CIRCA Article reproduced from CIRCA 104, Summer 2003, pp.47-50.
C104 article
Nauman .. Beckett ... Beckett . Nauman: the necessity of working in an interdisciplinary way1
Bruce Nauman has taken much from Beckett, who himself was very aware of issues within the visual arts. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes explores the links between the two creative intellects.
[...] the expression that there is nothing toexpress, no desire to express, together withthe obligation to express
Samuel Beckett, Aspen 5&6, Section 3
When creating Slow angle walk (Beckett walk) in 1968, Bruce Nauman was a young and as yet far from successful American artist pioneering the use of video - or was he just bored in his studio, pondering the futility of creating anything in an empty, white space? The feeling of inevitable failure he found mirrored in Samuel Beckett's Watt. For his video he therefore chose to adopt the demeanour of some of Beckett's characters: he did not bend his knees, but held his trunk forward at a right angle, while retracing his steps repeatedly. The viewer's perspective is also affected, as the camera was placed on its side. Nauman performs his walk within the confines of the square field which the static camera shows us.
Having written Film in 1963, Beckett himself created a work for a television camera in 1982, Quad: four actors shuffle in a choreographed manner around a square in an empty room, which they enter and leave through a curtain serving as the background.
Although Nauman (born 1941) belongs to a younger generation and different (American) culture from Beckett (born 1906), their engagement with each other's media and motifs could be called reciprocal inspiration. The question pursued here, however, is not so much whether Beckett knew of Nauman's work on him and was inspired by it, but what such a complicated relationship between literature and the visual arts can tell us. Some theoretical aspects will thus be presented briefly towards the end.
Nauman is innovative within the context of visual art by using a relatively new technique, video. That Wattinspired him is clear, but he was also very probably affected by plays such as Endgame and Happy Days, in which the characters' physical disabilities give expression to a human inability to act. The writer is apparently Nauman's source of inspiration in the area of imagery or motif.
In terms of medium, Beckett, on the other hand, used the opportunities presented to him in Quad for others to film his work, which remains largely stage-based, as is shown by his having a curtain and using actors in identical clothing. Therefore, Beckett, who knew a great deal about visual art, does not seem to have changed his genre fully. He did not actually create a work, which could only be understood with reference to the History of Art. Television was, moreover, a medium which was already well known to artists. For example, Gerry Schum's Television Gallery was broadcast in the Netherlands in 1971.
During documenta X, 1997, Beckett's Quad was, however, shown within a visual-art context (and that of Ireland, as the monitor stood opposite James Coleman's slide projection entitled Connemara Landscape). This would indicate that, at least retrospectively, it can be interpreted as a film or video work or a performance recorded in such a way. The borders between the genres seem to have shifted somewhat further for the different context and starting point (on Beckett's part and that of the visitor to the documentaexpecting visual art) almost not to be noticed any more. Is the distinction between the genres then obsolete? Has it any importance for an artist's choice of strategy?
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Samuel Beckett: Quadrat I, 1981, stills; |
Beckett has approached an 'un-literary' silence in several works, be it the white noise-like waterfall of language in Not I, the solitary "sssh!" in Film or the shuffling in Quad. His later work came to rely less on 'literary' aspects and more on visual and even musical aspects like this shuffling and the 'percussion' inQuad I (or Quadrat 1&2, since both versions were filmed in Germany and were titled in German for the Suddeutscher Rundfunk). Quad II is, in typical Beckettian manner, once again a reduction of means, an even sparser piece. The percussion and changes to the lighting were removed and the whole piece was transposed into black and white.
I would argue that the choreographic aspect of Nauman's Slow angle walk (Beckett walk) is even more appropriately 'Beckettian' than Beckett's own later piece. While the actors in Quad shuffle around a focal point - although this seems to be shunned in Quad II - there is still a stabilising centre. Nauman's movements are more peripheral and seemingly random, thereby not affirming a spatial anchor, while still retaining the repetitive aspect. Could this distrust of a centre be a result of the visual artist's even greater reliance on space, even in comparison with the stage-aware playwright, who nevertheless works from a textual background?
Nauman has continued to work on the darker side of life. His videos show falling clowns, spinning heads screaming "Anthro/socio" (reminiscent of Not I) and stylised violence in a domestic setting (Violent incident, 1986), which can easily be compared to Lucky and Pozzo's exchanges in Waiting for Godot. Nauman's drawings and titles often include wordplay like the anagram DEATH HATED, HATED DEATH, 1974. He thus still shows a clear interest not only in 'Beckett's' subject matter, but also in language itself. He makes use of that aspect of a visual artist's practice, which can be called literary, while reducing the 'visual' often to a minimum, relying for example only on very simply and even crudely sketched outlines in his drawings. These incidentally resemble Beckett's doodles on manuscripts, especially Watt, where there are words in capital letters, arranged in squares together with their anagrams.
The noise of Nauman's Anthro/socio would also indicate a move away from a distinctly visual preoccupation. It is hardly bearable for the visitor and plays as much on the nerves of the viewer as Beckett stated Not I should function. Even in his early work, Nauman employed 'musical' means - interestingly combined with a linguistic interest. In Violin tuned D.E.A.D., he plays the violin, without his head being visible, in the black-and-white video. What he plays is the cacophony of the notes d, e, a and d played in succession. Only the title will tell the viewer why he or she is subjected to such 'musical torture'. Silence itself was the topic when Nauman created a Concrete tape recorder piece in 1968. He made sure that the tape was on a loop and thus playable if plugged in. But nothing would be heard and not much - apart from a concrete cube and cable with plug - can be seen. This seems to be a final tape, Nauman's not Krapp's Last Tape.
