Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Beckett and Company PARTICIPANTS


Ondrea E. Ackerman 
(Columbia University, New York)

‘Beckett’s “Relentless Cycle of Configurations”: Nothingness and 
the Iterative Moment’

Self-proclaimed as ‘America’s finest news source’, The Onion is a New York-based satirical newspaper that marked the centennial of the birth of Samuel Beckett with an article headed, ‘Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play.’ With its ‘bare-bones structure and bleak repetition of what can only be described as “nothingness,”‘ these twenty-three ‘white, uniform, non-ruled pages, which […] were left unbound, unmarked and untouched,’ according to the article’s lead authority, Trinity College’s fictional Professor Fintan O’Donoghue, attest to Beckett’s ‘trademark style of “paring down” to really get at the core of what he was trying to not say.’ Alluding to Beckett’s own rare published statement on art (‘There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, together with the obligation to express’), this Onion article highlights Beckett’s shift in genre from the novel to the theatre, which he himself explains in a conversation with Mel Gussow as a preference for ‘the limitations of theatre as compared to the non-limitations of prose. I turned to theatre,’ Beckett explains, ‘as relief – from the blackness of prose. After fiction, “theatre was the light.”‘ 

This paper will begin with the literal ‘blackness of prose’, the ink on the page, tracing the thematization of nothingness in the trilogy from Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, through to Beckett’s later plays where that nothingness re-emerges, not as a negation through language, but instead through the specific, task-oriented actions infinitely repeated in the real time of the stage. From Murphy’s rocking and Molloy’s sucking stones to the paced strip of Footfalls, the rocking of Rockaby, and the walking and dredging of Quad I and II, these systematic structures that Beckett constructs via the precision of the printed page come into conflict with the indeterminacy of performance.  Forming a dialectic of control and lack of control, Beckett’s rigid structures - what Mary Bryden calls ‘the relentless cycles of configurations’ – provoke an inevitability of chance that undermines both the static literary text and the temporal performative process to achieve, in effect, the ‘blank page’ proposed in jest by The Onion. 





Dr Steven Barfield 
(University of Westminster, London)

‘“All the dead voices”: Beckett and Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials (2004—2005)’

Samuel Beckett has been an important inspiration for Bruce Nauman, as attested to by familiar works that show deliberate correspondences (such as Slow Angle Walk [Beckett Walk ] (1968)). The relationship has also been explored by critics such as Steven Connor (2000) and was the subject of a significant 2000 exhibition, Beckett/ Nauman, that was held in Vienna. In particular, the critical relationship between Beckett and Nauman has been analysed through their shared interests in the use of the body, of clowns/ tramps, and the often unsettling humour of repetition in both their works (in particular where repetition in Nauman’s works of everyday remarks and objects becomes frightening and/or disorientating for the spectator).

Rather than exploring more obvious or general affinities between their whole oeuvres, I wish to focus on just how the recent sound installation Raw Materials exhibited at Tate Modern in 2005 can be read in terms of Beckettian themes. Raw Materials was a series of repurposed fragments of voices and words from Nauman’s previous works in a large-scale installation (‘an aural collage’) for the Turbine Hall, that was also affected by the listener’s own movement through the space and included found sound from the visitor’s voices. Among the themes in the installation which I will demonstrate and discuss are

The relationship between the subject and the polyphony of fragment voices in the world and the exteriority of language as a prominent figure in many Beckett texts (such as Waiting for Godot and The Unnamable). 

The importance of self-quotation/ citation to both artists in their later works. 

The relationship between the individual fragments of voices and the overall sense of a unifying sound as possible in the exhibition and what this might say about Beckett and Nauman in terms of their generally different approach to mourning and melancholia between the subject and the world, and to repletion and absence in works of art.






Santiago Borja
with Javier Bassas Vila, Gabriela García Hubard, and Joana Masó

Our project consists in the projection of Santiago Borja’s film Said and Done, the reading of a text that will analyse this video-piece related to Samuel Beckett’s work, especially with the concept of suspension, and to Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze’s thought of the visible, in order to open a round-table where the subjects for discussion will be: the possibilities and/or consequences of the ‘epochetique perspective’ and the ‘ephectic violence’ concerning visual arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. For this purpose we intend to invite three or four scholars to nourish the discussion. 

Said and Done (a 5-minute video-piece)

This video is based on the polemic photograph of scholar Edward Said throwing a stone in Lebanon in July 2000. Set against a blue-screen background (as used in commercial cinema) a man is in the very moment of throwing a stone. He painfully tries to stay in the same position, as if motion has been suspended and image-time has gone through another axis. 

Being a false still-image, all the tension is given by the physical effort of keeping this awkward position, plus the noise produced by its own heartbeats and disgruntled respirations. In this video-piece there is a serious attempt to explore the possibilities of isolation and neutrality in artistic imagery, as if one could conceive a non-narrative image. As Deleuze wrote in Francis Bacon, ‘Isoler est donc le moyen le plus simple, nécessaire quoique non suffisant, pour rompre avec la représentation, passer la narration, empêcher l’illustration, libérer la figure: s’en tenir au fait’

‘From Now Say To Be Missaid’

On dirait cette fois qu’une image, telle qu’elle se tient dans le vide hors espace, mais aussi à l’écart des mots, des histories et des souvenirs, emmagasine une fantastique énergie potentielle qu’elle fait détoner en se dissipant. 

