Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Samuel Beckett in Company
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 538

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art—he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Beckett’s formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism’s theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett’s work. Perceiving Beckett’s ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett’s remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art

The Contemporaneous

Beckettian Spaces of Contemporary Art

Memory and Minimalism

Seeing and Seriality

Beckett and Contemporary Art: The Trace

Beckett and Contemporary Art: Between Abstraction and Minimalism

Beyond Beckett

REFERENCES

1: Beckett as Contemporary Artist

Beckett in a box: Texts for Nothing 8 in Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6

REFERENCES

“Play it again, Sam”: Undoing and Redoing Samuel Beckett’s Molloy in Contemporary Art

Introduction: Nauman’s Molloy (1968), Krauss’s Molloy (1978)

1. Molloy and When Attitudes Become Form (1969)

2. “Aligned with Nazca”: Morris’s Molloy (1975)

3. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Molloy: Bicyclette ensevelie (1990)

4. Final remarks

REFERENCES

Theatrical Minimalisms: On Place in Beckett and Judd

REFERENCES

Specific Objects and Inscrutable Activities: Beckett in the Landscape of Post-War American Art

Introduction

Malone’s Specific Objects: Samuel Beckett and the Minimalism of Donald Judd

Inscrutable Activities: Samuel Beckett and the Conceptualism of Sol LeWitt

Conclusion

REFERENCES

2: Beckett in Contemporary Art

A Singular Totality: Beckett, Salcedo, Hatoum and Installation Art, from Closed System to Embodied Cognition

Installation and Embodiment: Doris Salcedo

Embodied Cognition: Mona Hatoum

REFERENCES

Transformations of Samuel Beckett’s Work in Contemporary Radio Art and Video Sculpture

From the Visual to the Aural: Beckett’s Quad Transformed Into a Radio Art Work

From Words to the Kinesthesia—Beckettʼs Worstward Ho Transformed into a Video Sculpture

REFERENCES

Walking…Stumbling…Falling…Lying Down: Beckettian Operations in the Art of John Barbour and Ugo Rondinone

Introduction

The Artists: Barbour and Rondinone

Formless: The Operations

Walking

Stumbling

Falling

Lying Down

REFERENCES

“…gently light unfading…”: Traces of Samuel Beckett in the Works of Claire-Lise Holy

I.

II.

III.

IV.

Figures

REFERENCES

Samuel Beckett and Steve McQueen: Imprisonment, Sight, and the Screen

The Unblinking Eye

The Sight of the Screen

Looking In, Looking Out

REFERENCES

Beckett and Sonic Art

REFERENCES

3: Artists on Beckett

The Tragic Romance of Language: Paul Chan and Samuel Beckett

REFERENCES

Reverberations: Stan Douglas on Beckett

REFERENCES

INSTANT LIGHT VAULT WALL WHITE BLACK BODIES GROUND HEAT SEMICIRCLE

REFERENCES

INSTANT LIGHT VAULT WALL WHITE BLACK BODIES GROUND HEAT SEMICIRCLE

A Beckett Cut-up in six

Cocentricity

REFERENCES

Beckett: The Failure Sense

REFERENCES

Notes on Contributors

Copyrights/Permissions

Samuel Beckett in Company SBC

Copyright

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to extend their sincere gratitude to Paul Stewart for accepting their manuscript for inclusion in the series Beckett in Company. This volume would not have taken shape in the pleasantly engaging way that it did without the guidance of Valerie Lange at ibidem Press. The editors would like to extend their thanks to her and her team at ibidem for their marvelous work throughout the process.

To all of the contributors we would like to offer a measure of deep gratitude; it has been a distinct honor and privilege to work with such wonderful scholars and writers.

A special note of thanks is due to Paul Chan, Dorothy Cross, Stan Douglas, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Mary McIntyre. Their generosity in contributing their time, energy, and artwork to this project is recognized by us as the precious gift that it is.

For all of those who helped us in acquiring images we would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks. Among those instrumental in this regard are: Kerry Crowley at Yuill/Crowley Gallery, Sydney; Lilly Daniell at Sadie Coles HQ, London; Michael Eby at the Pace Gallery, New York City; Joyce Faust at Art Resource; Todd Leibowitz at the Artist’s Rights Society; Joachim Leisegang; Ewen McDonald; David Rozelle at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Samantha Small.

Katherine Weiss would also like to thank Jutta Brederhoff for her support of this project.

Robert Reginio, David Houston Jones, and Katherine Weiss

August 2017

Introduction: Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art

Robert Reginio

The Contemporaneous

Beckett is our contemporary. The phrase suggests, on the one hand, Jan Kott’s collection Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, a book in which Hamlet, for example, is seen as a shrewdindictment of the ways modern surveillance, deployed in totalitarian regimes, can warp the inner self. In this way, the phrase “Beckett is our contemporary” argues for the universal timelessness of his work. On the other hand, for a writer who inhabited the world of late capitalist, post-war global culture that we still do, the phrase implies a more historically specific encounter. In this way, the phrase becomes polemical, arguing that Beckett may not fit so easily under the various rubrics that have been deployed to situate him within a particular modernist aesthetic lineage. While Beckett’s debts to modernist art and to particular strands of classical Western art have been well-documented (see, for example, The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, edited by S.E. Gontarski; Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media, edited by Lois Oppenheim; and James Knolwson’s 1996 biography, which set the scene, as it were, for the current archival turn in Beckett studies), there has not yet been a close inspection of Beckett’s relationship with contemporary art. This collection opens up new directions in the study of Beckett’s influence on the art of the twenty-first century. It proposes to do so by examining Beckett as a contemporary artist and by tracing his legacy in the work of contemporary artists.

In the first part of this collection, we will see Beckett as a contemporary artist. This means, on the one hand, seeing Beckett as a crucial contemporary influence on avant-garde artists of the 60s and 70s and, on the other hand, seeing his own work for page and stage of that era as congruent with postmodernist movements such as Minimalism and Conceptualism. The second part of the volume traces Beckett’s influence on artists at work in the twenty-first century. These are artists unconcerned with “adapting,” faithfully or otherwise, Beckett into new arenas. It is understood by these artists that Beckett is, as this collection’s first part argues, a forebear who has set the field for any innovative artist. The third part of this collection contains specific artists’ meditations on Beckett’s influence, and they bear out the claim that Beckett’s skeptical regard of various media and his concurrent desperate attention to the expressive potential of those media remain uniquely relevant to a skeptical and desperate age.

