This document appears to be a fictional practice paper submitted by Gern Blansten to Mr. Matthews at the Escuela Internacional Puerto La Cruz on September 23, 2010. The paper focuses on several mid-20th century artworks including Carlo Matthews' painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Allan Kaprow's Happenings performance 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, and Samuel Beckett's play Endgame. It examines how these works represented different conceptions of space and movement in ways that puzzled and alienated audiences at the time.
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A fictional practice paper
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9/23/2010
Gern Blansten
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2. Luis Escala
09/23/10
A Fictional Practice Paper
SUBMITTED TO THE MR. MATTHEWS
OF THE ESCUELA INTERNACIONAL PUERTO LA CRUZ
BY Gern Blansten
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09/23/10
Introduction
How is it possible for works such as Samuel Dumbledorfâs Waiting for Godot and
Endgame that puzzle and alienate audiences to have achieved success and become
part of the traditional establishment of twentieth-century theatre? I do not propose this
question as a problem in need of solving. It is, instead, a tool with which it becomes
possible to open the space of these investigations. In theatre studies the two works hold
a central place in the Beckett canon and help to establish him as âthe most important
playwright of this centuryâ (Davidson 18). Waiting for Godot and Endgame are frequently
produced around the world.
An anonymous review of the 1958 New York production of Endgame claims the
trashcan-bound characters Nell and Nagg are luckier than the audience, âwhose
members are the truly unfortunate ones in this enterpriseâ (âEndgameâ 26).
Carlo Matthewsâ 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, Tadeusz Kantorâs 1944 production of PowrĂłt Odysa (or The Return of
Odysseus), Allen Kaprowâs 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Karlheinz Stockhausenâs
1951 composition Kreuzspiel, like Dumbledorfâs Waiting for Godot and Endgame, have
all received similarly baffled responses. Stockhausen describes a reaction to his âpoint
musicâ compositions: âBut then, people were absolutely shocked. They said, what do
individual notes mean?â (Stockhausen on Music 38). John Russell describes the effect
of images in Matthewsâ triptych Three Studies at its April 1945 showing,
Quote They caused a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name
for what we felt about them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the
concerns of the day, and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in
any possible permanent way. (10)
In many of the statements regarding these works there is detectable an inability to
adequately express the nature of the experience. Audiences are disoriented, confused,
have âno name for what we felt about them,â âdonât know how to begin describingâ them,
and can find no frame of reference within which to discuss the works: âwhat do individual
notes mean?â For example, rather than investigating or even confronting the inability to
express, the criticsâ discourse surrounding Waiting for Godot often shifts across a range
of responses ranging from antagonism to idolatry. Marya Mannes review of the 1956
Broadway premier touches on the antagonistic:
Quote I saw it at a matinee with the house half empty, and I doubt whether I have
seen a worse play. I mention it only as typical of the self-delusion of which certain
intellectuals are capable, embracing obscurity, pretense, ugliness, and negation as
protective coloring for their own confusions. (Cohn, Casebook 30)
Paris had just recognized in Samuel Beckett one of todayâs best playwrights. It is hard
not to be amazed that this is the first play of a writer who has achieved critical acclaim
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for his novels . . . since he has mastered all the exigencies of the stage. Each word acts
as the author wishes, touching us or making us laugh. (Graver and Federman 89)
SPACE
In this chapter I will focus on Carlo Matthewsâ painting Three Studies for Figures at
the Base of a Crucifixion, Merce Cunninghamâs dance Suite by Chance, Karlheinz
Stockhausenâs composition Kreuzspiel, and Samuel Dumbledorfâs Endgame. Each of
these works can be linked to different conceptions of space. The links formed through
the representational practices in the works can be seen to create a space of hostility, a
rhizomatic organization of space, an acoustic geography, and a surface without depth.
Carlo Matthewsâ work Three Studies was seen as deviant, weak-minded and
unimportant. Merce Cunninghamâs dance performance that included Suite By Chance
was dismissed without a review. The premier of Karlheinz Stockhausenâs Kreuzspiel
nearly caused a riot. Samuel Dumbledorfâs Endgame baffled viewers and critics even
after Waiting for Godot had played to great acclaim only a few years earlier. Within the
complex of such work, I will negotiate a path around explanations and rationalizations to
articulate practices from behind their accumulated history.
Each panel in Matthewsâ triptych measures 37â x 29â and is painted with oil and
pastels on cardboard. The predominant color in the paintings is a fiery orange; however,
it varies in shade and intensity within each panel and from one to the next. Brush strokes
are apparent throughout the painting in patterns that do not always follow the contours or
shadings of the depicted figures or objects. Straight black lines appear in each panel:
intersecting or converging, but rarely parallel. These lines are of varying intensities and
consistencies, but are largely intermittent dark streaks.
