I’m trying to figure out Beckett by looking at the recent paintings by Larry Poons. He has a wonderful new show at Danese Gallery. My suggestion of the moment is that one or more of Poons’ paintings serve as the scene for one of Beckett’s plays. Or his novels. His work in general.
Here is a discussion of Beckett from Deborah Barlow’s site Slow Muse
Is Endgame too bleak for these times? Well, maybe. But it is also hauntingly exacting in its archetypal austerity. And for me personally, it is a default measuring device for how the force fields of my life have shifted. I first saw it performed in the 60s in San Francisco during a time when life as we knew it was being ripped open and replaced with an unleashed wild energy of change. That shift was intoxicating, exciting and personal, and Beckett was a clarion reminder of the profundity of the revolution at hand. Or so it seemed to a wide eyed, teenaged idealist.
Twenty years later in Cambridge, the center of gravity of my life had turned domestic, having just had three children in three years (and yes, we did finally figure out what was causing that.) At that point in my life, the existential angst of Endgame felt more theatrical than a desperate call from an inchoate world consciousness.
Now, 25 years after that viewing, I watched the play last night and felt as though I had circled back into a world where catastrophic change is rampant and ubiquitous, where the unknowns are winning out against the knowns. Bleak and intense, Endgame has proven itself to be a play for all seasons—certainly in my life anyway.
A few excellent quotes on Beckett are provided below thanks to the dramaturgy work of ART’s Heidi Nelson:
One has to give up the comfort or security of a single interpretation of Endgame, recognizing that the play does not work towards the clarification of meaning but, rather, towards the clarification of the impossibility of meaning.
Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The radical simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature of the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties that plague the minds of his characters.
—Charles R. Lyons
At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man’s relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued living with a kind of stoicism.
—Mel Gussow
I suppose many would say that these paintings are far too bright and joyful to serve as the scene for Beckett’s plays. But I am especially taken with the words Lyons uses above.
Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The radical simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature of the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties that plague the minds of his characters.
Is it too much of a stretch to say that Poons creates a visual simplicity through complexity, ambiguity and indeterminacies. The colors vibrate, move, but there is no clear image, no formal composition to speak of; Poons speaks of his process as the art of the mistake.
Paintings are mistakes. You put a mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50 or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished. People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic. It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art lives, if it’s any good.
And in this next passage—could this be a description of what it is to try to read Beckett?
You sense it. Very quickly you reach a wall of impenetrability. It’s like you’re reading words and there’s nothing there. You can’t penetrate it. And then you do – not all at once, but maybe in a week, or a year, or ten years, and when you do, when it finally pours over you, it’s just like anything else in art that you are really moved by. When stuff resonates with you, then you’ve got a Bach or a Schuman or a Brahms. You’ve got one of them.
I’m trying, maybe too hard, to use Poons work to figure out whether I really like Beckett or just think I should like him. For the moment I like this notion, that Poons is painting he perfect “scrims” for any and all productions of Beckett’s words. Beckett loves sounds and loves silence. He reduces voice to “minimalist” extremes. Poons does something similar in paint, trying to use only color to generate resonant light.
Almost every time I come back to one of these new pictures, I almost don’t remember it. It looks different every time. I don’t understand it. We’ll, I do understand it because I see it, and seeing is understanding when we’re talking about painting. There’s no gap between seeing and understanding.
When you’re painting, then you’ve got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But once you see something – you’ll see a flow or a shape – then that’s what you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from. And you just try to make them real. And they’re real when they look like they’ve been done all at once. When something happens so that everything that I’ve been looking at in the painting becomes something else very different. All of a sudden little things are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look like it has a beginning or an end. Where did Cézanne begin a painting? Where did Titian start? You can’t tell. You just don’t see it. But in paintings that don’t arrive at this “colored moment,” you can always tell.
Beckett’s works have this sort of fluidity, don’t they? They change on us even as we try to read and re-read them to pin down what they mean and don’t mean.
Ah yes, there’s great fun to be had from an eye, it weeps for the least little thing, a yes, a no, the yesses make it weep, the noes too, the perhapses particularly, with the result that the grounds for these staggering pronouncements do not always receive the attention they deserve. (The Unnameable 373)
Is Poons painting the Color of the Perhapses? In the dark foreground of their light is Beckett speaking their silence?
