Bernhard
Münzenmayer-Stipanits
is reading Ulysses

ABOUT THE PROJECT

“Reading Ulysses” began, in fact, as a reading project. Having failed a first time, I tried again with a different approach: I read a few pages every day, then made a sketch of whatever came to my mind and added some lines of the text (see illustration 1 below). This ritual helped me to find my way through the novel and fill two sketch books with roughly 240 drawings.

Some time later, I couldn’t use my studio for about a year. Looking for an artistic project to cover this period, I remembered a friend with a very old-fashioned press I could use, which led to the idea of a cycle of lithographs based on my Ulysses sketches. I didn’t imagine this enterprise would keep me busy for fifteen years.

For one thing, lithography is a “slow” technique and requires a long, uninterrupted work process, which makes it difficult to integrate into everyday life (for lithography as a technique, see below).

I also found that simply copying the drawings onto stones and printing them was not satisfactory: the motifs needed to be elaborated and the text integrated into the pictures, and, most of all, the whole had to work as a series.

The solution lied in making the prints overlap one another, combining number one with number two, two with three, and so on (see illustration 2 below). This way, they are enchained in an order which reflects the process of moving forward in a text.

Despite its title, “reading Ulysses” is an artistic project, not literary research. It does not claim to be “true” to the text (whatever this means) and I do not pretend to wholly “understand” the book.

The connection of the pictures to the text is entirely personal, not always obvious, often seemingly arbitrary, sometimes even absurd. I like to imagine Joyce would have appreciated this.

Still, at the beginning of each episode, you will find a document containing the text passages related to the pictures which might help you to make a connection of your own.

And, as I started gathering information beyond the text itself relatively late into the project (and so, for instance, learned about the subdivision of the novel into episodes related to the Homeric Odyssey, which is the reason why I do not refer to them under their Homeric names), the pictures in the first half of the cycle are much more “innocent” than the later ones, and the project can also be seen as documenting the development of my relationship with ‘Ulysses’.

Whatever your relationship to ‘Ulysses’, however, I would most of all like you to enjoy yourselves.

I am sure Joyce would approve of this.

LITHOGRAPHY

Lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in 1796, is a planographic printing method based on the mutual repulsion of oil and water. A forerunner to offset and other forms of industrial printing, it is nowadays used mainly for artistic purposes.

In traditional lithography, the image to be printed is drawn onto the surface of a smooth and flat limestone plate with a basic substance in either solid form (pencils, crayons) or as a liquid (ink). Then, the stone is treated with a mixture of weak nitric acid and gum arabic ("etch"). This makes the parts of the stone's surface which are not covered by the drawing more hydrophilic (water attracting).

When, before printing, the stone is moistened, the water only adheres to the gum-treated parts, making them oil-repellent. So, the oil-based printing ink, which is applied with a roller, sticks only to the original drawing. The ink (= the drawing) is transferred to a paper sheet by use of a friction press.

After the printing process, the drawing is removed from the stone with the aid of grinding sand which also smooths the surface for reuse.

One of the great advantages of lithography is that, other than an etching or a woodcut, it can be used to reproduce different drawing techniques like crayon, pen and ink, even watercolour, and yet retain a specific character of its own.

Like most other traditional printing methods lithography produces a mirrored image of the original drawing.