The Cesspool of Rapture
Details:
19:00 - 22:00
Thursday 30 January 2025
FormaHQ & Presse Books
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW
Free entry, RSVP
The book will be available to purchase on the night in Presse Books. For more information head to mabibliotheque.cargo.site.
The Cesspool of Rapture: a book launch and screening
Joseph Noonan-Ganley with Seán Elder, Linda Stupart, and Sharon Kivland
30 January 2025
Join us to celebrate the publication of Joseph Noonan-Ganley's The Cesspool of Rapture, Artist's Texts 2012-2024 by Ma Bibliothèque: an evening of readings, a screening and conversational responses to the book from Seán Elder and Linda Stupart, introduced by Sharon Kivland.
The Cesspool of Rapture is a collection of Joseph Noonan-Ganley’s writing from 2012 to 2024, structured by three themes and contexts that emerged during the process of assembling the texts: STUDIO, UNIVERSITY, and EXHIBITION and includes responses by Simon Watney, Sarah Tripp, and Tom Dillon.
Working in my studio, teaching in universities, and presenting art in exhibitions demand distinct and contrasting kinds of labour that do not easily lead from one to the other. Persisting in any one of these areas is premised on the work and learning undertaken in the others. This assembly demonstrates why I continue to move between these, why movement is generative, essential. This book reconstitutes connections that are suppressed by infrastructural, institutional, and psychic compartmentalisation. These texts were not written to be compiled. They collectively comprise their themes, demonstrating diversity rather than synthesis [...] Objects host shared encounters: when I visit them, I come into contact with the desires of others, and they become contaminated by mine in the process.
The Cesspool of Rapture is a collection of more than ten years of complex, intensive grappling with art, language, flesh, and material by a remarkable voice intent on coming to grips (embracing/holding/tackling) with the world around him. Noonan-Ganley muddies boundaries between self and other, theory and practice, fabric and bodies, clay and dirt, in a constitutive queering of art and visual culture—where the pleasure of the reader ignites in every moment that “the encounter takes hold".
- Linda Stupart
Noonan-Ganley brings us beside him in a rigorous study where objects become companions that implicate observation, writing, and research in the body. Beds, mud, universities, and the ephemera of artists living and dead become things by which we wish to be loved or fucked, or which we wish to love or to fuck. Binaries of interior and exterior do not exist here—the notion of choice and conditions for living, auto/biography, are revealed in intense richness by Noonan-Ganley and invited guests as socially-produced, inherently collective, and emergent between author and reader, page and thumb.
- Seán Elder
Biography
Joseph Noonan-Ganley is an Irish artist from Co. Clare. His videos, sculpture, photography, textiles, and writing explore how identity is collaboratively made by openly manipulating the leftover material from other people’s work and experience. His video installation Our Bed—about the making of improvised beds after the infamous 1972 plane crash in the Andes—was exhibited at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin, and shortlisted for the CIRCA Prize, in 2023. The Cesspool of Rapture, 2017—revealing zips as methods of composition through the dresses and words of English-American couturier Charles James (1906-1978)—was included in GAZE film festival at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, 2023.