As the title of this volume argues, Beckett has a place within the world of “contemporary” artists. Where once “modernist” and “postmodernist” served as functional modifiers, albeit highly contentious ones, “contemporary” seems to be a throwing-up-of-the-hands in the face of a wildly diverse set of artistic practices: “contemporary art” is art that follows, historically, “High Modernist” art (the art of the early to mid-twentieth century). To decide on whether “modernism,” for example, denotes a historically specific set of practices1 and that the term works as a temporal marker first and foremost, or whether “modernism” denotes a particular aesthetic that crosses many temporal boundaries2 is a debate, it seems, endemic to modernism. This unease with historical teleology, master narratives, and a clear lineage are all, of course, hallmarks of “modernist” works of literature and art. We can say that modernism has not ended, that we live with the aesthetic questions it proposed more than a hundred years ago.3

Thus, as the narrator of The Unnamable famously puts it: “When now?” (1991, 291). Exilic, indefatigable in the face of such questions’ impossibility, Beckett’s writing for page, stage, and screen exerts an uncanny pull on artists of the twenty-first century. In considering the influence of Samuel Beckett on contemporary art the question “when now?” is pertinent in several ways. For one, it asks us if in his experimental attitude towards his chosen media we find a decisive break with the modernist project and its various utopias (explicit or repressed), a break paradoxically found in fidelity—attenuated or distorted—to the artist’s chosen medium. Beckett, in this case, is of our fractured time in that his abiding themes—how to get by with so little, how to recall and work through an ambivalent past—persist through a whole range of artistic media, inviting, by such an expansion, a similar interrogation of media by those who have found his eloquent, sardonic tone the guiding force of their own projects.

The seemingly simple question also asks us if Beckett’s work decisively hews closely to the modernist project writ large, if, indeed, his work has been “adapted” (if at all) to the postmodern moment and yet retains that fidelity to formalism so many narratives of modernism find attendant upon the art of “High Modernism.”4 Rather than rehearse the various narratives of postmodernism and modernism (and, in fact, the various narratives of Beckett’s postmodernism or his modernism) it may be helpful to consider space—not time—when we begin to think of Beckett’s place in contemporary art. In fact installations have dominated the art world since Beckett began reducing, ever more, his own work in the late 1960s. As the critic Brian Dillon has astutely noted, the most familiar contemporary space of art now is strikingly Beckettian:

perhaps the most properly Beckettian scene in contemporary art is simply the black box intrinsic to so much video and film art: a dimly illumined space, in which we drift without acknowledging each other, and sometimes, in the semi-dark, stumble on another body, stirring and searching still. (2006, 71)

The ubiquitous video installation is a sealed off space intent on immersing audiences in a fragile balance between the three-dimensionality of their progress through the space and the two-dimensionality of projected video. The dramatic engagement with the tension between the three- and two-dimensionality of the video installation is something we find in Beckett’s late work for the theater, in work that he was producing when the post-Minimalist turn in contemporary art was emerging. As Dillon argues “what Beckett learned from painting” —from gallery going, from considering the place of the spectator between the reduced remains of painting such as Van Velde’s and its intractable referentiality—is “something to do with the intimacy of figure and ground, body and earth, human and inhuman” (2006, 68). “Intimacy” is a term here used to signal the oppositionality of being itself, of being in relation to as our irreducible condition, despite our attempts to be free from external reference, to be free from history, from time, from the body’s own estranging presence. As Dillon continues: “[Beckett] seems, throughout his career, to have taken art as the model for an encounter between corporeal frailty and the implacable abstractions of space” (2006, 68).5

Beckettian Spaces of Contemporary Art

The typical evocation of space as found in Beckett’s dramaturgy centers on a minimalistic reduction of theatrical means that renders space transparent at the same time that the inhabited space is rendered uninhabitable. As Lois Oppenheim argues in The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art, “Beckett’s art is a visual inquiry into and commentary on the fundamental nature of space” (2000, 158). She then quotes Beckett from 1985 on what this might mean: “I wanted to rupture the lines of communication…to state the space that intervenes between the artist and the world of objects” (2000, 158). To “state space,” to put into temporal narrative sequence what remains an ineluctable gap, breach, or pause, is found in his late stage plays’ indeterminate status as two-dimensional projections or three-dimensional object-filled events (many of the plays migrate from stage to television, and vice-versa, such as Not I and Eh Joe). We are not sure if we are intent on viewing a two- or a three-dimensional apparition. For instance, the looming face of That Time, as equivocally drawn as the teeming Mouth at the center of Not I, is an entranceway into the spaces evoked by the disembodied voices that emanate from three distinct areas of the stage. However, this face is also a site of resistance to our desire to read or to listen through the voices and their disconnected memories, to construct a sense of three-dimensional reality in which to situate ourselves. For Beckett, staring intently at a framed painting was always—or should have been always—just such a provocation.6

Oppenheim’s overall argument is relevant in that she finds in Beckett a focus on the specular as instantiating the drama of being and an increasing self-referentiality in late works for the page (e.g., Imagination Dead Imagine). These late works, as we will see in some of the essays in this collection, resonate with the post-Minimalist aesthetic debates of contemporary art. Beckett’s art criticism, for Oppenheim, reasserts “his indifference to art as anything but a projection of the indeterminacy of experience” (2000, 95). She goes further to declare that this essential anaesthetic emerging from Beckett’s art criticism gives rise to a point of view that is “resolutely anti-Conceptualist in its repugnance for the ideation of art; the latter, with its aversion to the symbolic, is doggedly anti-Conceptualist in referring, above all, to itself” (2000, 128). If in “referring to itself” Oppenheim means focused only on an artwork’s constellation of formal elements, then she has accurately placed Beckett in the context of contemporary art.

However, we find exceptions to this “anti-Conceptualist” stance in the range of artists found in this collection considered in accord with such a radical self-reflexivity. While the theorists of Art & Language, for example, might have given up, completely, the object of art for the idea of art—in Oppenheim’s terms, given up the essential place of visibility, in seeing and being seen, when it comes to experience—artists like Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson and others associated with “Conceptualism” were not so quick to divide their discourse so surely between an aesthetics of pure self-referentiality and a concern with the visible. For them, the frenzied repetitions of a Beckett piece like Quad or the permutational exertions of Watt open up a vertiginous space where system gives way to perception which gives way to object which reveals an essentially unstable embodiedness for the viewer or reader.

