Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism

David Houston Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317679066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Miros?aw Ba?ka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for 'archival' media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist.

1 The Beckett Effect

The Intermedial Archive

Beckett, the Archive and Installation Art

Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape stages an extraordinary meditation on the archive, transporting the viewer into the private archive of Krapp, a sixty-nine-year-old man whose failing memories of his younger self are supplemented by a repertoire of audio recordings. Krapp’s faltering progress through those recordings, accompanied by interjections of his present, live voice, is the foundation of the spectacle we witness in the theatre, as Krapp ruminates on the ‘farewell to love’ which results from his decision to devote himself to literature.¹ At thirty-nine, Krapp is already preoccupied by his recorded memories, and records himself reflecting on the experience of listening to an earlier recording, made at least ten years earlier. This early point in Krapp’s memories, at which he was ‘still living on and off with Bianca in Kedar Street’ (p. 218), constitutes a turning point. The relationship with Bianca is described as a ‘hopeless business’ (p. 218) by the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp, and his sixty-nine-year-old counterpart subsequently listens in ambiguous silence to Krapp thirty-nine’s apparently enthusiastic consignation of his ‘best years’ (p. 223) to the past. Much of the irony of the presentation of Krapp’s ambivalent recourse to recorded memory stems from the seeming ignominy of Krapp’s literary career which famously leads only to ‘seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas’ (p. 222).

Beckett’s play presents two possibilities which resonate with archivalist problematics. The first concerns the way the idea of the archive is concretised: this is Beckett’s most tangible representation of the archive, and the creation of the personal archive or ‘den’ in which Krapp lives as a physical location in Krapp’s Last Tape was to inspire the interplay between Krapp’s study and other manifestations of the archive in the installation of Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett during the Enniskillen festival in 2012. The second possibility concerns the relations of Beckett’s works with archival technologies, whose presence marks the ongoing reinvention of Beckett in installation art. I suggest that the two possibilities are interlinked, and that the nature of the connection has compelling consequences both for Beckett studies and for representations of the archive in installation art, which in turn display an enduring preoccupation with Beckett.

In Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp’s attempts to negotiate the past, played out in the decaying confines of the archival space which he inhabits, consist mainly of listening to old recordings of himself on a reel-to-reel tape player. The counterpoint of memory and its technological support in the play is well known: the tape player, which in 1958 represented contemporary technology, allows Krapp to access the remote and irrecoverable domain of his youth, and to mourn his lost love. The paradox of the play, though, is that it depicts ‘a late evening in the future’, a setting with highly significant and far-reaching implications.² This is the play’s opening stage direction and yet, like the description of Krapp as ‘wearish’ (p. 215), it apparently makes no real contribution to the business of staging. Instead, I suggest, it subtly modifies the role of archival technology in the play’s reception, by marking Krapp’s textual aspect with an enduring sign of irreconcilable anachronism. When Krapp’s Last Tape is considered as a text, the action is both embedded in an unspecified future and wedded to the technological signifiers of the past.

For Nicholas Johnson, the play now represents a ‘fascinating crossroads with profound implications for how Beckett is to be treated in the future’.³ For Johnson, the encounter of future and past represents a practical dilemma in the theatre: writing in the context of the 2010 Gate Theatre production in Dublin, Johnson argues that this is the ‘last audience generation for which Krapp could even conceivably be in the present. He can always be read as an old man who held on to a piece of analogue machinery instead of getting a recording attachment for his iPod, but at what point does the technological anachronism get in the way of the play’s reception?’ (p. 217). I reformulate this position slightly in order to tease out a problematic which, I suggest, does not necessarily surface in staging but which pervades the play’s textual being.

The vision of the future in Krapp’s Last Tape has no direct bearing on the action, which is concerned with the endless series of ‘P.M.s’ (p. 218), or memorial post-mortems, which populate Krapp’s present experiences. Nevertheless, the play’s ambivalent recourse to the future offers glimpses of a time after Krapp’s death, ‘when all my dust has settled’ (p. 217; original emphasis) and even, towards the end of the play, of a post-human era in which ‘the earth might be uninhabited’ (p. 221). In this, Krapp echoes Clov’s apocalyptic dream of order in Endgame, in ‘a world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust’ and the accompanying fear, in that play, of humanity surviving the apocalypse.⁴ The staging of the play is thus invisibly modified by the discourse of futurity which textually underwrites it: although the play can be staged exactly as written, the alignment of the tape player with ‘the future’ is inherently unsettling.

The thread of the play concerned with a very remote, destructive future crucially interferes, too, with the historicisation of the play’s action, just as Krapp’s protestation ‘thanks to God that it’s over’ (p. 218) finally rings false. One of the central ironies is that Krapp ultimately bemoans the farewell to love, and looks back at his past in an implicit attitude of regret, but the play’s insidious futurity threatens to unravel the underpinning temporal logic of the scheme in which that very statement is made. Instead of setting the play in ‘a late evening in the nineteen eighties’, as he at one point considered, Beckett ultimately decided upon ‘in the future’, permanently complicating the play’s relationship to the present of its performance.⁵ The 1980s setting would have ensured that the reel-to-reel player itself looked more and more antiquated to later audiences while anchoring the action in a technological present defined by the compact disc as well as the not-yet-quite-obsolete reel-to-reel machine. Instead of this fixed end-point, though, Krapp either suggests a setting in which reel-to-reel technology is itself positioned in the future or, alternatively, gestures towards the endless succession of recording technologies which supersede it, ensuring that the play resists its own historicisation by occupying a future which always recedes before the spectator’s eyes. This, then, is a drama of the asynchronous which cannot be resolved in the theatre.

