When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969, after commenting that the prize should have gone to James Joyce, Samuel Beckett proceeded to give most of the $70,000 in winnings away to other, more destitute novelists. The gesture was typical of a writer whose spare dramas and novels pared away the detail of mid-century modern life, leaving symbolic and elegiac masterpieces that still exemplify the best of post-World War II literature. On March 31, The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery opens the show 18:Beckett, originally created to mark the centenary of the writer’s birth. Curated by Séamus Kealy, the show is touring from the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
Beckett spent his early years in Dublin, but moved to France soon after leaving school, and lived there for most of his life. A failure as an academic and teacher, his work as a writer didn’t begin to capture readers until the late 1940s and early 1950s. Then, a brilliant trilogy of novels — Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable — and plays including Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Waiting for Godot easily led to the Nobel. The idea behind 18:Beckett was to collect the work of contemporary artists, mainly working in new media, who have been inspired by concepts in Beckett’s work.
In Gary Hill’s video installation Wall Piece, a man flings himself against a wall over and over, blurting out a single word, backed by the flash of a strobe light. The repetition and flashing light reference an attempt to break out of suppressed impulses. It’s an idea Beckett used effectively in his symbolic and fragmentary 1953 novel Watt. Recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1998, much of Hill’s video work has been an investigation into the intersection of textual and visual meanings.
American multimedia artist Bruce Nauman has long been influenced by Beckett’s work, sometimes directly referencing characters in the writer’s novels and plays. In 18:Beckett, Nauman’s seminal 1987 video installation Clown Torture is an exercise in black humour, taking off on Beckett’s use of clowns as archetypal characters. The incessant interplay of shrieks in Clown Torture recreates the labyrinth of babble in Beckett’s play Not I, and viewers aren’t sure whether to laugh or be repulsed.
Other works in 18:Beckett include Martin Arnold’s film Silent Winds, a video of Gregor Schneider’s CYRO-TANK PHOENIX 1, Stan Douglas’s 1998 video projection Win, Place, or Show, Dorothy Cross’s video Chiasm, Ann-Sofi Sidén’s 179 kg, Zin Taylor and Allison Hrabluik’s new work Are Your Dreams 10 Sizes Too Tall?, and video work by Stéphane Gilot, Nikos Navridis, Michal Rovner, and Magdalena Szczepaniak.
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Media images for 18:Beckett
More information about the Walter Phillips Gallery