What is striking in what follows is how often it is Beckett’s prose works that engaged these pivotal artists. One would assume that the turn to Performance Art, Conceptual Art, and current installation-based work would draw upon Beckett’s stark, iconic stage images that predominate in his work for the theater from the 1960s on: while this is true to a certain extent, there is nevertheless a consistent recourse to Beckett’s prose works when these contemporary artists think through the predicates of their chosen media. In particular, the artists of LeWitt, Bochner, and Smithson’s generation were consciously looking beyond the frame of accepted artistic practices in the visual arts and Beckett served as a self-conscious dismantler of his own fictive modes to become a guiding figure for artists bent on a.) incorporating language and its attendant conceptualism into their work and b.) dismantling generic norms contra Clement Greenberg’s vision of modernist art straitened into a contemplation of its own formal properties. It is perhaps the increasing recourse to the starkly visual tableau in Beckett’s late theater and the increasing turn to language in the post-Minimalist art where Beckett and these contemporary artists cross paths at a crucial historical moment as they head in different directions. For Beckett, in the theater at least, the visual predominates to the degree Beckett is concerned with “worsening” language in his late prose, while, for these contemporary artists, the purely visual had become an incapacitated mode for the critique of institutions and of ontologies serving those institutions that set a viewer and an artwork in the pristine “white cube” of formal contemplation.

Memory and Minimalism

As a way of describing the effect of Beckett’s texts on a reader, Arnold Dreyblatt begins his ruminations on his own artistic practice in this volume with the gesture of archiving. The bifurcated, dynamic model of the mind Dreyblatt ponders is one uncomfortably alive with its memories and one hungrily alive to the corpus of memorial matter in which it is situated. In stating that Beckett’s late prose pieces are compelling to read aloud, Dreyblatt hits on a facet of the works that struck actors and directors who read them when they were first published. Beckett was constantly asked to produce monologues like these late pieces (such as A Piece of Monologue) or to have prose pieces such as Fizzles or Company performed. Dreyblatt’s implicit argument as to why this is the case is that the works give us a vision of present, existential consciousness as pitched between the regimes that structure conscious thought and the mass of data that memory intractably is. They are works that “ask” to be performed since they capture for us the modern sense of time paradoxically grounded in an over-abundance of data and a sense of time ever-overdetermined by regimes of organization and utilization. They play for us our sense of being ungrounded and, at the same time, haunted. They are postmodern in the sense that they call to mind, at the same moment they flatten reference to, the historical. In this case his late prose pieces make clear for readers of Beckett that, as Dreyblatt puts it, “it is the reductions which finally speak to our existential experience” (336). Any reduction calls to mind the sense of fullness at which the reductive imagination cuts away.

Dreyblatt’s cut-up reconfiguration of Imagination Dead Imagine seems an extension of the reductionist self-reflexivity of Beckett’s prose experiments. The quasi-aleatory technique employed shows us a Beckett already prepared, as it were, for the regime of the organizational imagination. Rather than giving us a Burroughsian descent into the seams of ordinary language, Dreyblatt’s cut-up reveals the basic “DNA” of Imagination Dead Imagination, a set of recurrences evident to any reader of the text, but, so reconfigured, underscoring for us the balance between formal self-interrogation and bodily presence—a balance at the heart of memory itself—as in this sequence:

MERGING IN THE SURROUNDING WHITE NESS

MOVEMENT TOWARDS HEAT AND WHITE NESS

NO TRACE STILL ON THE GROUND

OF EVER FINDING AGAIN THAT WHITE (340)

Coupled here are the minimal “movements” of the text (the perception of white bodies on a white surface) with the “nothingness” the text insists on foregrounding. “MERGING” and “MOVEMENT,” in the rhythm of Dreyblatt’s text, suggest an immersion Beckett’s text hints at, a purposeful fusion of perceiver with the whiteness perceived. We cut back, as it were, in the next two lines, to a perceiver bereft of a spot on which to construct that very perception. It’s as if a close-up and wide-angle shot are jarringly brought together. It’s an effect most Minimalist art produces in a viewer. Such a viewer feels at once immersed in an “environment” and, at the same time, made aware of their lonely position as a perceiver, as a viewer in search of a whole that serially-deployed Minimalism in particular refuses to yield.7

Dreyblatt thus gives us Beckett the Minimalist once again. But what might it mean to call Beckett a Minimalist? Surely, we should tread lightly between the way Minimalism functions in art history and in literature, but there is in Beckett’s minimalizing always the trace of the archive, of archival processes, of memory—as if it is through the process of minimalizing that memory is voiced, that the trace is revealed. Failure, then, in this reading is the failure of the trace to take firm root—and here we find some of the main connections between Beckett and contemporary art. Performance Art itself is predicated on the notion of the impermanence of the performance, of its unscripted untransportability—a kind of exaggerated notion of what performance is for Beckett. Scripted, surely, but close to fading.

Seeing and Seriality

Failure implies, in Beckettian aesthetics, the need to begin again: to repeat. In a letter to Tom McGreevy written in August of 1934, Beckett wrote of Cézanne’s landscapes:

What a relief the Mont. St. Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscapes…Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities of vitalism...there is no entrance anymore nor any commerce with the [landscape], its dimensions are secret and it has no communications to make. (2009, 222)

For Beckett, it appears that illusionistic realism, when its theme is the confrontation of the human with the inhuman landscape, is a transparency-producing aesthetic. The classical figuration of the picture plane as unambiguous entranceway to a clear perspectival organization of reality in fact is an entracement of the self with its own limits, i.e., as if those limits constitute a world, an abrogation of the inhuman. Cézanne, in Beckett’s estimation, is able to traverse these limits (that is, to establish the picture plane as entrance, border or barrier between viewer and the [memory of] the landscape) at the same time this traversal works to reinscribe the limits of the human, to give a viewer a sense of vision occluded by the inhuman. Reinscribing an occluded view: is this not what we get in Cézanne’s serial studies of “Mont. St. Victoire”? It is certainly not a series which proposes, in its numerous representations of the same place, a compendious reintegration of an “atomistic landscape” to the order of the human. Thus, failing in this regard, there is “no communication” to be made.

In her important study The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art After Modernism, Briony Fer puts particular emphasis on the distinction between a “series” and a “serial strategy” (2004, 67–80). We can say of the series that it proposes a kind of compendium, a collection of individual pieces which, collected together, create a whole. A “serial strategy,” however, is a stylistic deployment of repetition in order to attack the very expressiveness Beckett attacks, the easily commodified or communicated content Brian O’Doherty finds straitened within the “white cube” of the modernist gallery space (1986, 23). The serial projects of any number of artists working after modernism, for Fer, “inscribe subjectivity in surprising ways which do not adhere to, indeed which are radically detached from, the subjectivized expressiveness of a modernist imaginary” (2004, 160; emphasis added). “The shift to serial strategies” that is at the center of her book “involves a shift of focus onto the problem of temporality” (Fer 2004, 3). All of the artists influenced by Beckett that this volume examines closely exemplify this kind of shift. Even if serial strategies are the province of Beckett-influenced artists of the 1960s and 1970s, the problem of temporality, the problem of recurrence and the individual’s relationship to fragmented histories remain central to all of these artists.