Gilles Deleuze, ‘L’épuisé’

A gesture is frozen in suspension. The gesture of throwing a stone is a quotation suspended within a blue-screen background, prompting a figure in tension. A ‘muscular dialogue generated by gesture’ – something which Beckett stressed in his lectures on Molière – and the possibility of isolating the figure involve an interaction between Santiago Borja’s video piece Said and Done and Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. 

Next to the darkness that suspends Beckett’s mouth and head – reminiscent of Not I and That Time –a blue-screen, that is normally used as a film’s background in order to be substituted later by an actualised landscape, is used to explore the possibilities of des-contextualization or neutralization of an image in Said and Done. Through different paths, both suspensions point towards the ephectic attitude announced by the Unnamable and Derrida’s epochè, adjourning or postponing the assumption of position. 

Ephecticism means suspension, and more explicitly suspension of judgement, decision, conclusion, or intentionality when the Beckettian ‘character’ asks: ‘Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares?’ Such a question, answered with the suspended ‘I don’t know’, focuses on the ironic complexities of an ephectic attitude being either intentional or unintentional. In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida relates the sceptical epochè , which also means interruption or cessation of judgement, to the ‘skepticism’ concerning vision (from the Greek verb skopeo, ‘to gaze’). Therefore, farther from fixing a thesis or a position, the image, like the judgement, ‘depends on the hypothesis’.

Under the light of this suspension, the title Said and Done evokes a sentence, in more than the everyday sense, appending word, interpretation and fact, where the participles ‘said’ and ‘done’ suggest that the epochè or the ephectic attitude might permeate not only the present but also the past or the finished action. Nevertheless, Beckett’s accomplishment of the image has also been interpreted as a movement exhausting its possibilities in ‘L’épuisé’. Following Deleuze, does Beckett’s and Borja’s images detonate ‘a fantastic potential energy […] while being dissipated’? Do these images become ‘like a possible event’ no longer concerned by the realization or the accomplishment?

Bearing in mind the problematic of ‘suspension’ and the impossible achievement in Beckett’s work, the violence of the gesture showed in the video-piece is then visualised in what we could call an ‘epochetique perspective’. What are the possible effects of this perspective vis à vis the image and even the judgement that Said and Done stages through a quotation of the political context? What quotes and precipitates this ‘ephectic violence’ on an opened/opening blue-screen?


C.CRED

Beckett Borderwords

Beckett Borderwords is a performance by the artist collective C.CRED based on the novel Molloy, the first part of Samuel Beckett’s extraordinary trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). Taking each of the novel’s pages, spreading them out on a 3m x 2m ‘plane’, C.CRED generates a short, incoherent and often non-syntactical text by using ‘trans-textural lines’, that is, simple line drawings (diagonals cutting and breaking the progression of the text, minimal shapes and diagrams, etc.) superimposed upon the original text. The words the lines transect are extracted from the novel to form the basis of the re-written script that is then published in the form of basic instructions, easily staged by anyone in any site or environment.

For the Beckett and Company conference, C.CRED has put together a new version of the Beckett Borderwords piece. This version involved a large number of performers walking around the building hosting the conference, reading lines from the re-written script thus intervening into the texture and nature of the space itself as well as the event of the conference. 

Bearing in mind that Beckett’s writing itself flickers, makes obscure and traces the possibility of animating words as speech issuing from a body, our attempt at infusing these words with an excess that refuses to submit to signification, a kind of peculiar embodiment refusing to give in to the totalising logic of a transmission of original meaning, we hope produces somewhat an intensification of what is already a particular and peculiar quality in Beckett’s work – its affective register; its minor, exilic qualities; its stuttering and stammering – a quality as frail as it is powerful; a borderline that exiles us from all possible meaning at the same time as it produces a germinal state where words link, mutate, and radicalize outside of their original narrative. 

(C.CRED, from flyer produced in conjunction to the performance of Beckett Borderwords at Camberwell Arts Festival, 2006)

Considering the original novel was written in two chapters, each with a separate main character – Molloy, who is lost, wondering around aimlessly, and Moran, the private detective hired to find him – Beckett Borderwords involves two actors reading out this rewritten and staged version of the novel. Standing next to one another, the two actors deliver the lines of each character as two simultaneous monologues, thus exploring the sound of voice and the power of words through the impossibility of a transmission of original meaning and a refusal to submit to its totalising logic. 

Thinking of Beckett’s novel as a portrait of the paradoxical nature of human language as both liberating and imprisoning; as both a vehicle for and a limitation upon reasoning; as simultaneously a link and a gap between experience and expression, we wanted to amplify these sub-currents of Beckett’s work ad absurdum by making each character’s words step out into the other’s as well as by foregrounding the immediately affective register of Beckett’s language (its minor, exilic qualities; it’s stuttering and stammering). Bearing in mind that Beckett’s writing itself flickers, makes obscure and traces the possibility of animating words as speech issuing from a body, our attempt at infusing these words with an excess that refuses to submit to signification we hope produces somewhat an intensification of what is already a particular and peculiar quality in Beckett’s work, a quality as frail as it is powerful; a borderline that exiles us from all possible meaning at the same time as it produces a germinal state where words link, mutate, and radicalize outside of their original narrative. 


