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James Coleman - Chronology: Selected Works (ca.1956-2007)

The book is a catalogue raisonné of the work of the international artist James Coleman. I was commissioned to organise the Chronology as the principle ‘interpreter’ of his work since the late 1970s. The Chronology occupies 2/3rds of the book, and consists of analyses of 49 individual works; 35 entries were written by me, many of which were undocumented works that had to be researched; the remaining 14 were edited by me from analyses by other writers of works I had not seen. Coleman’s work has been central to the development of my own. It was through investigating the legacies of Irish colonial history and literature alongside Coleman’s work that I came to understand the subtle relation of the political to the aesthetic, eventually leading to studies on the role of trickster/ Hermetic tropisms in undermining dominant discourse.

One of my entries for the catalogue raisonné, was an extract from ‘So Different... And Yet’, a one-hour lecture transcript published in James Coleman, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2009, for which the co-contributors are Jacques Rancière, Luke Gibbons and Dorothea von Hantelmann (ISBN 978-1-903811-96-2). My text is an in-depth analysis of one of Coleman’s more carnivalesque installations, which had undergone several contextual and technological transformations. This text was conceived as a ‘performed lecture’ in collaboration with the artist; that is, as The Lecturer, I was part of the ‘framing device’ in Coleman’s varying presentations of the installation’s setting and props, and my text mutated accordingly. It was performed in the following venues: Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona (2006), MACBA, Barcelona, and the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris (2007) and the Rietvelt Academie, Amsterdam (2011).

The book is a catalogue raisonné of the work of the international Irish artist James Coleman. The Chronology consists of a total of 49 ‘entries’, or succinct analyses, of individual works; 35 were written by me, and the remaining 14 were edited by me from the best analyses by other writers. The Chronology occupies 2/3rds of the book. The book is also provided in English.