Fer’s intriguing revision of the serial strategies of the 1960s— seen, sometimes as Beckett’s work is, as drained of historical or political import—leads her to argue that

[r]ecollection is somehow more vivid, or put another way, original experience is a pale imitation of its repetitions. Repetition is understood as a means not of deadening but heightening experience, just as infinity is not opposed to the material trace so much as rescued through it. (2004, 57)

We can say that in the serial art of someone like Sol LeWitt or Robert Morris or that of Agnes Martin, of whom Fer writes above, the trace is rescued in systems that seem to subsume the singular. A preoccupation with subsequent new ways of seeing—ways that make place for the space between “proposal and duration, between idea and affect, between waiting and finding, between the protracted, continuous time of seriality and its interruptions and intervals” (2004, 67)—can be found in Beckett’s own preoccupations with how to write not “about” something, how to reconfigure language’s innate, irrepressible referentiality in order to undo those very processes by which language’s referentiality “shelters” the transcendental subject of modernism. When Fer writes that serial artworks “insistently ground the experience of art in the time of lived experience, of things just going on, in a world of repetitive habits,” we find a subtle difference in Beckett where, for certain, the habitual is the ground of being, but where the time of his repetitive late theater and television pieces (for example Come and Go, That Time, and Ghost Trio) is a layered time, a textured time, one where memory—even ghostly sketched out in Quad—is a presence, a residue repetition lays bare.

Beckett and Contemporary Art: The Trace

Why does Beckett resonate strongly with such a diverse set of artists? Is it merely his committed stance as artist, first and foremost, i.e., his taciturn consideration of the world beyond his work? Or is there a formal strategy (or a series of formal strategies) that profoundly, inherently influence many contemporary artists? We agree it must be the latter although the former exerts its influence as well. The particular formal concerns found in the chapters that follow lead us to a sensibility of belatedness. This feeling of belatedness, common to most understandings of modernism and postmodernism, is related to the “archival” cultural phase identified by Pierre Nora, which exerts a strong influence in the work of Atom Egoyan and Arnold Dreyblatt as well as Beckett himself.

That Beckett may share an aesthetic with figural painters—such as Claire-Lise Holy—is reinforced, as Nico Israel argues, by the “strikingly stationary, and often silent, images from so many of Beckett’s plays akin to painterly tableaux” (2013, 260). But, he warns us, importantly and despite Beckett’s own extensive study of figural painting, “one must hold this idea of picture or image in tension with the dubiety with which Beckett generally treats the faculty of vision” (2013, 260). In fact, Katherine Weiss’s contribution to this volume, on Claire-Lise Holy’s figural work, makes an excellent case for Holy as the kind of figural artist in whose work Beckettian aesthetic concerns are found in an incessant return to painterly tableaux—often strikingly theatrical —that nevertheless express the “dubiety with which Beckett generally treats the faculty of vision.”8 The “impenetrable unself” of Beckett’s libretto neither (1995, 258) is found in the mise-en-abyme-like column-, mirror- and frame-strewn spaces of Holy’s drawings.

While the tonal and thematic resonances between Beckett’s and Holy’s work verge on the melancholic, Beckett’s formal experimentation, seen as such, was a crucial impetus, in America, for artists in search of expressionless methods of art production. Sarah Garland places Beckett amongst the luminaries of one of the most important —and for the purposes of this volume the most important—art “movements” of the late 1960s: Minimalism. What has been a working notion for Beckett scholars—that Beckett’s tendency is to drive towards a particular medium’s limit or margin and to work from this point of weakness—is seen in Garland’s essay as the driving animus of artists in the 60s and 70s. This movement to nullify a medium’s predicates—expressionless language, music determined by silence, art bound up in intangible ideas and not in objects per se—becomes the way of working for postmodernist artists. The import of Brian O’Doherty’s recontextualizing Beckett in Aspen 5+6 underscores that it is Beckett’s use of systems—both “open” and “closed”—that blurs the distinction between open and closed systems so crucial to artists working with serial strategies. This blurring resonates with Beckett’s metatheatricality and the virtual attack on the predicates of narrative writing in his late “closed space” pieces that are contemporaries of the Minimalists’ work.9 Forms courting the formless, these works push the boundaries of any given medium.

In his chapter, Russell Smith powerfully conveys the way that “the formless,” as the idea is developed by Georges Bataille, describes neither a theme nor a concept. “The formless,” he argues, allows for the experience of operations that “bring down in the world” the human. By tracing specific formal operations in the art of John Barbour and Ugo Rondinone, Smith shows how Beckett functions, as in Garland’s essay, as a fulcrum for postmodern Minimalism and Conceptualism. Beckett refuses, Smith writes, to endow this “lowering down” with the stain of sentimentality or the burnish of high moral seriousness. Just as he interweaves the two modes of systematic self-consciousness in Garland (that is in the spirit of play and that of abjection), Beckett, for Smith, activates in his work a move towards reduction, paring-back, and abstraction that leaves us always at the limits of a given medium. We stumble, in Beckett’s view: this fact of existence so powerfully expanded upon by Beckett in his body of work inspires both the comic and the abject in contemporary art.

Beckett’s “incessant recourse to the visual” in the playing-out of such comic or abject systems is where David Houston Jones begins his chapter (135). But the visual—for Beckett and for the installation artists Mona Hatoum and Doris Salcedo—becomes radically redefined as it becomes attendant on a process (inexhaustible, incomplete, with great political resonance) of embodiment. The probing analysis of Imagination Dead Imagine offered in this essay further inscribes this particular prose piece as central in a consideration of Beckett and contemporary art. As Jones argues, this piece (and others like it) puts the reader (or image-maker) in an impossible viewing position wherein bodies are “memorial or virtual rather than actual” (136). In a critical analysis of Beckett’s formal qualities akin to Adorno’s pioneering consideration of Beckett and the political, the body as trace in Beckett bears testimony to, while refusing to be subsumed into, dominant regimes of power. The artist’s own fidelity to aesthetic penury carries, then, an ethical weight, and it is through this condition or state of penury that contemporary installation artists make unstable one’s own position as viewer. Both Beckett’s narrators in the late prose pieces and the objects of Hatoum and Salcedo’s installation art offer up the “cancellation of the bodily support they appear to provide” (148). As in Smith’s chapter, Jones finds the debility of the Beckettian body a paradoxically rich resource for artists in the twenty-first century.