Cristina Cano Vara 
(Universidad Autonoma de Madrid)

‘“Concomitant Relationship”: 
Javier Aguirre adapts Beckett’s Company 
for the film Voz (Voice)’

This paper will explain how the Spanish director Javier Aguirre established – in his own words – a ‘concomitant relationship’ with Beckett when making the novel Company into a feature film. Voz was completed in 1999 and had its premiere at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 2000. It was the first film version of Company, and consisted of one fixed shot lasting about eighty minutes; at also featured one of Spain’s greatest living actors, Fernando Fernán Gómez. According to Aguirre, he chose Beckett’s Company because in its ideas related to his main artistic interests, namely time and space. In this sense, I will analyse to what an extent the director’s artistic concerns and Beckett’s own poetics seem to have merged in Voz. 

Aguirre usually works for the commercial cinema and television in order to make money, thus allowing him to do other more interesting and risky projects, some of which are named ‘Anti-cinema’ by the director himself. The fact that the novel and the film have different titles is due to the director’s assumption that his film is not a standard adaptation of a literary work. As in music, the director describes Beckett’s text as an appoggiatura that served his goal of experimenting with time and space as he had done in previous works. However, as the critic José Henriquez suggests, the image of Voz would have been hardly conceived without bearing Beckett’s text in mind. Aguirre’s film was shown in Madrid, Barcelona, and some other Spanish cities, but its distribution was and still is very difficult and reduced. It is a film which apparently breaks with all the cinematographic conventions, as Beckett once did in the theatre. 


Dr Richard Cope 
(South Bank University, London)

‘Is the failure to express its expression?: Manuel Ocampo and Samuel Beckett’s 
“Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”’

What does it mean for an artist to fail ‘as no other dare fail’? While Beckett’s prose and drama has become a source of inspiration for artists who aim to practice and to understand various forms of artistic failure, it is his ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ (1949) in particular that theorises the path to failure by making a case for the impossibility of success, the impossibility of expression. Since 1965, ‘Three Dialogues’ has become something of a crutch [crux???] for Beckett scholars, but what of its possible influence on the arts? Many artists echo or engage with Beckettian themes and are, as a result, considered to be engaging with the notion of an ‘aesthetics of failure’, but are they taking the idea of failure to the same extreme as expressed in ‘Three Dialogues’? Are these artists failing ‘as no other dare fail’ or are they merely involved in the continuing creation of an art whose history is ‘the history of its attempts to escape from this sense of failure’?

This paper will explore the work of the contemporary painter Manuel Ocampo through a reading of ‘Three Dialogues’ in order to highlight and compare the differences between a general ‘aesthetics of failure’ and the particular problems raised in ‘Three Dialogues’. By reading Ocampo’s work beside the ideas within (and the idea of) ‘Three Dialogues’, I shall argue that, more than merely engaging with an ‘aesthetics of failure’, Ocampo reflects the paradox of ‘Three Dialogues’ in an exploration of the possibility or impossibility of an ‘aesthetics of failure’ and the problems inherent within these. By highlighting the extremity and the absurdity of the argument in ‘Three Dialogues’ through the work of Ocampo, and in the process exploring the implications this has on aesthetics, it may be possible to understand the difference between those who merely fail and those who fail ‘as no other dare fail’.


Dr David Cunningham 
(University of Westminster, London)

‘Beckett as Literalist: 
Minimalism across the Arts’

The description of Beckett’s work – particularly the later writings – as minimalist is a commonplace one, and, critically, serves to open up a network of potential relations with other work broadly contemporaneous with his writings. One thinks, most obviously, in this regard, of the use of the term ‘Minimalism’ to denote particular forms and practices within post-war music and the visual arts. And, in fact, the connection of such work to Beckett’s is not without some historical justification. Rosalind Krauss, for example, notes Beckett’s ‘veneration’ by those visual artists identified as Minimalist, during the 1960s, locating in their ‘object-world’ the ‘correlative’ of Beckett’s characteristic modes of ‘the deadpan, the fixed stare, the uninflected repetitious speech’.

This paper seeks to develop and extend such claims in relation to the well known description of minimalism as a literalist art in Michael Fried’s 1967 critical essay ‘Art and Objecthood’; an attack on the work of a certain generation of artists – including Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, and Sol Le Witt – which nonetheless provided many of the terms that were to be embraced by these artists and their supporters. In an earlier essay from 1966 Fried argued that ‘[n]o single issue has been as continuously fundamental to the development of modernist painting as the need to acknowledge the literal character of the picture-support’. Yet it is precisely this registering of the literal that ultimately becomes the threat to modernism’s own art status, insofar as such literalism becomes indistinguishable from what Fried calls mere ‘objecthood’ as ‘the condition of non-art’. Once art’s ‘literal character’ is immanently registered by the work, the literal object becomes readable as ‘art’, in a way that is, simultaneously, ‘antithetical to art’ itself. ‘Minimal works’, Fried quotes Greenberg, ‘are readable as art, as almost anything is today – including a door, a table, or a blank sheet of paper’. Art’s reduction to its literal form risks its becoming indistinguishable from the negation of art itself – that is, the paradoxical negation of art as art.