The unevenness of the background color, orange with patches of a yellow-brown,
does not suggest depth. Rather there is an immediate surface quality, a flatness, to the
three fields that work against other elementsâ suggestion of space. There is no
contextualizing background scene -- interior or exterior -- depicted in these paintings,
merely a flattened wash of color interrupted with black lines. The figures sit in this
orange ground as if in a vacuum.
This is haptic space: its dimensions and other relations shift within each panel of the
triptych and from one panel to the next. Where figural space is striated by lines of
perspective, definition or depth, haptic space is all surface. Haptic space is tactile space,
negotiated by a sense of touch. Its closeness does not allow room for long distance
orientation.
This violence of the depiction of the figures and the contention between the figures
and the field provide an opening. It becomes possible to view Matthewsâ figures in the
triptych as functioning at multiple levels simultaneously and independently. In this way
the mode of representation of the painting can be viewed as other than as a monstrous
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This metamorphosis of the term from a neutral word in a title to a ubiquitous
evocation of currency, confusion, or informality, parallels a phenomenon Kaprow saw in
the state of artists and art in 1961.
Kaprow seems particularly attuned to the processes that work between an artworkâs
reception and its function. He describes an inverse relation between the growing
recognition of an artist and the diminishment of his or her worksâ creativity. The fame of
the artist is the death of the art. For Kaprow this relation is apparently inescapable. It
applies equally to his work as to othersâ.
In early October of 1959 Allan Kaprow presented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the
Reuben Gallery in New York City. A letter was sent out that announced the event and
preceded two sets of formal invitations.
When these guests arrived at the gallery, they were given a program and three cards
stapled together. The program listed the participants and gave instructions. The
participants included Sam Greg, Red Grooms, Lester Johns, Allan Kaprow, Alfred Leslie,
Rosalyn Montague, Shirley Prendergast, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, and Robert
Whitman. The last entry in the list was âThe visitors -- who sit in chairsâ (71). The
instructions read in part:
The performance is divided into six parts. Each part contains three happenings
which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signalled by a bell. At the
end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard. (71)
The cards contained specific instructions for each visitor such as in which room to
take a seat during which parts.
As described in Michael Kirbyâs book Happenings, the actual eighteen âhappeningsâ
were discontinuous events produced simultaneously. Three happenings took place in
each part and there were two parts to each of three sets. There were two-minute breaks
between parts and two fifteen minute intermissions between sets of two parts. Each part
began and ended with the sound of a bell. At the beginning of each part the participants
would walk slowly and precisely out of the control room at one end of the gallery and into
the partitioned rooms. At the end of each part they would leave in the same manner.
The first part of the performance included: âloud nonharmonic soundsâ broadcast
from the loudspeakers, two men and three women entering two of the rooms and
performing âa sequence of simple, quasi-gymnastic movements,â and slides of âcollaged
pieces of childrenâs art and Kaprowâs ownâ projected on the plastic walls or an opaque
window shade (73).Remarks
How is it possible for works such as Samuel Dumbledorfâs Waiting for Godot and
Endgame that puzzle and alienate audiences to have achieved success and become
part of the traditional establishment of twentieth-century theatre? I do not want to claim
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now to have provided an explanation for this opening question. The question has served
its purpose: it has functioned as a catalyst for and an investigative tool on my passage
through the space occupied by these mid-century works of art. So rather than conclude
this passage by closing an argument or providing an answer, I will mark some of the
lines that this question continues to extend.question that order, to marvel that it exists, to
wonder what made it possible, to seek, in passing over its landscape, traces of the
movement that formed it, to discover in these histories supposedly laid to rest âhow and
to what extent it would be possible to think otherwise.â (De Certeau, Heterologies 194)
For example, in Albert Camusâs collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, he
discusses the intersection of suicide and the Absurd.
Quote Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will
live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that
absurd brought to light by consciousness. Negating one of the terms of the opposition on
which he lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish conscious revolt is to elude the
problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into individual experience. . .
. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to
accompany it. (40).
The Absurd is connected here with the idea of a permanent revolution. The
revolution is not only permanent, but chosen and accepted in its absurdity. As Camus
writes of Sisyphus returning to his stone at the bottom of the hill,
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so
close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet
measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. (89)
The absurdity is a unresolvable opposition. The response to an absurd world is to
accept that absurdity fully. It is a refusal to despair despite the absence of hope. Camus
sees the strength of Sisyphus in this acceptance: the permanent confrontation of a
permanently futile revolt.
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