Debility, as found in Beckett’s sprawling, crawling, entombed, and fragmented figures, is a state that renders the body a trace. The debilitated body’s incompleteness points to—as a trace may—a wholeness never to be gained in Beckett’s universe. In Katharina Knüppel’s essay on video sculptor Peter Welz and sound artist Christof Migone, it is the body as trace—or bodily traces—that are the “materials” marshalled by these artists in their response to Beckett’s work. In registering and rearranging speakers’ taped responses to Quad, the work by Migone explored in the chapter reveals the remainders left over not only from the act of “translating” Quad into a spoken description, but it points to the excess, the trace left by speaking or verbalizing at all. The procedural poetic of Beckett’s Quad, for example, is reconstituted by Migone in order to produce these remainders: the procedure and its remainders shuttle back and forth in the perceiver’s mind like the figure and ground shifting indeterminately in Beckett’s evocation of Cézanne’s landscapes in his letter to MacGreevy. Knüppel quotes Migone in a way that speaks to many artists’ engagement with Beckett’s poetics of weakness and debility: “Here the challenge is to produce a somatic presence in the midst of the semiotic” (165). Beyond Beckett’s stage-bound characters that bear this challenge out (to work on an audience’s nerves at the threshold of enunciation), this impossibility describes precisely the kind of project Beckett is about in Worstward Ho. In other words, in Worstward Ho Beckett attempts to reduce writing to its “[m]ere-most minimum” for the purposes of revealing an absent center—as in Quad—showing the human as that irreducible and obdurate “somatic presence” in—and occluded by— language (Beckett 1996, 91). Knüppel shows just how much the work of “process”-based artists is energized by the basic Beckettian paradoxes of time and memory in his later work. This argues forcefully for Beckett’s experiments in Quad and Worstward Ho as contemporaneous revisions of modernism’s theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like Minimalism and Conceptual Art, whether we understand these trends as carrying a “late modernist” concern over art’s place in modernity (an always already failed attempt to transcend a reified world), or a postmodern recognition of art’s nature as an inexpressive closed loop of iteration (a re-patterning of the world’s reification).

Beckett and Contemporary Art: Between Abstraction and Minimalism

Zachary Tavlin and Kirin Wachter-Grene, in their chapter, argue strongly that Donald Judd and Beckett do not employ minimalistic means for “transcendent” ends, to absolve us of our historical situatedness or to leave the question of history behind for merely formal problems. Rather, the work of Judd and Beckett situates us and ungrounds us at the same time. The figural studies of an artist like Stan Douglas or Dorothy Cross—the former imbricated by layers of media and temporalities and the latter harkening to an almost ritualistic sense of the viewer’s encounter with the work—become, then, recognizably Beckettian not because they return to themes or characters from Beckett’s work, but because, in very different ways, they do what Tavlin and Wachter-Grene insist a piece by Judd (obdurately material) and a piece by Beckett (obdurately spectral) necessarily do. They abdicate anthropomorphism in favor of paradoxically minimal works (paradoxical insofar as the work-as-residue or remainder of a process pairs an inscrutable object with a process that cannot be brought to conclusion). As they write of the “sites” created through Judd’s specific objects or through Beckett’s theater,

[these are] the non-place[s] appropriate for nevertheless concrete gestures where the event of the action can be turned into a non-event, a series of (speech) acts filled—paradoxically—with emptiness, a concatenation of movements without tense, isolated from those concluding motions that would usher in (or at least move toward) a state of satisfactory rest. (98)

Alive to the metatheatrical uses to which Beckett stages the body in time, this passage also hearkens back to Christof Migone’s notion that for the artist after Beckett the challenge is “to produce a somatic presence in the midst of the semiotic.”

The somatic and the semiotic seem to coincide and make each other legible in modern archival technologies. In her reading of the British artist Steve McQueen’s Charlotte and Beckett’s Film, Rachel Wells posits the ambivalence of these artists’ relation to the seemingly omnivorous power of archival technology over the fallible, falling human body. This recording technology—as made fully, intimidatingly present in the artists’ works—becomes a metaphor for a state of narrative being we find in Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine. In that text an impossible scopic narrative voice—both inside and outside—seems to want to materialize (in the reader’s mind) and to obliterate the very process it instantiates. Wells argues that the camera’s eye, in McQueen and Beckett, is also a force of its own to be borne by the (pitiful) human body.

In Derval Tubridy’s chapter on “Beckett and Sonic Art” we find, once more, the interplay between a minimal referentiality and pure abstraction is a key framework through which to view Beckett’s art and the art responsive to his aesthetic. Her analysis of Charles Amirkhanian’s 1987 Pas de voix shows us an audio artist using technology to bend and warp the sounds of the body so that listeners are caught in a soundscape neither wholly referential nor wholly abstract. Tubridy finds it telling that several of the one-minute tracks on a 2006 album Bend it Like Beckett focus on the human breath. The tracks employing and exploring the multiple ways a breath can be embodied point us to the tension between sonic referentiality and abstraction, a tension endemic to sound art, Tubridy argues. She cites a line from “Sounds,” a 1973 “variation” from the drafting of Still: “the sound not die on the brief way the wave not die away” (Beckett 1995, 267). The line is an apt expression of sound in Beckett and Beckett in sound art. The tiny disturbance, the sound wave persists; this signals the survival of the sound, of the influence of Beckett. Yet, too, it signals the separation of sound from source, of voice from origin, of language from the body.