Focusing in particular on the radio plays and on the late television pieces Quad and Ghost Trio, this paper will argue that this problem of the literal finds some parallel in the notorious difficulties associated with critical reading of Beckett. This is less about a similar rhetoric of the literal to be found in Minimalism – exemplified by, for instance, Stella’s ‘what you see is what you see’ – and in, say, Beckett’s famous renunciation of symbolism in the Addenda to Watt, than it is about what seems most literalist in the development of Beckett’s own forms. How does one ‘interpret’ what Bersani and Dutoit call the (paradoxical) ‘stupefyingly literal allegories’ of Beckett’s late works? What does it mean to receive such works as works of art?


Dr Garin Dowd [see Balázs Kicsiny]


Dr Nikolai Duffy 
(Goldsmiths, University of London)

‘The Anonymous Company of Samuel Beckett’

Focussed around parallel discussions of ‘Still’ and ‘Neither’, this paper will consider the concepts of anatomy, anonymity, and antihumanism in Beckett and the ways in which these intervene critically in contemporary literary-philosophical debates surrounding the relation between aesthetics and politics. Rather than rehearsing discussions of humanism and depersonalisation in Beckett, however, this paper seeks to address the ways in which anonymity functions for Beckett as a separate discursive field that resituates the parameters of the speaking being outside notions of negation or affirmation. 

In order to lay the contextual groundwork for this discussion, brief reference will be made to Adorno’s and Blanchot’s respective readings of destitution and neutrality in Beckett before these figures are situated in differential relation to Jacques Rancière’s more recent engagements with the interface between literature, indifference, and democracy. Key to this argument will be the ways in which Beckett’s elaboration of literary anonymity in ‘Still’ and ‘Neither’ can be seen to both reflect and inflect the very conditions of possibility of the political subject in contemporary philosophy. As Rancière reflectively comments in interview, ‘humans are political animals because they are literary animals’ in the sense that, firstly, humans ‘have the power to put into circulation more words, “useless” and unnecessary words, words that exceed the function of rigid designation’; and secondly, ‘because this fundamental ability to proliferate words is unceasingly contested by those who claim to “speak correctly” – that is, by the masters of designation and clarification.’ 

Returning to Beckett’s texts in light of this argument it will be suggested that, at least on one level, part of the continued force of Beckett’s writing rests with the ways in which his ambivalent handling of anonymity not only typifies but can also be brought to bear critically on contemporary attempts to think the relation between words and bodies, literature and politics, being and company. 


Sozita Goudouna 
(Royal Holloway, University of London)

‘Theatricality and the Look of Non-Art 
in Beckett’s Breath’ 

During the twentieth century, the very foundations of theatre were turned upside-down, as were those of the visual arts. The mid-1960s was a period of significant activity, debate, and ultimately crisis in the art world, as curators and critics tried to come to terms with recent developments in the visual arts. This expanding site of practice marked a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism. The aim of the modernist work was to explore its medium, whilst artists seemed to defy conventional formal categorizations. Late modernist critical discourse, in this context, is narrowed down to the dominant critical tendency in the New York art scene of the 1960s, which commended on Abstract Expressionism. However, I would like to explore some ramifications that go well beyond the confines of the post-war American art world.

This critical edifice built up around methods of perceiving and conceptualising the art work in the visual arts and established a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the relationship between work and beholder, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, temporality and the role of theatricality in the visual arts. At the same time, post-war European and American sculptors became interested both in theatre, as a durational encounter and in the extended experience of time, which seemed part of the conventions of the stage, theatricality was the term that was used to describe this phenomenon. Theatricality turned into a polemical term in the criticism of modern sculpture, as in the essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ by the formalist art theorist Michael Fried. His polemic was directed not against the theatre per se, but against certain types of painting and sculpture, ‘the new art of minimalism’ which he labeled ‘theatrical’, as regards the terms of its appeal to the viewer. Fried characterized the inclusion of the viewer as ‘presence’. Presence, suggested the bodily impact of the artwork, an experience akin to encountering another person, for Greenberg ‘presence’ was the ‘look of non-art.’ 

This paper charts a historical parallel between Fried’s writing in 1967 of Art and Objecthood and Beckett’s piece Breath, as a representative piece of minimalism in the theatre (the shortest stage piece ever written and staged), written two years later (1969), in an attempt to formulate a basic framework for thinking about the intersection of critical discourses on theatricality in the visual arts and the theatre, specifically about the notion of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and the modernist anti-theatrical impulse in the visual arts. The significatory modes that operate in Breath may be understood in terms of this intersection in a  process of reduction, given that it consists solely of stage directions, no literary text and total absence of plot, action, dialogue, and character, hence visual and acoustic (non-textual) processes of signification. In Breath Beckett comes perhaps as close as a practicing dramatist can to defining the boundaries between a theatrical performance and a purely visual representation. Breath is not performed it is displayed, it internalizes the critique of representational processes, yet it cannot resist the allure of the look of non-art. 


