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. Responses by Simon Watney, Sarah Tripp, and Tom Dillon end each section.
'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 me (mine) in the process.'
The Cesspool of Rapture, Artist's Texts 2012-2024 was published by Ma Bibliothèque in 2024. Buy here.
‘Noonan-Ganley cares about objects in half-states, doing things they possibly shouldn’t and getting sticky with the residue of others. He processes objects and texts by remaking and retelling, tweaking them to reveal a complex dynamic of ethics, attraction, and queer use. In collaboration with the past, Noonan-Ganley’s work and writing help the viewer and the reader to recover a set of mechanisms for finding the ‘good’ in things. Getting messy along the way is as inevitable as it is compelling.’
Vaari Claffey
‘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
‘In The Cesspool of Rapture, deviant associations creep up unexpectedly: bodies of evidence circulate through conversations with artists, Joseph Cornell’s contorted sexual frustrations mingle uncannily with the writer’s own identity, the belly of a pot is felt, and an intimacy with jockstraps defies normative engagement. Enmeshed in worldly physicality, Noonan-Ganley’s writing undoes conventions of biography, pedagogy, and authorship, with rigorous indecency.’
Katrina Palmer
‘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