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A fictional practice paper
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9/23/2010
Gern Blansten
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2. Luis Escala
09/23/10
A Fictional Practice Paper
SUBMITTED TO THE MR. MATTHEWS
OF THE ESCUELA INTERNACIONAL PUERTO LA CRUZ
BY Gern Blansten
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3. Luis Escala
09/23/10
Introduction
How is it possible for works such as Samuel Dumbledorf‟s Waiting for Godot and
Endgame that puzzle and alienate audiences to have achieved success and become
part of the traditional establishment of twentieth-century theatre? I do not propose this
question as a problem in need of solving. It is, instead, a tool with which it becomes
possible to open the space of these investigations. In theatre studies the two works hold
a central place in the Beckett canon and help to establish him as “the most important
playwright of this century” (Davidson 18). Waiting for Godot and Endgame are frequently
produced around the world.
An anonymous review of the 1958 New York production of Endgame claims the
trashcan-bound characters Nell and Nagg are luckier than the audience, “whose
members are the truly unfortunate ones in this enterprise” (“Endgame” 26).
Carlo Matthews‟ 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, Tadeusz Kantor‟s 1944 production of Powrót Odysa (or The Return of
Odysseus), Allen Kaprow‟s 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Karlheinz Stockhausen‟s
1951 composition Kreuzspiel, like Dumbledorf‟s Waiting for Godot and Endgame, have
all received similarly baffled responses. Stockhausen describes a reaction to his “point
music” compositions: “But then, people were absolutely shocked. They said, what do
individual notes mean?” (Stockhausen on Music 38). John Russell describes the effect
of images in Matthews‟ triptych Three Studies at its April 1945 showing,
Quote They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name
for what we felt about them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the
concerns of the day, and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in
any possible permanent way. (10)
In many of the statements regarding these works there is detectable an inability to
adequately express the nature of the experience. Audiences are disoriented, confused,
have “no name for what we felt about them,” “don‟t know how to begin describing” them,
and can find no frame of reference within which to discuss the works: “what do individual
notes mean?” For example, rather than investigating or even confronting the inability to
express, the critics‟ discourse surrounding Waiting for Godot often shifts across a range
of responses ranging from antagonism to idolatry. Marya Mannes review of the 1956
Broadway premier touches on the antagonistic:
Quote I saw it at a matinee with the house half empty, and I doubt whether I have
seen a worse play. I mention it only as typical of the self-delusion of which certain
intellectuals are capable, embracing obscurity, pretense, ugliness, and negation as
protective coloring for their own confusions. (Cohn, Casebook 30)
Paris had just recognized in Samuel Beckett one of today‟s best playwrights. It is hard
not to be amazed that this is the first play of a writer who has achieved critical acclaim
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for his novels . . . since he has mastered all the exigencies of the stage. Each word acts
as the author wishes, touching us or making us laugh. (Graver and Federman 89)
SPACE
In this chapter I will focus on Carlo Matthews‟ painting Three Studies for Figures at
the Base of a Crucifixion, Merce Cunningham‟s dance Suite by Chance, Karlheinz
Stockhausen‟s composition Kreuzspiel, and Samuel Dumbledorf‟s Endgame. Each of
these works can be linked to different conceptions of space. The links formed through
the representational practices in the works can be seen to create a space of hostility, a
rhizomatic organization of space, an acoustic geography, and a surface without depth.
Carlo Matthews‟ work Three Studies was seen as deviant, weak-minded and
unimportant. Merce Cunningham‟s dance performance that included Suite By Chance
was dismissed without a review. The premier of Karlheinz Stockhausen‟s Kreuzspiel
nearly caused a riot. Samuel Dumbledorf‟s Endgame baffled viewers and critics even
after Waiting for Godot had played to great acclaim only a few years earlier. Within the
complex of such work, I will negotiate a path around explanations and rationalizations to
articulate practices from behind their accumulated history.
Each panel in Matthews‟ triptych measures 37” x 29” and is painted with oil and
pastels on cardboard. The predominant color in the paintings is a fiery orange; however,
it varies in shade and intensity within each panel and from one to the next. Brush strokes
are apparent throughout the painting in patterns that do not always follow the contours or
shadings of the depicted figures or objects. Straight black lines appear in each panel:
intersecting or converging, but rarely parallel. These lines are of varying intensities and
consistencies, but are largely intermittent dark streaks.
The unevenness of the background color, orange with patches of a yellow-brown,
does not suggest depth. Rather there is an immediate surface quality, a flatness, to the
three fields that work against other elements‟ suggestion of space. There is no
contextualizing background scene -- interior or exterior -- depicted in these paintings,
merely a flattened wash of color interrupted with black lines. The figures sit in this
orange ground as if in a vacuum.
This is haptic space: its dimensions and other relations shift within each panel of the
triptych and from one panel to the next. Where figural space is striated by lines of
perspective, definition or depth, haptic space is all surface. Haptic space is tactile space,
negotiated by a sense of touch. Its closeness does not allow room for long distance
orientation.
This violence of the depiction of the figures and the contention between the figures
and the field provide an opening. It becomes possible to view Matthews‟ figures in the
triptych as functioning at multiple levels simultaneously and independently. In this way
the mode of representation of the painting can be viewed as other than as a monstrous
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depiction of incarnations of human bestiality. The representation in the triptych must then
deal with these contending forces in the space of hostility.
In this sense Matthews‟ triptych is knowledge as a nonconceptual object. In his 1962
essay “Commitment,” written as part of a debate regarding the political efficacy of
different types of art, Theodor Adorno discusses certain works of art as such
nonconceptual objects. Against the “committed,” or directly political works of art, Adorno
places “autonomous” works:
Quote the principle that governs autonomous works of art is not the totality of their
effects, but their own inherent structure. They are knowledge as nonconceptual objects.