The ambivalence of the embodied self is, for Carla Taban, the thread linking Beckett’s experiments in prose and experiments influenced by Beckett in contemporary art. Tracing the wide-ranging references to Molloy in contemporary art writing and work, Taban begins with the seminal exhibition When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and its exhibition catalog essay “Notes on the New,” in which Scott Burton epigrammatically refers to Molloy’s “Saying is inventing.” She argues even this epigram—especially in the context of the exhibition itself, in which artists of various practices came together—is “polysemous and hence ambiguous” (70). It suggests the erosion of the communicative properties of language at the same time it offers up the connotation of imagining, of conjuring up the possible through language. Taban observes that “the sentence marks the shift, the gliding between these two meanings, the conceptual threshold through where the limits of language become the possibility of fiction” (70). From the ambivalence traced between the archive and the human in Wells’s chapter to the tension between embodiment and disembodiment in Knüppel’s chapter to the ambiguity between narrative and non-narrative sound in Tubridy’s chapter, ambiguity about the artist’s obligation towards her materials resonates in Taban’s chapter and, in so doing, her contribution raises some essential questions about the artist-as-theorist that remain with us to this day: is it incumbent upon the artist to undercut, undo, or unstitch the modes on offer, or are these new modes, these new technologies openings onto a new terrain? Taban shows us that the ironic stance certain artists have taken towards their media, and their concomitant role as critics or theorists is deeply rooted in Beckett’s work (see Robert Morris in Taban’s chapter and Paul Chan as a more recent example of this trend). It is the configuration of the novel Molloy in this instance (its irresolvable duality) rather than only its thematic concerns that reveal the true depth of these artists’ interaction with Beckett. To “prompt readers/viewers to become highly aware of their own arduous meaning-making activity” becomes the central goal of the Beckett-inspired artist (82).

Beyond Beckett

For the artists collected in this volume, this arduous process of making meaning is, indeed, the driving force behind their work. For example, in the photography of Mary McIntyre we find that rather than being the assurer of indexicality, photography fulfills a purpose of veiling, of countervailing the tendency of photographs to unify the presence of an object and its trace. In her hands a photograph becomes an interstitial thing, its form embodying the dissipation of being Beckett gives us, a form where things are nothing, neither indexical (only) nor present (only). In her landscape series Veil—and especially in “Veil IX” from this series—we cross Beckettian landscapes. The tufts of fieldgrass create hopeless little lees in the landscape of “Veil IX”: one can hear Beckett’s speaker from Texts for Nothing crawling along this bleak, shrouded plain. And the photograph harkens to the melancholy landscape paintings Beckett himself turned towards in his travels across Germany in the late 1930s. But beyond mere illustration of “the Beckett country” or an art historical connection, the difficult, paradoxical indexicality of the image—the way it tries to represent occlusion, to express an impossibility to express, the way it engages with photography as medium of traces—surely shows the imprint of Beckett.

In her own text, McIntyre juxtaposes her working methods and methodology with images and words from the world of twentieth century political violence. A feeling of formal dissipation aligned with the courage to listen to “all the dead voices” comes through in this insinuating juxtaposition, just as in Beckett’s own work the traumas of the twentieth century remain ghostly presences. In McIntyre’s transposition of the aesthetic and the political there is the insinuation that empty space contains an entrancing power, that the empty stage/space is a boundary-line, a political space when we consider it is constituted by disappearances. The work of photography, then, is to remain faithful to the disappearances that clear the space for the taking of the photo. An impossible task, for certain, but one undertaken in spite of this impossibility due to a fidelity to the scraps, fragments, and dispossessed beings history has left in its wake.

We find this fidelity in the work of Dorothy Cross as well. Her work Stage, as described and illustrated in her chapter, charts the very notion of circularity and/or progress, of evolution, of the looping of latitudes within the boundary-lines of Empire, and how knowledge is produced through such encirclements. The clearing of space—the marking of space as closed off or open—is at once an aesthetic gesture and political theme both McIntyre and Cross reveal and reconfigure in their photography and installation works. The body is scrutinized, too, in Cross’s installation Space: Fiona Shaw’s physical posture—knees drawn up to her chin and arms wrapped around her legs— hearkens to the fragmentarily glimpsed bodies from the late “rotunda” pieces, while the large arcs of whale vertebrae encircling her signal a kind of temporal endlessness (the very deep time of nature) and the incommensurability of the human body with such enormity.

To see Endgame as a “play of concentric days,” as Cross does (346), is to give voice to the limited nature of the play. All circles in this play share a zero-point center; there is no Yeatsian play of spiraling vortices that offer the possibility of containing the process of entropy. And yet, for Cross and for other artists, this bleak prospect is a fertile starting point. As Cross writes, it is Beckett’s “separating out of elements from the mass,” of which a play like Endgame is emblematic, that strikes her as the definitive gesture of his aesthetic. In reimagining the “game” from the ground-up, Beckett is put in a lineage with modernists like Marcel Duchamp or Gertrude Stein—those artists who were central to such diverse undertakings as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and Pop Art. The “singular unity” of a particular view of modernist art, that David Houston Jones describes as destroyed in Beckett-influenced installation art, becomes, for Cross, a “dissembling [of] the hierarchy of the body” (347). The body in Beckett—never whole—is, in Cross’s work, alluded to through the manifold ways it is subject to a disorienting encirclement or enshrouding. Her striking vision of “concentricity” makes room for a determinate embodiment and a reverberating entropy that dissolves that very embodiment.

The entropic dissolution of community engendered by political apathy drove artist Paul Chan to stage Waiting for Godot in New Orleans in 2007. Finding in the poetic penury of this iconic play a powerful means of addressing societal collapse (as in Susan Sontag’s staging of the play in Sarajevo in 1993), Chan’s production was a carefully mapped-out engagement with the community. Somewhat like Christo’s large-scale interventions in urban spaces, part of the point of staging the play was to bring into conversation artists, activists, municipal leaders, and community members. That it was this play that spoke to that community at that point in time (post-Katrina New Orleans) is, perhaps, not surprising. Waiting was an existentially and politically loaded reality in those days. And yet, beyond the superficial connections between Beckett’s battered topographical and psychological landscapes and those in New Orleans, Chan insists:

if you’re talking about an outdoor production of a play in a city that barely had…civil infrastructure…the compositional parameters become much broader than questions of castings or staging…you expand the idea of what a composition is. (300)

Aesthetic reconfiguration here goes hand in hand with a very public intervention in the fabric of a city, however much (and perhaps especially because) those things typically unifying a city have so decayed. “[A] country road, a tree, an evening, is not abstract at all,” Chan claims, and he argues that the feeling of abstractness in Waiting forGodot, comes from “our inability to imagine what it was like in ‘53 in Paris when it was in ruins” (302).

Chan, centering his own activist aesthetics against the “ruins” of the twenty-first century (for example in Iraq, New Orleans, and our own ruin-strewn, data-infused mental cartography as seen in his video installation that uses the landscape of Godot titled My birds…trash…the future ([2004]), sets out to “describe and appreciate and criticize what’s happening today within a form and grammar that is utterly today, utterly now” (307). Beckett becomes a touchstone for Chan in that Beckett’s work shows a way to deal with irreconcilability, to refuse reconciliation with the world and to make do with less and less. Working in this way is working within a legacy while at the same time trying to free oneself from that legacy. “Returning” Godot to the ruins which inspired it—as one might describe his 2007 re-staging—is part of a strategy of radical recontextualizing that marks Chan’s art practice. Our contemporary here is not a Beckett reshaped to fit our times, but a Beckett that forces us to a position of irreconcilability, a Beckett that drives a wedge between ourselves and our accommodation to “the mess,” a Beckett reminding us of our position of temporal irreconcilability and intractable belatedness.

