Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Is the failure to express its expression?


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’.


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