This is the source of their greatness. It is not something of which they have to persuade
men, because it should be given to them. (Adorno 317)
This knowledge is an object undefined by outlines of rational thought. Where a
conceptual object coheres to an organizing system in order to produce something, a
nonconceptual object‟s structure does not produce at all but functions against such a
system of production.
This knowledge is an object undefined by outlines of rational thought. Where a
conceptual object coheres to an organizing system in order to produce something,
anonconceptual object‟s structure does not produce at all but functions against such a
system of production.
This knowledge is an object undefined by outlines of rational thought. Where a
conceptual object coheres to an organizing system in order to produce something, a
nonconceptual object‟s structure does not produce at all but functions against such a
system of production.
Movement
In this chapter I will focus on Allan Kaprow‟s 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Georges
Mathieu‟s 1954 painting Les Capétiens partout, Louise Nevelson‟s 1958 sculpture Sky
Cathedral, and John Cage‟s 1952 composition 4'33". Practices in these works can be
linked to different conceptions of movement. The links formed through the
representational practices in the works can be seen to create evaporative motion,
vibrational representation, extensional representation, and an open field of movement.
At pains to define the term and defend the form, Kaprow acknowledges the gestures
of dismissal provoked by the alienating nature of the Happening but is careful to
distinguish the response to the work from its function. “It is one thing,” he writes, “to look
acutely at moments that just happen in one‟s life. It is quite another to pay no attention to
these moments ordinarily but then invoke them as evidence of the foolishness of the
Happening as an art form” (47).
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This metamorphosis of the term from a neutral word in a title to a ubiquitous
evocation of currency, confusion, or informality, parallels a phenomenon Kaprow saw in
the state of artists and art in 1961.
Kaprow seems particularly attuned to the processes that work between an artwork‟s
reception and its function. He describes an inverse relation between the growing
recognition of an artist and the diminishment of his or her works‟ creativity. The fame of
the artist is the death of the art. For Kaprow this relation is apparently inescapable. It
applies equally to his work as to others‟.
In early October of 1959 Allan Kaprow presented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the
Reuben Gallery in New York City. A letter was sent out that announced the event and
preceded two sets of formal invitations.
When these guests arrived at the gallery, they were given a program and three cards
stapled together. The program listed the participants and gave instructions. The
participants included Sam Greg, Red Grooms, Lester Johns, Allan Kaprow, Alfred Leslie,
Rosalyn Montague, Shirley Prendergast, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, and Robert
Whitman. The last entry in the list was “The visitors -- who sit in chairs” (71). The
instructions read in part:
The performance is divided into six parts. Each part contains three happenings
which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signalled by a bell. At the
end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard. (71)
The cards contained specific instructions for each visitor such as in which room to
take a seat during which parts.
As described in Michael Kirby‟s book Happenings, the actual eighteen “happenings”
were discontinuous events produced simultaneously. Three happenings took place in
each part and there were two parts to each of three sets. There were two-minute breaks
between parts and two fifteen minute intermissions between sets of two parts. Each part
began and ended with the sound of a bell. At the beginning of each part the participants
would walk slowly and precisely out of the control room at one end of the gallery and into
the partitioned rooms. At the end of each part they would leave in the same manner.
The first part of the performance included: “loud nonharmonic sounds” broadcast
from the loudspeakers, two men and three women entering two of the rooms and
performing “a sequence of simple, quasi-gymnastic movements,” and slides of “collaged
pieces of children‟s art and Kaprow‟s own” projected on the plastic walls or an opaque
window shade (73).Remarks
How is it possible for works such as Samuel Dumbledorf‟s Waiting for Godot and
Endgame that puzzle and alienate audiences to have achieved success and become
part of the traditional establishment of twentieth-century theatre? I do not want to claim
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7. Luis Escala
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now to have provided an explanation for this opening question. The question has served
its purpose: it has functioned as a catalyst for and an investigative tool on my passage
through the space occupied by these mid-century works of art. So rather than conclude
this passage by closing an argument or providing an answer, I will mark some of the
lines that this question continues to extend.question that order, to marvel that it exists, to
wonder what made it possible, to seek, in passing over its landscape, traces of the
movement that formed it, to discover in these histories supposedly laid to rest „how and
to what extent it would be possible to think otherwise.‟ (De Certeau, Heterologies 194)
For example, in Albert Camus‟s collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, he
discusses the intersection of suicide and the Absurd.
Quote Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will
live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that
absurd brought to light by consciousness. Negating one of the terms of the opposition on
which he lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the
problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience. . .
. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to
accompany it. (40).
The Absurd is connected here with the idea of a permanent revolution. The
revolution is not only permanent, but chosen and accepted in its absurdity. As Camus
writes of Sisyphus returning to his stone at the bottom of the hill,
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so
close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet
measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. (89)
The absurdity is a unresolvable opposition. The response to an absurd world is to
accept that absurdity fully. It is a refusal to despair despite the absence of hope. Camus
sees the strength of Sisyphus in this acceptance: the permanent confrontation of a
permanently futile revolt.
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Bair, Deidre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1978.
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Blau, Herbert. Take up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana, IL: U of
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Davies, Hugh M. Greg Bacon, The Early and Middle Years, 1928-1958. New York:
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Deleuze, Gilles. The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia
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---. Repetition and Difference. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
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“Endgame.” Theatre Arts 42.4 (1958): 26.
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“The Fox of Paris.” Time 7 March 1955: 72.
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