Johnson contextualises the 2010 Gate Theatre production by reference to the productions of the play staged by Michael Colgan between 2000 and 2010. In particular, Johnson cites the danger of turning Beckett’s plays into the ‘museum pieces’ (p. 219) which the tape recorder used in the Colgan productions, including the Beckett on Film version directed by Atom Egoyan and featuring John Hurt, has literally become. If Colgan’s productions court a ‘mode of repetition’ (p. 219) with potentially serious implications for Beckettian performance, however, that mode has also proved to be the source of unsuspected opportunities. The reuse of the tape recorder from the Beckett on Film version heralds a strategy of reuse in which Egoyan remakes Krapp’s Last Tape once more as the installation Steenbeckett in 2002. At the same time, the ironisation of repetition in Beckett’s work, and the implication of the archive in that irony, have been repeatedly revisited in both theatre and installation art.

The insistent return to Beckett in contemporary visual culture takes place through and as a mode of repetition. Such a situation is loaded with irony in view of the groaning thematics of memory in Beckett’s work, suggesting that Beckett becomes a crucial shared memory precisely in the dramatisation of forgetting and loss. To remember Beckett, then, is to participate in shared amnesia; in Nora’s famous (Beckettian) phrase, ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’.⁶ For Nora, too, the archive is the privileged figure of this cultural aporia: ‘the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life itself – often a function of its own recording – a second memory, a prosthesis-memory’ (p. 14).

The implication of Beckettian performance in the constitution of Beckett as lieu de mémoire paradoxically points the way to the ‘reinvention’ of Beckett which Stan Gontarski envisages in his centenary essay on Beckett’s theatre, and to a strand of intermedial practice which, since the late 1990s, has begun to implant Beckett’s theatre into new contexts and forms.⁷ Those forms, as we shall see, are durably marked by the figure of the archive, and by the epistemological dilemmas which arise in the tense exchanges it initiates with Beckett’s work. Such dialogue, as Peggy Phelan suggests, arises from the broader contemporary theatrical context: as Phelan argues in 1997, the ‘strange temporal economy in which we live’ is already characterised as ‘post’, and contemporary performance studies must respond to this dilemma of belatedness. For Phelan, Beckett plays a key role in any such response: ‘what we carry in our “post” is a series of transpositions, transcriptions, transfigurations. Our current “post” signals the difficulty of the end ever arriving at its true ending, or of remaining singular, fixed, gone. And so, like Didi and Gogo, we go on’.⁸

I want now to consider the reinvention of Beckett as an archival strategy: one which combines intermedial reference with a deep investment in ‘archival’ forms and technologies. If recent reimaginings of Beckett have privileged one form, it is that of installation art. For all the diversity of recent installation work, Claire Bishop’s major account characterises the form as presupposing an ‘embodied viewer’ derived from the physical presence of the viewer within the art-work, two characteristics with enormous implications for Beckett:

Rather than imagining the viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes that survey the work from a distance, installation art presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision. This insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art.⁹

Such a definition, principally intended to distinguish installation art from other types of art, sheds considerable light on the sensory problematics of Beckett’s work. Not I, for example, constitutes one of Beckett’s most striking sensory interventions, drawing the viewer’s gaze in towards the mouth, the sole illuminated object in the theatre, but it simultaneously highlights the disembodiment of that mouth. Arguably, Not I is a key milestone in the ‘radical complications of corporeal self-presence that characterize Beckett’s staging of the body’ and which herald Beckett’s interest in other forms, including television, in the 1970s.¹⁰ More recently, the possibility of embodied spectatorship has come to the fore in Beckett studies, despite, or in tandem with, the tortured phenomenology of the prose fiction, where all is ‘mal vu’, or ill seen.¹¹ In what follows, I suggest that the disputed ground of embodiment in Beckett’s prose and theatre alike gives rise to the very dilemmas which have led to the recent ‘re-embodiment’ of Beckett’s work as installation. In particular, those dilemmas concern the deliberately ill-concealed epistemological problematics of the late works, and the concern with the ontology of the image which runs through Beckett’s literary production.

Nikos Navridis and Adriano and Fernando Guimarães exemplify the important shifts in spectatorial dynamics which occur in performance and installation in the twenty-first century: Navridis’ Breath (2005–06) reimagines Beckett’s Breath (1969) in the gallery space and redefines that space through the use of hypersurfaces. The Lost Ones (1971), meanwhile, has inspired two mixed reality projects which respond to the problematic articulation of the fictive reality in Beckett’s original. Carmin Karasić...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Beckett Effect: The Intermedial Archive
• 2 The Archival Testimonial: Mirosław Bałka’s How It Is
• 3 The Relational Archive: Silvia Kolbowski and Eija-Liisa Ahtila
• 4 The Personal Archive: From Christian Boltanski to Lifelogging
• 5 The Archive and the Informational Sublime: Arnold Dreyblatt
• Bibliography
• Index