18:Beckett—Séamus Kealy

Bruce Nauman, Clown Torture, 1987, four-channel video installation, G00159, 
The Art Institute of Chicago

Gary Hill, Wall Piece, 2000, Single-channel video/sound installation

Dorothy Cross, Chiasm, 1999 Single-channel video of performance Courtesy of the artist & Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Allison Hrabluik and Zin Taylor, Samuel Beckett and His 18 Eye Balls, 2007

Stan Douglas
Win, Place or Show, 1998 
Two-channel video/ four-channel soundtrack. Installation dimensions variable 
Courtesy of the artist & David Zwirner, New York

18:Beckett

March 31 to May 27, 2007

Opening Reception: March 31, 2 – 5 p.m.
Curator’s tour:  March 31, 2 p.m.
Curated by Séamus Kealy
News release

Beckett, Contemporary Art, Film, and New Media: May 19, 2 p.m.

18:Beckett explores the legacy of the work of Irish writer Samuel Beckett as it appears in the contemporary visual arts. This exhibition concentrates on how contemporary artists have applied methods that Beckett worked with — not so much Beckett plays as “readymades” nor literal re-workings of his work per se, but revitalizations of a number of themes along with an algebraic, austere clarity associable with Beckett’s writing and productions.

Although it is misleading to identify them, these themes include: using repetition to unmask constructions of reality; expressing determination in the face of despair; generating observations on perception and philosophy; giving desires free expression; employing irrationality; rejecting the principle of knowing more as a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it; focussing on poverty, failure, exile, and loss; applying Democritus’s credo that “nothing is more real than nothing”; and generating an elegant, stylized, often irreverent scepticism of the world at large.

Beckett’s iconoclastic, evolving aesthetic of impoverishment — however conversant he was with more grandiose questions in art, history, philosophy, or psychoanalysis — acts as a withdrawal from modernism’s promises of grandeur and happiness. It continues to provoke and splinter humanity’s idealizations, which themselves arguably trap thought delusively. With Beckettian space and “tableaux,” identifiable in his plays, teleplays, and novels — at times identifiable in this exhibition — one may find an opening beyond questions of ideology and rationality. This aesthetic is rarely beatific or redemptive, but consists of radical doubt; fractured precision; crippled bodies in muck; obsessed, vanquished minds; traumatized, sputtering voices; the shades of the real and the unreal; and most of all onwardness: the lost, forsaken, and unredeemed, within an unwinding, questioning order.

—Séamus Kealy

Artists: Martin Arnold, Dorothy Cross, Stan Douglas, Stéphane Gilot, Gary Hill, Bruce Nauman, Nikos Navridis, Michal Rovner, Gregor Schneider, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Magdalena Szczepaniak, Zin Taylor, and Allison Hrabluik.

Organized by the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto at Mississauga