Exhibition: The Perceiving Eye | nd-aktuell.de

The exhibition “On Television, Beckett” is a project by the artist Gerard Byrne and the curator and Beckett expert Judith Wilkinson. Both approached the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) through the visual arts. All seven groundbreaking television plays that he produced for Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR, today SWR) in Stuttgart between 1966 and 1985 are presented: “He Joe” (1966), “Ghost Trio” (1977), “… only clouds…” ( 1977), “Square I” (1981), “Square II” (1981), “Night and Dreams” (1982) and “What Where” (1985). Beckett’s television version of his play “Not I” (1975), produced for the BBC, can also be seen, which was only released by the SDR on November 1, 1977 at his pressure, together with “Ghost Trio” and “… only clouds …« was broadcast under the title »Shadows«. Beckett had been promised the best possible technical and organizational support, a promise that was kept. In 1966, the recording process did not allow subsequent corrections or cuts.

For “He Joe,” Beckett gave precise specifications for sets, costumes and camera angles. What happens should be limited to shades of gray. Beckett had worked out every setting with a protractor and ruler, stopping text and pauses between individual passages. An older man can be seen shuffling through the gray while a female voice whispers: “The best is yet to come… You were right, that one time, in the end.”

After the broadcast on April 13, 1966, Anneliese de Haas wrote in the “Welt”: “New territory for television that has become rigid with its routine and is constrained by programming schemes.” In “Ghost Trio” and “… only clouds…” Beckett largely avoids spoken passages. In “Ghost Trio” A Largo by Beethoven appears as a recurring quotation as language. And in “… only clouds left …” nothing is spoken of as a treasure trove, and the seated man quotes the final verses from William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Tower”: “… only clouds left in the heights …/soon none Horizon more…/tired birds moaning…/dark shadows all around.”

In “Square I” and “Square II” Beckett forgoes language entirely: “The actors walk through the limited area, each going their own way.” The title “Night and Dreams” is borrowed from the Schubert song of the same name, the last seven of which Bars accompany the dream of a man who has fallen asleep at the table: “Fair dreams return…” Beckett’s last TV work in Stuttgart was the adaptation of the stage play “Was Wo” created for the Styrian Autumn in Graz. In this “endgame after the end” (Peter Goßens), Schubert’s “Winterreise” appears in the negative: “It is winter. Without travel.”

Beckett, for whom visuality and performance always played a major role, saw television as an independent form of expression.

Beckett, for whom visuality and performance always played a major role, saw television as an independent form of expression that he sought to explore experimentally in his plays, driven by radical language skepticism. The image became increasingly important to him. In his works for television, as Gilles Deleuze later wrote in his text “Exhausted” about the almost completely textless productions, “Beckett exhausts the space twice and the image twice. Words became more and more unbearable for Beckett. And he knew from the beginning the reason why he was finding it increasingly difficult to tolerate it: it was the particular difficulty of drilling one “hole after another” into the surface of language so that “the things behind it” would finally become visible.”

Beckett worked to ensure that television kept the promise that – according to Theodor W. Adorno in ‘Prologue to Television’ (1952/53) – still resonates in the word and not “the idea of ​​great happiness betrays the department store for the small.” . Day after day, today’s German television stations prove how right Frank Zappa was with his song “I’m the slime oozing out of your TV set.” The advanced technical possibilities remain unused; no TV station would bring a Beckett into the studio today.

Based on Adorno’s statement that those who speak with human voices on television are dwarfs and are hardly taken seriously in the same sense as film characters, the “crazy TV inventions” (Beckett) are not shown on TV screens at the Württembergischer Kunstverein, but as Cinema projections in four projection booths reminiscent of TV studios – an experimental arrangement from miniature to close-up.

These bunks are positioned in such a way that they create a fifth, slightly offset square room in the middle, in which a cot, seating and a hint of door and window refer to the set from “Ghost Trio”. To get from bunk to bunk, the visitors move back and forth through the stage-like space and thus become actors in an imaginary piece. In addition, Byrne and Wilkinson present an aesthetically and substantively successful frieze with photos of archival materials relating to Beckett’s work in Stuttgart. And films about “Germany in Autumn” and “Film” (1965) by Alan Schneider and Beckett can be seen on monitors. This film with Buster Keaton as an actor has no dialogue or accompanying music. It is a film, says Schneider, “about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver – two aspects of the same person.”

“About television, Beckett,” until January 12, 2025. Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart.
www.wkv-stuttgart.de