Sounding Spaces: Aurality in Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art
   Derval Tubridy
The paper investigates the ways in which Samuel Beckett and contemporary artists such as Bruce Naumann and Janet Cardiff transgress the borders between theatre, music and fine art through finely composed dramatic narrative. It explores the interrelationship between narrative, aurality and space in Beckett’s late plays such as Krapp’s Last Tape and That Time, and Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s audio pieces and installations such as Forty Part Motet and The Missing Voice (Case Study B). Both dramatist and artist examine the role of listening within a specifically constructed fictional space which is, in Cardiff’s work, mapped onto the real space in which the listening body moves. Cardiff’s work blurs the line between fiction and reality as the narrated soundtrack leads the listener through real time and space. Using the conventions of cinema Cardiff’s works present in sound what Beckett’s Film evokes through visual imagery, the counterpoint between both works destabilising the border between genres. Naumann’s early work was strongly influenced by Beckett’s theatre. This is most evident in video pieces such as Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) in which Naumann mimics the akward gait of many of Beckett’s characters (particularly from Molloy and Watt) in a performance that takes place within the spare confines of the artist’s studio. The paper examines Beckett’s legacy in Naumann’s contemporary work, in particular his installation at the Tate Modern called Raw Materials. Here Naumann develops an arrangement of narrative which is closer to music than prose, and presents it in a way that evokes Beckett’s theatrical places writ large. Sounding Spaces: Aurality in Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art explores how Beckett, Naumann and Cardiff interweave past and present, memory and fiction, desire and reality through a complex interplay between sound and space at the moment of performance.
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1