Stan Douglas’s pioneering exhibition of Beckett’s Teleplays (1988) also firmly planted Beckett in the now, insisting that his plays for television without question form a probing intervention into the gallery space, that they resonate with the rigorous conceptualism of postmodern inter-medial art. In his interview with Marisa Sánchez, Douglas argues Beckett’s works “exist in a continuum present without teleology” (324). This kind of suspension—a present unredeemed by teleology and beset by repetition—marks the formal suspension of Douglas’s works for television, works that recirculate the forms and tropes of the medium while refusing the direct communication supposedly endemic to the medium. “[B]eing skeptical about the possibility of communication,” he says, is the point that he begins in making his work (324).

Douglas becomes a thoroughly Beckettian artist when he insists on his obsession with “human memory and human time and mechanical memory and mechanical time” (326). As in Krapp’s Last Tape, and television pieces such as Ghost Trio, Douglas insists in Beckett’s work, “[t]he medium always becomes the content” (324). In his own work, the confluence of Beckettian formal predicates (medium as content) and themes (the human and the mechanical) bears out what he wrote about Beckett in his catalog for his 1988 exhibition of Beckett’s Teleplays:

[Beckett works] in persistent distrust of discrete self-identity, and the potentially authoritarian subject that lies beneath any such identification, [and] he has been able to delineate (or at least allow others to imagine) the shape of an activity of meaning which, for our culture and its institutions, is still dismissed or marginalized as non-meaning. (1988, 17–18)

In the essays that follow we find Beckett as contemporary artist and Beckett in contemporary art thriving, paradoxically, at the indistinct boundaries whose impermeability once proved the prerequisite for artistic expression. In the wake of Beckett’s work, the failure of boundaries to maintain their integrity demands that new artistic expression be sought and for artists to diligently risk aesthetic penury and to fail as they find their fraught way towards meaning.

REFERENCES

Beckett, Samuel. 1984. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Edited by Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press.

---. 1990. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber.

---. 1991. The Unnamable. In Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press.

---. 1995. The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989. Edited by S.E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press.

---. 1996. Worstward Ho. In Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. New York: Grove Press.

---. 2009. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

---. 2011. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941–1956. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dann Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brater, Enoch. 2008. “From Dada to Didi: Beckett and the Art of his Century.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 19 (1): 173–86.

Chesney, Duncan McColl. 2013. Silence Nowhen: Late Modernism, Minimalism, and Silence in the Work of Samuel Beckett. New York: Peter Lang.

Dillon, Brian. 2006. “Stirrings Still.” Modern Painters April: 68–71.

Douglas, Stan. 1988. “Good-Bye Pork-Pie Hat.” In Teleplays, 11–18. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery.

Fer, Briony. 2004. The Infinite Line: Remaking Art After Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fifield, Peter. 2013. Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Gontarski, S.E., ed. 2014. The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Israel, Nico. 2013. “Contemporary Visual Art.” In Beckett in Context, edited by Anthony Uhlmann, 255–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jones, David Houston. 2016. Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism. London: Routledge.

Josipovici, Gabriel. 2010. What Ever Happened to Modernism? New Haven: Yale University Press.

Knolwson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Krauss, Rosalind. 1986. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT University Press.

Lloyd, David. 2014. “‘Siege Laid Again’: Arikha’s Gaze, Beckett’s Painted Stage.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, edited by S.E. Gontarski, 25–43. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Nixon, Mark. 2011. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries: 1936–1937. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

O’Doherty, Brian. 1986. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Oppenheim,Lois, ed. 1999. Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media. New York: Garland Publishing.

Oppenheim, Lois. 2000. The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Perloff, Marjorie. 1986. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Slade, Andrew. 2007. Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime. New York: Peter Lang.

Weiss, Jeffery. 2004. “Language in the Vicinity of Art: Artists’ Writings 1960–1975.” Artforum 42 (10): 212–17.

 

1 See Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 1986, which critiques the gesture of the formal break; see Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 1986, which sees rupture as defining this specific historical moment.

2 See Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, 2010.

3 There is, then, the tendency to read Beckett as a “late modernist,” one who preserves art as a domain uniquely free from reification, but perhaps only impossibly so. See Fifield, Late Modernist Style, 2013 and Chesney, Silence Nowhen, 2013.

4 See Brater, “From Dada to Didi,” 2008.

5 For a thorough examination of the Beckettian predicates of contemporary installation art, see Jones, Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism, 17–21. In that volume Jones shrewdly locates “the shifting status of the speaking ‘I’” as bound up with the “reconfigurations which take place” in installation art’s “relentless…scrutiny” of such a subject’s relation “to the past, to cultural history, and to art history” (80). Such scrutiny, endemic to installation art, is located convincingly in foundational works like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and, furthermore, we find “[o]ne of the most palpable changes [in artists’ turn to Beckett’s work] is the profusion of work in installation form which allows viewers to enter physical installation spaces in which Beckettian scenarios are populated with digital entities” (174). For a specific reading of these kinds of works see Jones, 29–43.

6 For certain, the strikingly iconic tableaux of the old masters were potent precursors to the kind of stark, image-centric art of his theater. David Lloyd argues, in an essay that analyzes Beckett’s own consideration of the iconic images of Caravaggio, that for Beckett “the reduction or refusal of istoria, of a narrative investment in signification, coincides with a profound attention to the moment of appearance itself, in which the thing—human or non-human—stands forth” (2014, 40). In his epistolary dialogue with Georges Duthuit, Beckett defines the artist as “he-who-is-always-in-front-of” (2011, 139). But, it is with gallery-going as much as it is with those old, framed touchstones that inspired Beckett’s reconceptualization of theater as a confrontation of felt, embodied three dimensional experience with flat, disembodied two dimensional images.

7 What’s striking is that an artist whose tendency is towards minimal reduction is nevertheless essential to artists for whom the historical particular matters. As Andrew Slade argues about the postmodern sublime, the kind of insistent scrutinizing of media in the face of the vanished object is not a theorizing that puts ideas over matter. Rather “it [is] a critical philosophy which bears witness to the force of Ideas and the limitations of the human mind to comprehend them and the human body to feel them” (2007, 22).