Jorge Gutiérrez Burgueño 
(Universidad Autonoma de Madrid)

‘Grammatical Bodies: A Reading of Physicality in the Beckettian Stage and Contemporary Plastic Aesthetics’

Artistic avant-garde movements have transformed our traditional view of the body. In the theatre, the body was previously a mediator, and in art the body was considered to be a container of meaning, often a very specific meaning in the case of figures represented in painting. In contemporary art, however, bodies have turned into transmitters of sense and meaning by themselves. As the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out in his work The Primacy of Perception:

It is not to the physical object that the body may be compared, but rather to the work of art. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument, and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move and object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humeral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.

These ideas are present in the transformation of both art and theatre and it are probably sufficient grounds for the confirmation of a complementary aesthetic. 

It could be said that the body in art goes through an anatomical excision, changing from signifier to signified, ‘from being a machine to be[ing] a grammar’. In this transition we cease to have a merely descriptive anatomy were the body is like a catalogue and instead develop a more dynamic and functional notion. In this dynamic perspective of the body, the materials of study are not physical elements alone, but also the process of sensation, the actions and passions of the human being. These theoretical arguments are based on the research on the body in contemporary art by the fine-art professor Antonio Rabazas Romero. From my point of view his reasoning deserves to be applied to Beckett’s use of the human body on stage.  

Samuel Beckett’s experiments with the human body on stage represent human actions and passions to the extent of actually transmitting them, constituting the processes of meaning through a dynamical perspective of the body by a constant emphasis on the physical gesture. It might be argued that Samuel Beckett is one of the first playwrights for whom the body is a theme; in Katherine M. Gray’s words, 

Beckett’s plays develop a human body that functions in multiple modes simultaneously. In some of these modes, the stage body works as a signifier; in others it works as DO-er that materializes the effects of its performative relationship with its environment, describing that relationship with its movements. In Beckett’s most extreme experiments, the body’s performative movement intensifies the focused energy of the actor’s material body to the point at which we become aware of the animated immateriality. 

According to Rabazas, the body in art goes through an anatomical excision, changing from signifier to signified, ‘from being a machine to be[ing] a grammar’. In this transition we cease to have a merely descriptive anatomy were the body is like a catalogue and instead develop a more dynamic and functional notion. In this dynamic perspective of the body, the materials of study are not physical elements alone, but also the process of sensation, the actions and passions of the human being. 

Beckett’s experiments with the human body on stage represent human actions and passions to the extent of actually transmitting them, constituting the processes of meaning through a dynamical perspective of the body by a constant emphasis on the physical gesture.


Balázs Kicsiny & 
Dr Garin Dowd (Thames Valley University)

‘Time Unhinged: Experiments in Navigation and Chronometry in Samuel Beckett and Balázs Kicsiny’

In the form of a ‘dialogue’, sometimes with the sound turned down and the image turned up, Garin Dowd and Balázs Kicsiny will discuss the shadowy companions from Beckett’s oeuvre which occupy parts of the body of work (and parts of the ‘bodies’ which populate that work) created by the Hungarian artist. In this session, through a ‘voice-over’ in part dictated by a range of texts (contending for attention with Beckett in the artist’s work in some instances and clamouring ruinously in the ‘commentary’ here presented in others) by, inter alia, Shakespeare, Mallarmé, Deleuze, Derrida, and Proust, the interventions will convene on two related thematic strands: navigation and chronometry. 

Kicsiny’s entire Venice show (at the 2005 Biennale, where he represented Hungary) was devoted to navigation, in an intersection of one of his abiding themes and the specific location of that maritime city. The work of Beckett comprises many wandering figures, often moribund, wheeling about a central point; likewise we encounter in the work of Beckett, as we do in Kicsiny, figures mired in the condition Beckett called ‘gression’. In Beckett navigation is often focalised as orientation or simply direction. There are occasions in Kicsiny’s recent work which bring it into insistent dialogue with the literary ‘rabble’ which Beckett conjures in the midst of vectors, signs, ciphers, courses, and paths. The onward, backward, and sometimes ‘worstward’ displacement of Beckett’s ‘delegates’ is of course both a spatial and a temporal matter. After all, it’s only human. It is striking, then, that both bodies of work under consideration in this session should feature superimposed instances of chronometry and navigation, as well as instruments pertaining to these activities. The session will be prone to the hiatus and ‘silence’ that must occur when company of this sort is devised.

Séamus Kealy 
(University of Toronto)

‘Samuel Beckett and the Contemporary Arts: 
Organizing “18:Beckett”‘

As curator of the Blackwood Gallery, I am organizing an exhibition of contemporary art that responds to and has been influenced by Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. 18:Beckett (November—December 2006) is an inter-disciplinary, multi-partner visual-arts project to mark the centennial year of Samuel Beckett’s birth. The title refers to the eighteen years since Beckett’s death and the eighteen sites where this project will take place in Mississauga and Toronto. These sites are seven artist projects, six weekly film/video art events, three film screening evenings, a publication, and a symposium; all of which arise from Beckett’s influence. 

Beckett has become a touchstone for contemporary artists who employ new media as a form of cultural critique. The exhibition highlights formal and conceptual strategies that artists are exploring in relation to Beckett’s work. Some artists have been directly inspired by Beckett’s writing, and thus utilize themes that Beckett employed in his writing and films. These themes include use of repetition to unmask behavior and constructions of reality, representing catastrophe ‘negatively’, tropes of absurdity and onwardness in the face of despair, observations on perception and modern philosophical ideas, and an ongoing, often poetic and elegant criticism of the world at large. 