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Bruce Nauman: Concrete Tape Recorder Piece,1968, concrete, tape recorder, tape, 30.5 x 61 x 61 cm; photo A. Burger, Zurich; courtesy Flick Collection |
There really are remarkable coincidences in Beckett's and Nauman's preoccupations. Even that reluctant symbol of hope, the tree in Waiting for Godot, appears in Nauman's work - but once again with a telling difference: Tree standing on three shoulder points, 1967, appears to be related to that famous tree from Beckett's play, in fact so much so that the appearance of anthropomorphic shapes at its base (shoulder points) would almost amount to locating God(ot) in this tree as much as the single leaf appearing in the play does.
While Beckett and Nauman do share a vaguely existentialist outlook on life, the conclusion one is to draw is that the notion of futility and exhaustion is in the first instance a reflection on the condition of their own art form, i.e., the genre each has departed from in their career. It seems that, when trying to show failure, exhaustion and the impossibility of being affirmingly creative, this would first relate to the means of an art form with which one has occupied oneself for a long time. The last straw as it were, the ultimate possibility (despite all impossibilities) of creating something is then provided by another art form. This appears to be fresher and to include newly available tools.
The point at which Beckett's and Nauman's practices converge is performance - a term used in visual art and music (one could think of John Cage's work on silence, 4'33'', 1952), as well as the theatre. While composers and playwrights have always had performance at their disposal as a matter of course, in the History of Art, 'theatrical' and 'literal', as well as, of course, 'literary' approaches were shunned in the middle of the twentieth century by the then prevailing high-Modernist approach. Subsequently, Nauman and other artists in the 1960s rebelled against having to remain within the close confines of what modernist artistic practice was made out to be. The energy which the visual artist's new (and by definition interdisciplinary) performance genre generated for all arts at the time seems to have informed the playwright's performance in turn.
Furthermore, in criticism - to put this very briefly - the focus has moved from those preoccupations in the 1960s to what was called the 'linguistic turn' in the 1970s. Here, the focus was the structures of signifiers in any context. Everything, not just language in a more limited sense, was termed a text and thus differences between the genres appeared to be less important. Anything within culture could be 'read' and - later again - deconstructed, in order to expose 'subtexts', etc. From this historical point of view alone it appears that Art Historians would be well advised to be familiar with approaches to texts, approaches still largely at home in and developed by literary scholars.
Recently (in the 1990s), a "performative turn"2 has modified and complemented earlier findings. This change in research subjects and procedures seems to me to echo what has been found here: a turn towards performative strategies in Beckett's and Nauman's works, as well as an interest in silence, a forfeiting of the nicely finished product. A tension can be observed between textuality in literary and visual genres and this performative drive. Materiality and mediality, play and spectacle, as well as nonart phenomena like rituals, dances, games, etc., have entered the centre of attention in cultural terms. This again requires new kinds of interdisciplinary co-operation. Theatre studies and anthropology seem to take a lead, although the History of Art could very well claim expertise, especially when looking at the recently published first two volumes of Aby Warburg's collected writings (he died in 1928). For the nonwestern world a performative sense of identity has long been noticed. Regarding this performative turn, European and North American culture appear to have joined the rest of the world - and this not only in Warburg's estimate, but widely acknowledged. (Coincidentally, Ireland could be at the forefront in taking account of this performative nature of culture, as monumental artworks have traditionally been of lesser importance than Gaelic games, wakes, music sessions and storytelling.)
From the perspective outlined, interdisciplinary approaches are more central than their still often-marginal position in criticism would lead one to believe; they are to be included in a genre's history as something which is necessitated by the state of affairs within that genre. While the historic distinctions between the arts have enabled artists to continue to create, they do not present barriers which interpreters should not dare to cross. Their existence as historical givens may be a point of contention so strong that rebelling against it can keep even the most exhausted, misanthropic and pessimistic artist producing. The borders between the arts are thus all-important and simultaneously null and void.
Dr. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is Government of Ireland Post-doctoral Fellow in History of Art at University College, Dublin, and author/curator of a forthcoming book/exhibition on 'Joyce in Art' at the RHA, Dublin.
Some valuable work has been done on the Beckett/Nauman relationship, most notably Beate Kleinert-Engel's MA thesis, University of Cologne, 1993, unpublished. An excellent exhibition (with a comprehensive catalogue) was shown in Vienna in 2000, but unfortunately not in Ireland. Michael Glasmeier, Christine Hoffmann et al. (eds.), Samuel Beckett Bruce Nauman, Exhib. Cat., Kunsthalle Wien, 4th February - 30th April 2000, Vienna 2000. The present author was one of the selectors of the interdisciplinary PictureBook project initiated by the Arts Office and Public Library Service of Carlow County Council. This text grew out of her choice of Beckett's Quad for that project.
1The format of the title is borrowed from Beckett's own essay on Dante .. Bruno ... Vico . Joyce in: Our Exagmination round his Factification of Work in Progress, London 1929.
2See, e.g., Erika Fischer-Lichte, Vom "Text" zur "Performance": Der "Performative Turn" in den Kulturwissenschaften, Kunstforum International, Vol. 152, 2000, pp. 61-63
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