8 This skepticism about pictorial mastery is something inherent in Beckett’s early, and extensive, encounter with Western visual art. As Mark Nixon writes on Beckett’s German Diaries, “[t]ogether with Rubens and Titian, Rembrandt represented, in Beckett’s eyes, the competent Master rather than the psychologically challenging painter” (2011, 153). What Nixon argues the diaries tell us is that it is the painter courting failure, the painter that allows for sparseness and incompleteness to register in the viewer is what might make a painter “psychologically challenging,” and worth looking closely at (2011, 143–5).

9 Jeffery Weiss, exploring the centrality of language and writing in post-Minimalist art, argues that in art where a potentially vertiginous self-inquiry was central, “the art [of the 60s and 70s] was often knowingly grounded in a linguistic revolution (Ludwig Wittgenstein and Samuel Beckett, among others, were routinely cited after 1960) in which the very viability of terms and discourse can be said to have been at stake” (2004, 215–16). In this era, “a language-based or propositional art…could emerge roughly in tandem with work by artists such as [Carl] Andre or [Richard] Serra, which is in its means and its content wholly phenomenological” (2004, 216). He argues that these two tendencies “together were conditioned by the premise that physical (even existential) experience is structured or occasioned by the very inadequacies of language or speech, along with other systems, as forms of symbolic expression” (2004, 216).

1: Beckett as Contemporary Artist

 

Beckett in a box: Texts for Nothing 8 in Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6

Sarah Garland

Aspen magazine ran from 1965 to 1970, and billed itself as “the first three dimensional magazine,” as “unbound,” a “Happening!,” and an “assemblage” (“The Magazine in a Box”). The publication took its cue from the annual Aspen International Design Festival, and sought to bring together a “wealth of reading and hearing and touching and moving and thinking matter,” as the founder, Phyllis Johnson, wrote in one of her letters (Aspen no 1, item 8).1 This multi-sensorial approach was made possible by the form. “Since it comes in a box” it might contain “all sorts of objects and things to illustrate our articles,” and “each article can be designed as a separate booklet with the size, format and paper dictated by the article itself,” she explained (Aspen no 1, item 8). Aspen was to be the physical container that the word “magazine” has always implied—“a storehouse, a cache, a ship laden with stores” (Aspen 1, editor’s letter), promising to stimulate “touch and hearing as well as sight like no two-dimensional magazine has ever done before” (“August 1967 advertisement”). The first two issues were a blend of lifestyle and arts reporting, but after the third issue, designed by Andy Warhol and David Dalton in the shape of a Fab detergent box (Aspen 3), the “box of delights” begun to mutate into an environment for artworks themselves, becoming, as Gwen Allen argues in Artists’ Magazines, an alternative exhibition space.2 “Aspen gives you actual works of art! Exactly as the artist created them,” an advert for the “British Box” announced (“January 1971 advertisement”).

A different guest editor and designer team curated each box: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore worked on Aspen 4 (the McLuhan issue) and Dan Graham and George Maciunas produced Aspen 8 (the Fluxus issue). Brian O'Doherty worked for a year on his box with Dalton and Lynn Letterman—the double “Minimalist Issue” now known as Aspen 5+6—and in its white cardboard cube it became, according to Brenda Moore-McCann, “the first exhibition to completely dispense with the gallery” (Bui 2007; Moore-McCann 2009, 72). The box was marketed as “a museum of the moment,” and worked across media, including, as the box enumerated on its contents page, “1 box 1 book 4 films 5 records 8 boards 10 printed data” (“September 1968 advertisement”). The boards were for a build-it-yourself Tony Smith sculpture called The Maze; the data included experimental scores to go with the recordings of John Cage’s Fontana Mix and Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark. A translation of an excerpt from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, and Conceptual works by Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, and O’Doherty himself (one under his own name, and one under the pseudonym of Sigmund Bode) were also included. Samuel Beckett’s eighth section of Texts For Nothing, read by Jack MacGowran, appeared in the box on flexidisc alongside artists who were radically experimental, often anti-aesthetic, and who went on to be absolutely at the heart of Conceptual, Minimal, and neo-Dada practices.

The Aspen minimalist issue was intended to prompt new and exciting alignments between the disparate materials in the box. “Robert Morris’s Site would talk to Hans Richter’s Rythmus 21; László Moholy-Nagy’s Light play: Black-White-Grey would share its transparencies with Rauschenberg’s Linoleum,” O’Doherty suggests (Bui 2007). These correspondences crossed media too; the attention to time and space in both of Merce Cunningham’s recorded lectures play off against ontological concerns voiced by the narrator of Text eight, and lines might also be drawn between Dan Graham’s Schema, listed here as Poem, March 1966, and the self-consciousness of Beckett’s eighth Text as well as to Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” (Barthes’s essay was commissioned by O’Doherty for the issue [Bui 2007]). As Mary Ruth Walsh suggests: “The ingenuity of the box is such that to fasten or isolate one artwork or project is to rearrange the system of relationships within its components. Perspectives shift, analogies touch, chimeras appear and disappear” (Walsh 2003, 46).

The issue was concertedly transatlantic. O’Doherty, an Irishman working in New York, sought to elect “ancestors” for his own “New York history” in a way that used the preoccupations of the New York art scene as a network. “Morty [Feldman] had this idea that if you come to a center where your life is going to be lived,” O’Doherty remembers,

[y]ou have to pass through its antecedent history so that you know who and where you are, so that you position yourself in a literate fashion in the matrix of New York. And then, you know, taking the cues from what’s around you, you respond according to your reading of whatever that particular situation might be—a sort of game theory idea in a way. (O’Doherty with McManus 2009)

O’Doherty’s game ended up juxtaposing the contemporary American artists with older European avant-gardists such as Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, Naum Gabo, the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, and with Russian constructivism. At Dan Graham’s suggestion the box was dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé (O’Doherty with McManus 2009), and as an ensemble looked, as Jud Yalkut pointed out in a contemporary review, to be moving towards the conditions of an “intermedia magazine,” (Yalkut 2016, 62) or—to cite the older precedent Graham highlighted—towards the hybrid of object, situation and performance that Mallarmé planned for Le Livre.3

If we put the recording of Jack MacGowran reading the eighth of Beckett’s Textsfor Nothing back into the context of Aspen’s double issue, its new role in this experimental multimedia environment gives us both the work as an item that is “boxed” into a miniature system with other items (a condition that I’ll explore later on), and a trace of an actor’s physical incarnation in the form of MacGowran’s sonorous, Irish voice. Although it’s not clear whether the laments of Texts for Nothing