As part of the Belgrade Irish Festival, on Thursday, March 12, the "Balkan" cinema will open exhibition "Siege in the room - following the work Samuel Beckett". The exhibition was put on by Nikola Šuica, art historian and curator, professor at the University of Arts in Belgrade. We talk about Samuel Beckett, why and in what way Beckett persists as a challenge even after so many years, how to transfer his work to the art medium, what it tells us, and how our artists found inspiration in the great Irish writer.
...Nikola Šuica
"WEATHER" Why do we return to Beckett?? Or why Beckett returns to us?
NIKOLA ŠUICA: From the past of the city's culture, along with all the current persecutions and all the forgetting, a reminder has arrived: it has been seven decades since the first theater performance of the tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. And that is only part of the program, which is mostly dedicated to the phenomenon of Samuel Beckett, under the auspices of the Belgrade Irish Festival. The return of the writer who came to Belgrade for a short time in 1958 also takes place through the exhibition of our artists, which awakens his powerful global legacy.
Why did you come back to Beckett??
Now it's a memory of my childhood in Dorćol in the mature sixties, my mother took me several times to the neighborhood, to visit uncle Radet. As a boy, I was carried away by the colorful posters nailed to the bark of plane trees - the circus "Moira Orfei" and the painted faces of clowns with top hats. I used to draw clowns and vagabonds, maybe even Chaplin, so I guess that prompted the host to show me some shots of guys with top hats and broken shoes: photos from the Waiting for Godot performance. Rada's uncle was Radomir Konstantinović, not only a writer, thinker and sensitive anatomist of culture, but at that time, for more than a decade, Beckett's friend. Much later, before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Ljuba Tadić returns to Beckett or, rather, does not leave him either - Vladimir from Godot. He staged a famous tragicomedy in an off theater called "Magaza", and that performance, I remember, with Koja on the bass guitar and the anthem "Hey Slaveni", spread the foreboding of disintegration.
The confessional tone and ruined existence, those forms of satirical helplessness and indirect sobriety, are the stimulus of transmission from the ancient depths. I have been thinking for a long time how curatorial interventions in Beckett's immersions (and not only his) should aim at playing with value matrices, hierarchies and extremely superficial, as much as boring, agendas of visual art. The sensitive writings provide an incomparable contrast, which is a retreat from the ferocity and predatory self-emphasis in the deceptions of contemporary artistic endeavors that have been going on for decades anyway.
You place Beckett in a space that is neither literary nor theatrical. Is the call to visualization heard from Beckett's work itself or is it a question of interpretation "outside","by other means"?
Scenic motif of the waiting area, near a barren tree from Godot the vestibule is for descriptions of movements and plots, just like the first novel Murphy nor do the motives of passionate wanderings and sensual temptations have a temporal determinability. It is clear that the ideas for the exhibition come from the artist's personal authorial intuitions and expressions, and can be connected with Beckett's insight into the experiences of the outside, as with his role model Dante. The organic background in the form of silk with embroidered cartoon outlines of anatomy is part of the carefully created silk objects of Vana Urošević and Zoran Todović: Beckett's hands, figures, sensory receptors of the human anatomy, a plucked wing or a bat. On the other hand, the combined photographs are either large-format, or, on the contrary, condensed into panels of epoxy resin - similar to amber that gives the illusion of objects, figures and shadows and thus accentuates the hardships of everyday life in Marija Ćalić's acrylic transfer. A giant drawing of a "Dante's" vision of the celestial body, the dark side of the moon, is also included, which also aims at the geopolitical events of today: whitish reflections of quotations in Latin and Arabic by Zoran Dimovski. There is also a reflection of the damaged body in the wood of an upturned chair, similar to a monumental solution to the decaying physicality of the body, as well as the drastic disintegration of the portrait in the expressive charge of Aleksandar Denić. The awakened "Beckettian" mechanism builds up and offers a visible flow.
The setting suggests a certain anti-Beckettian gesture: Beckett is interpreted and seen through matter. His works are, however, metaphysical. Is there a certain tension between setting and meaning offered by Beckett's work?
photo: Milan Kralj...
Metaphysicality is indirect precisely because of the lyrical-elegiac suggestion, but also because of banal materiality. Tramps and wanderers from Godot, from Moloa, as well as voices or descriptions from one-act plays: the characters are crushed and grounded by impotence, even as they speak frantically of their misfortunes, in haunted rooms, wastelands, or at crossroads. The descriptions of their movements refer to Dante's entry into "Purgatory", and they become games with religious metaphysical tremors. Beckett's Protestant view of modesty, all that confession even through extremes or tiresome trumpeting in the midst of which silence nestles, point to Irish Catholicism. The focus on the things described are long silences, the passage of time, noises and flashes, ghostly summons and certain Gnostic lessons: when you stop looking, you start finding. I would like to believe that this is evidenced by the visuality of the works in the expressive media at the exhibition "Siege in the Room".
What does it mean "Siege in the room"?
Interpreters thereby determined the expressive momentum (1945-1950) in the seasons of scarcity, when through work, mental and emotional obsession, works are created Mercier and Camier, Waiting for Godot, Moloa, Malone is dying., Lyrics for nothing, or ideas like the work End of the game. A lonely experience for a self-willed exile from Dublin, through London to Paris, is evidence of other anxieties. According to the included works, the exhibition is not illustrative, but aims at the global troubles of the superimposed fusion of the world, at the emptiness as a consequence of the failed progress of the modern age. In the setting we find what Beckett himself offers: death and frenzy, absence and bitter humor, and evil and ignorance of the law, as well as the absurdity of experience that expresses impossibility and nothingness. Going beyond established perceptions and judgments about failure, about the downfall of the scientific spirit and humanities, is lost in the system of painful repetitions. In this way, existence is seen as a crack. We live in a time where any performance skill, as well as marketing, or digitally packaged visual expression, accumulate fatigue. Entire landfills are created. And Beckett's call "and now deeper through the garbage..." may be a way to overcome the current activist environmental traumas.
Contemporary context, it seems, doesn't offer much hope.
For more than a quarter of a century, numerous Beckett studies, analyzes and insights into his legacy have branched out in the humanities. On the one hand, it is precisely such an atmosphere that we should thank for the new, existentialist platforms of contemporary visual art - who wants to see it - but there are also consequences, political consequences. It is unnecessary to emphasize how all this is happening in the midst of destruction and devastation in the third decade of the century. Like theater instructions and works of art redefine everyone's premonitions. They penetrate into the concepts of the unspeakable, sometimes unimaginable. After all, for years expressions of fine art have become commercial illustrative decorums. Or quite the opposite, on the other hand - they have become strict rules of intrusive political correctness, completed social and political utopias. In environments that have created a new psychedelia of media consumer frenzy. For Beckett, I believe, our age would also be a justified reason to withdraw from the macabre carnivalization of "breaking news" that has been working hard for decades to abolish the possibility of hope, to deepen personal anguish and collective obsessions. Especially in the South Slavic region.