To date, invited artists include:

Martin Arnold (Austria), Maja Bajevic (Bosnia), Gerard Byrne (Ireland), Dorothy Cross (Ireland), Stan Douglas (Canada), Atom Egoyan (Canada), Gary Hill (U.S.A.), Antonia Hirsch (Canada), Stacey Lancaster (Canada), Bruce Nauman (U.S.A.), Nikos Navridis (Greece), Daniel Olson (Canada), Hans Op de Beeck (Belgium), Anri Sala (Albania), Tilo Schultz (D) 

This project aims to avoid an essentialization of Beckett’s modernist sprit of opposition, repetition, and re-coding. It would also, in this regard, resist casting a portrait of the man. 

The international 2006 ‘celebration’ of Beckett will be taken a step further by way of an examination of his modernist strategies as they have influenced contemporary artists and continue to be exploited, renewed, re-engaged and/or developed. In all, this project emphasizes new media and video art, film as well as critical discourse on this topic via the symposium and publication (exhibition catalogue). 

I propose to present my research from this exhibition in roundtable form, including a visual presentation of the artists to be represented, and discussing some of the themes that these artists are exploring in relation to Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. 


Dr Catherine Laws 
(Dartington College of Arts)

‘Beckett – Feldman – Johns’

Three of Morton Feldman’s late works (Neither, Words and Music, and For Samuel Beckett) owe their existence to Beckett, and the text of Neither was written by Beckett in response to a request from Feldman. Much of Feldman’s late work is also strongly influenced by the crosshatch paintings of Jasper Johns. Crosshatching first appeared in one section of Johns’s Untitled (1972), which subsequently formed the basis for his contribution to Foirades/ Fizzles, a joint venture with Beckett. In no sense did these three ever truly collaborate. However, a triangle of association and influence is apparent; in each case, certain works from the 1970s and 1980s were developed at least partly in response to work by one of the others. What remains debatable is how far these associations arose as a result of affinities already independently manifested, and to what extent the direct contact led to actual changes in artistic approach and method. 

A close examination of these works illuminates this question. In each, the apparent drive towards self-reflexive abstraction belies a more complex relationship with the role of echoing and memory, through both formal and allusive repetition and difference. In turn, this very complexity exposes the difficulty of placing the three artists within any of the possible canons; each sits uneasily within either purely Modernist or Postmodernist boundaries, while Feldman’s late work also complicates his relationship with American Experimentalism, as does Beckett’s with the European Avant-Garde. Central to this, inevitably, is the question of how similar artistic concerns and techniques may or may not be translated between different media and across continents, and how each draws upon precedents and in turn influences new developments: how do these ideas mutate as they are mapped from language and to visual art and/or sound (and back again), and between North American and European experimental traditions.


Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes 
(University of Ulster, Belfast)

‘Reciprocity: Beckett Interpreted in 
the Context of Contemporary Art’

When an artist’s work centres around the impossibility to express, coupled with the obligation to do so nevertheless, trespassing on the territory of the other arts may seem as though it could provide new and untainted tools and motifs. What happens if this ‘trespassing’ is then understood and interpreted within the context of that other art’s history?

In relation to film- and video-art, the late Beckett was contemporary with ‘Beckettian’ creators like Bruce Nauman and Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland. When their visual (and occasional literary) formulation show approximations, the visual artists often seem more faithful to Beckett’s literary legacy than the writer himself, when working in the visual field. They also often pre-empt Beckett’s formulations (sometimes by decades). General word-and-image issues arise, as well as questions concerning Beckett’s writing’s role for the generation of Minimalists and first-generation conceptual artists, as well as their own legacy within Beckett’s ‘visual’ oeuvre. 


Dr Matt Paproth 
(National University of Ireland, Galway)

‘The Death of the Author: 
“The Problem with “Beckett on Film”‘

My paper explores the authorial image that Beckett constructed throughout his life and its influence on the way we see him today. 

Beckett continually presented himself as essentially a figure like those in the trilogy and his other fictional works. While in his writing Beckett certainly does obliterate notions of authority and autonomy in the author-function, in his life Beckett was quite the opposite, maintaining an obsessive and unhealthy desire to control every aspect of his work. As his writing entered the cultural field – through the publication of his prose and the performance of his plays – Beckett was unwilling to abandon the authorial control that his work constantly questioned. Examples abound, particularly in the famous stories of his tantrums during early productions of his plays. 

Several of Beckett’s plays – for example Krapp’s Last Tape, Not I, and Play – demonstrate the impossibility of communicating (through utterance on the stage, through writing in narratives, through failed dialogues, through speeches given directly to the audience, even through recorded speech). None of these media allow the author to retain his/her authority, to capture reality for all to hear, understand, and experience. Rather, these plays often directly show the impossibility of such endeavours. However, when we turn to Beckett’s treatment of these plays in performance, it becomes clear that his relinquishing of authority does not extend to his own texts. Beckett’s behaviour is often written off as a symptom of the tortured existence that we see in any of his narrators (a tortured existence that is often mistakenly extended to Beckett), and rarely seen for what it really was: a carefully crafted attempt to construct a deliberate authorial image, a positioning of himself as the anti-Joyce (the “Nayman of Noland”). 

