>>PREVIEW
18: BECKETT
Runs until May 27
Martin Arnold, Dorothy Cross, Stan Douglas, Stéphane Gilot, Gary Hill, Bruce Nauman, Nikos Navridis, Michal Rovner, Gregor Schneider, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Magdalena Szczepaniak, Zin Taylor and Allison Hrabluik
Walter Phillips Gallery (The Banff Centre)
To extricate oneself from Samuel Beckett's work without a feeling of disquiet would be a challenging task. Similarly, this exhibition has an intensity that is neither comfortable nor reassuring, but lingers, perhaps permanently, in some liminal mental space. The troubling nature of the selected works and their unwavering commentary on the human condition creates an environment of near psychotic sensations.
Absurd, hermetic and complex, 18: Beckett is demanding, provocative and thrilling. The exhibition features a cross-section of major works by heavyweights including Bruce Nauman, Stan Douglas, Gregor Schneider, Gary Hill, Dorothy Cross and a host of others. To detail each artist's work and their relation to Beckett would be the task of a large monograph. In reality, the scope of the exhibition is so broad that only the briefest thematic study seems appropriate.
Repetition is one of Beckett's most notable theatrical traits and many of the works comprise elements of repeated activity at or near a physical or psychological limit. Gary Hill's Wall Piece is a particularly visceral example. A strobe light in a black room flashes on and off. At the same time, a video is projected that shows a man in a suit jacket and pants throwing his body against a wall over and over again. Each time he hits the wall he recites a word. These words are parts of syntax, perhaps a narrative of some sort, but the strobing effect and the impact of his body against the wall make it very difficult to mine a distinct meaning. The piece is indelibly memorable, revealing an ambiguous physical and emotional state while obscuring language behind trauma.
Bruce Nauman's Clown Torture installation complements Hill’s, but where Hill's work is primarily concerned with influencing perception through psychological disturbance, Nauman investigates the space between humour and suffering. The clowns featured in his various videos/performances partake in activities that are both vaudevillian and cruel. Their actions might be funny in certain contexts, but instead these clowns are hapless rubes, utterly powerless and presided over by an all-knowing unyielding camera/eye. At the same time, all of their acts are fictions, utter contrivance. In this sense, Nauman makes us aware of the social construction involved in the representation of fear, ennui and discomfort. It is not so much that his characters are undergoing real abuse – rather, they simulate and repeat it. In doing so, we see how behaviour is conditioned by the social and technological. A laugh track is conspicuously absent.
Nauman’s and Hill's works lead us to consider aspects related to duration as well, but a duration that expresses "onwardness: the lost, forsaken and unredeemed within an unwinding, questioning order," as Seamus Kealy refers to it. Similarly, Stan Douglas's Win, Place or Show reflects this "algebraic, austere clarity." Douglas's work is an installation comprising two-channel video and four-channel audio. The speakers play top 40 radio while the videos depict a loop of two male characters arguing over horse racing in an apartment. The mood is tense and a feeling of deja vu is palpable. Not surprisingly, the work plays slightly different versions of this same scenario endlessly, creating 204,025 possible variations. The characters are hopelessly inured in the predetermined strategy, their experience provoking contemplation of futility and the endless plodding of existence.
At the rear of the gallery, Dorothy Cross's video Chiasm mirrors the symmetry of Douglas's work, but with different outcomes. Cross's work engages in a broader dialogue with the natural world that is not present in many of the other works in the exhibition. The video documents a performance by two opera singers in a large warehouse. Two identical, mirrored videos of the ocean washing onto a shoreline are projected on the massive floor. Each singer remains separated on distinct sides, pacing back and forth. The response is similar to that evoked by the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Beckett describes this feeling in Endgame when he states, "Infinite emptiness will be all around you… and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe." |
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