneth Patchen in the ‘50s and extending right through to Camae Ayewa and Aquiles Navarro today. While the complexity of the performance is heady and often intoxicating, I couldn’t help but desire a new work consisting just of horn and voice—a duet rather than a symphony. Captured right, this could be something to be watched repeatedly, a nod to the current work’s title, to forget and begin again—its instruction for the performers also acting as a template for the spectator.