The most recent iteration of the fissure between Beckett’s textual and metatextual practices is the Beckett on Film series. Beckett’s manic desire for control has extended beyond his death, and the critical fear of interpreting his plays in a way that Beckett wouldn’t have wanted is imprinted all over this collection of films. The problem is that the plays being filmed are about the impossibility of controlling the same things that Beckett insists on controlling. How can we take seriously the production of plays that preach the death of the author when, although the author is literally dead, he is still attempting to control them?


Kit Poulson
(Middlesex University)

‘There is a bucket in my hole’ 

An exploration of non-transcendence through seven actions with a bucket.

A lecture in which images, text, and action fold into one another. An attempt to describe a sense of the physical and mental movements that might constitute memory and recognition.

In these explorations elements of Beckett’s writing (focussing on his discussion of painting) are considered alongside sixteenth-century Protestant emblems. These emblems are themed around fire and water, and especially the image of the well. These emblems developed from the Stoic tradition and were used as a basis for the development of a non transcendental meditation, which focussed on revealing the limitations of human perception and reason, working a kind of sophisticated internal iconoclasm as part of a daily practice.

This work addresses extension and fragility; the fascination of the point of intersection of memory, perception, and the persistent power of illusion. Simple functioning patterns grow, reach a limit and then collapse. These might be manifested as images, loops of sound or attempts at conversation. How much can be apprehended, repeated?

Each section  is an attempt at a different kind of communication with the bucket, to establish some kind of conversation. The actions performed to/with the bucket will include getting inside it, filling it with water, trying to set fire to the water, singing to it, placing a stone bowl within it, placing a voice inside it, putting it inside a box, and sealing it up.

The titles for each section, drawn from a set of painted panels originally sited at Hawstead House in Suffolk, are:

‘By descending I become fuller’
‘Thou dost but alter air’
‘But it imparts nothing’
‘Faithful servants but harsh masters’
‘At last enough’ 
‘I am drawn up with difficulty’
‘It has blazed, crackled and gone out’

Each motto is accompanied by the image it was originally paired with.


Michael Rainin

Waiting for Woody Allen

I directed a 16-minute short film entitled ‘Waiting for Woody Allen’, a parody of Samuel Beckett’s classic play Waiting for Godot . It is a tragic comedy starring Modi Rosenfeld and Joseph Piekarski as Mendel and Yossel, two quarrelsome Hasidic men. Disillusioned with religion, therapy, and their own friendship, they wait on a bench in Central Park for Woody Allen to come and give meaning to their lives. 

‘Waiting for Woody Allen’ garnered me the D.N.A. (Discovering New Artist) Award at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, was screened at Lincoln Center, and was an official selection at more than 40 film festivals worldwide.

The idea for the film came from Woody Allen’s long-time admiration of Samuel Beckett and a famous photo of Woody and Samuel. I was reading an L.A. Times article on Beckett and Woody Allen and on their upcoming schedule celebrating Beckett’s centenary: I hope you will agree that my film is a fitting way to help celebrate Beckett’s anniversary.


Rhian Samuel 
(City University, London)

The Flowing Sand (2006)

The Flowing Sand is a setting for baritone and piano of five of Beckett’s poems: ‘what would I do without this world faceless incurious’; ‘my way is in the sand flowing’ (which gives the work its name); ‘Da Tagte Es’; ‘Roundelay’; and ‘saying again’. 

It was commissioned by the School of European Studies, Cardiff University with funds from the Arts Council of Wales, and was first performed, by Adam Green and Indre Petrauskaite, at the Gala Concert Proust, Beckett, Deleuze in Music on 09 March, 2006, at the Temple of Peace, Cardiff. Its performance on Saturday is the London premiere. 


Lee Scrivner 
(The London Consortium)

‘Breathing in Beckett’s Breath’

Following Deleuze’s lead, my paper draws parallels between Beckett’s materialism and that of the Greek Stoics. It compares the various breathings in Beckett’s work with the Stoic notion of pneuma (or ‘breath’). 

As Steven Connor points out, breath for Beckett is not only the precursor to life, but also represents ‘the immanence of death to life, since there is a little death in every breath’ (‘Beckett’s Atmospheres’, p. 1). Beckett’s short play Breath references this identity between life and death through the medium of breath. For example, the play begins and ends with ‘an instant of recorded vagitus’, which is the first breath taken by a newborn. 

I will assess varied aspects of breathing in Breath, focusing primarily on Damien Hirst’s film version, to show how breath, like pneuma, represents for Beckett an intermediary not only between life and death, but also between the visible and the invisible, and between matter and an animating ‘spirit’. 


Dr Kathy Smith 
(London Metropolitan University)

‘Abject Bodies: Beckett, Orlan, Stelarc, and the Politics of Contemporary Performance’

Jeanie Forte (in the context of feminist theatre praxis) describes her search for ‘those circumstances where the body is undeniable, when the body’s material presence is a condition of the circumstance. Interestingly, one is that of pain, and another is that of live performance; two cases when the body must be acknowledged, when it becomes visible/palpable through inhabiting temporally a process that depends fundamentally on its presence’ (1992).

