On the day marking Beckett's centenary, Aidan Dunne finds appropriate echoes in the visual arts strand of his festival.
Reviewed
I not I, Nauman, Guston, Beckett, Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery until May 1 (01-6612558)
Centenary Shadows, John Minihan, National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar until May 27 (01-6030371)
No Colour No Colour, Cian McLoughlin, OPW, 51 St Stephen's Green until May 1
The first thing to be said about Bruce Nauman's Clown Torture, surely the centrepiece of the RHA's excellent Beckett centenary show I not I, is that it is pretty close to being torture alright. It is one of the most grating, uncomfortable artworks you are ever likely to encounter. It is also a benchmark piece in the development of Nauman's distinctive and highly influential style of sensory abrasiveness. Long a major figure in contemporary art, his artistic trajectory has been unpredictable. Firstly, in the early 1960s he veered from studying maths and physics at Wisconsin University to painting in California. But he soon gave up painting.
From the mid-1960s, there was a veritable revolution in artistic practice, as artists challenged virtually every convention, moving from standard forms into installation, earth works, performance and conceptualism.
There was also a technological development that still resonates today: Sony introduced the first domestic video recording camera. Artists, including Bill Viola and Nauman, latched onto it with unalloyed enthusiasm. The innovation freed artists from the bounds of professional technicians. Suddenly the moving image was in the studio in a completely open, unfettered way. Nauman made a series of pared-down studio video pieces that are, in effect, recordings of carefully ritualised performances.
One of these early works, Slow Angled Walk, from 1968, features in I not I. Nauman had gradually come to focus on his own physical presence as subject and actor, but ask what his work is about and the answer is something like the angry interrogation of symbolic systems of meaning. Right from the first, there is something very Beckettian to his performance videos. Their restricted means recalls the variously, sometimes grotesquely, restricted characters in Beckett's dramas for stage and radio. So too does Nauman's use of language and the way he pushes the ordinary, in terms of both language and actions, way beyond the point of absurdity. The hypnotic build-up in Good Boy, Bad Boy, a two-screen duologue, is a case in point.
Clown Torture, though, is something else in the way it relentlessly assaults the senses. Nauman, no more than Beckett, is not the first to use the motif of the sad clown as emblematic of the tragicomic nature of life, but the work is in a class of its own as a howl of anguish. Though it was made in 1987, it is all too apposite in the context of media images of detainees and hostages in boiler suits, of everyday cruelty and atrocity. In fact it is an extremely resonant and powerful piece in many ways. You should grab the opportunity of seeing it. But remember, it is an unsettling, abrasive experience.
The second strand of I not I is formed by a group of paintings by Philip Guston. Guston famously alienated much of his public and indeed his gallery when, around 1970, he switched from abstract expressionism to a style of deliberately crude, comic-book figuration.
It's now customary to decry his abstract period but as a retrospective a couple of years ago demonstrated, the paintings and drawings he made during this time are really terrific.
But at the start of the 1960s he seems to have gone through a crisis, to have come to a dead end, eventually giving up painting completely in favour of making exploratory representational drawings. There is a sense of creeping ennui and despair throughout the figurative work he made during the last decade of his life (he died, suddenly, as a result of a heart attack in 1980), but there is also something like exhilaration, as though he was finally able to express masses of mostly negative feelings.
Rather than starting from scratch, as well, he actually returned to his earliest days as an artist. The Ku Klux Klansmen who feature large first appeared in his paintings in 1930. The question that arises from responses to his shift in approach is: why wasn't he entitled to change his mind about his way of working? I Not I features six of his later paintings, all substantial, and all impressive. The darkly comic mode, certain props - the bare light bulb, for example - and a generally stark, overtly theatrical pictorial vocabulary invite the term Beckettian. The hobnailed boots worn by the figure in Sleeping are dually indebted to Beckett and graphic artist Robert Crumb. Martyr is another exceptional work.
The Beckett strand of the show draws on a couple of formidable talents. Neil Jordan's Not I, which simply focuses on the mouth of Julianne Moore, is exceptionally good. A lot of logistical effort was clearly invested in Damien Hirst's Breath, but the net result is essentially some Hirst staples cursorily repackaged and re-branded. In all, it would be difficult to think of a better, more appropriate exhibition to mark the centenary.
THOUGH FAMOUSLY PUBLICITY-SHY and rarely photographed, Beckett became an iconic figure, a living embodiment of a Left Bank intellectual, craggy and dark and severe and enduringly stylish. One of the people responsible for his iconic status is undoubtedly the Irish photographer John Minihan, who was greatly taken with the writer. Centenary Shadows at the National Photographic Archive marshalls his portrait images and shots of several productions of Beckett's plays. The writer was, it has to be said, a compelling subject, a formidable and intense presence. There is one shot of Beckett that recalls but does not match the celebrated photograph of James Dean in Paris, on the boulevard of broken dreams. What comes across consistently, though, is Minihan's warmth toward his subject, and his subject's reciprocal warmth and co-operation. One of the best known images, from 1984, is particularly apt: we see Beckett walking away, satchel over his shoulder.
The question of how to approach Beckett in drawings or paintings is best answered so far by Guston or, from quite a different perspective by portrait images by his friend Avigdor Arikha.
In No Colour No Colour at the OPW, Cian McLoughlin has a brave stab at capturing the character of Beckett's theatrical world in a series of portraits of actors in performance.
Lee Evens, Michael Gambon, John Hurt, Geoffrey Hutchings, Barry McGovern, Johnny Murphy and Liz Smith all sat for the artist, in character from three Beckett productions. Hurt's face, for one, is a gift of expressiveness, but perhaps too much of a gift in this context.
Theatrical photographs tend, predictably enough, to be stagy. They are supplementary to stage productions and do a job. The imagination adjusts to the stylised world of the theatre for the performance, and the photographs are pointers to, supplements of performance.
McLoughlin paints on an ambitious scale, but comes up against the problem of depicting a stylised theatrical world. Essentially he doesn't step outside the frame of the production still, which limits the scope of his works as paintings. Writ large they may be, but they don't move beyond their given, illustrative parameters.
The textured masses of pigment that form extensive backgrounds in the larger pieces add little, partly because they don't go far enough and partly because they do not evidence great feeling for paint. Still, as someone drawn to hopeless enterprises, Beckett might have approved.