Orlan, a French multi-media artist working since the 1960s, began a project in 1990 of body modification through plastic surgery, raising complex questions about sexuality, beauty, subjectivity, gender and technology. Stelarc, an Australian performance artist, has been ‘extending’ his body through performance since the late 1960s, using both flesh and technology to interrogate the body/discourse relation. Samuel Beckett, through his later writings for the stage, foregrounds the troubled relationship between the body-in-discourse and the body-in-performance. 

Contemporary performance constantly challenges boundaries and limits of understanding, constantly questions the dynamics, the politics of the body – the relationship of the material body to discursive formations in currency, the dynamic, constantly shifting relationship between performance/representation, the culture which both accommodates and provokes the representation, and the spectating subject. The body becomes both site of enquiry and gaping interstice through which the workings of our culture are momentarily thrown into relief. Schisms and ruptures are where this politics reveals itself: in the moments of visceral response, where bodies ‘speak’ directly to one another.

The theatres of Orlan, Stelarc and Beckett each explore aspects of the representational limits of the body. Certain common themes recur through all three; and this paper seeks to demonstrate that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the disparity between the Beckettian body-in-performance and those found within the theatres of Orlan and Stelarc is not as great as might initially be anticipated, and that the reading of one through the others might offer an interesting insight into all three, and into the politics of contemporary performance.


Dr Russell Smith 
(Australian National University, Canberra)

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

Rather than seeing Beckett’s influence on visual art in terms of recognisable visual elements (especially those derived from Beckett’s works for stage and screen such as geometric minimalism; monochromatic composition; extremes of light and dark; manipulations of the human figure), or in terms of dominant structuring principles (symmetry; repetition; permutation; disintegration), this paper seeks to explore the notion of a Beckettian aesthetic in terms of characteristic operations expressed as verbs: walking, stumbling, falling, lying down. Modelled on Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss’s taxonomy, in Formless: A User’s Guide, of the ‘operations’ of George Bataille’s notion of l’informe, this paper seeks to isolate a few ‘operations’ – walking, stumbling, falling, lying down – that might be seen in combination as characteristically Beckettian, and to use these operations as a way of tracing the various manifestations of a post-Beckettian aesthetic. 

I will discuss the work of two contemporary artists whose work in might be seen in this light: Ugo Rondinone’s recumbent clowns can be seen as a rewriting Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture as Waiting for Godot, while works such as Roundelay reproduce the endless aimless trajectories of the late theatre and prose works. John Barbour’s various sculpture, installation and fabric works explore a ‘syntax of weakness’, a tragicomic persistence in the face of falling down and falling apart. In each case, I will argue that it is the presence of a particular kind of humour, associated with the stumble and fall as narrative events, that produces a peculiarly Beckettian resonance.



Siobhan Tattan 
(Middlesex University)

Siobhan Tattan’s performative lecture will be delivered as a formal lecture, detailing new writings, Failure Analyse in Performitivity, and extracts from her ongoing practice-led Ph.D. research.

However, a disruption will occur within this lecture. A voice, a recording of the director’s notations, directing the artist at the lectern, will interject with the artist’s speaking voice. The time-lapses between each of the director’s notations varies between 45” and 3’20” as it corresponds with the original lecture. For Tattan, this negation is a pivotal point of the performance, deploying it as a tool of interrogation into the role and function of the voice – the voice as informer, narrator, raconteur, seanchai. The performance here lies, not in the visual action of performers, but in the rhythmic lyrical quality of the oral performance.


Jenny Triggs 

Samuel Beckett: The Unnamable (2000)

Rough for Television (2006)

Jenny Triggs’s film Samuel Beckett: The Unnamable (2000) animates body parts, chess pieces, and mechanical motifs as life’s conveyor-belt threatens to grind to a halt, without ever actually doing so. It has been shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000), the Beckett Time Festival (Glasgow Film Theatre), the Leeds International Film Festival, the Leicester Short Film Festival, and at Kinofilm (Manchester 2001). 

The visual imagery of Rough for Television (2006) (subtitled ‘A response to “Ping” by Samuel Beckett’) centres on a female figure created from a series of negatives which fluctuates between a state of recognisable (trapped) object of the gaze and a more enigmatic (released) representation. The 8-minute, looped film picks up on Beckett’s use of negation/ambiguity as a narrative technique, and aims to reflect the focus-promised-and-withheld aspect of the text which substitutes for a traditional narrative. The viewer's focus of attention is constantly interrupted or obscured, creating a disorientation and progression of doubts in the viewer as much as a description of a definite picture. Despite this, narrative desire and the directional nature of viewing pulls the reader forward, and the build-up of visual information, emotion and memory with each non-similar repetition forms an alternative visual narrational arc. The eyes that interrupt are both the eyes of the body the viewer is watching, and the eyes of the creator/artist figured at the beginning and end. This blurring (indeterminacy) of the narrator/creator relationship and character (discernable in Beckett’s Ping) is extended out into the space of the viewer by situating him/her within an enclosed space (with flickering light) sporadically being observed by/perceiving a “black eye long lashes imploring” (film B). The viewer is situated as object /character and narrator/creator (the latter suggesting creation/narration involved in the act of viewing). 



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