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| Samual Beckett not I at the Macba 2012 |
Noise...is what sums up Barcelona, it never stops 24/7 noise!! people, traffic, babies, bars, loading and unloading barrels, alarms, church bells, music construction. buildings...zzzzzzbangbangbangzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..........My visit to MACBA gallery is very apt that is to experience 'VOLUME! which quote 'identifies the turn of the century as the moment of consolidation of sound and voice as materials lfor artistic production. The new model is rooted in experimental video and cinema works that favour a narrative language that gradually frees itself from the image'...
Not I is a thirteen-minute dramatic monologue written in 1972 and represented the first time the Forum Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York that same year. In 1975 Samuel Beckett was a version recorded by the BBC television interpretation of Billie Whitelaw and directed by Bill Morton. A Not I, a human mouth, in the foreground, hangs in the darkness illuminated by a single ray of light. Recites a monologue of fragmented phrases syncopated on a subject with a painful past. Although the voice is female (the performer is an actress), the text is not clear if this is a man or a woman. The title comes from the insistent repetition of the word: "everything that happened to me I'm not telling me."
The adaptation of the play to the television format had a decisive effect on the work. If in the stage version, a second character (a figure of indeterminate sex) acted as receiver in the television adaptation suppress it Beckett for technical reasons. If the stage, the vision of the audience was a woman in a monologue, the screen is just a mouth, something that happens to be independent and which is highlighting the condition of the physical body.The lips of the actress kept its original state, but also in turn become sphincter and vagina. The monologue is very fast pace, with interruptions of laughter and desperate cries: a glowing mouth that speaks of herself in third person while he repeatedly denied his identity.
Although the film is one of the lesser known areas of Beckett, the filmic investigations are not a marginal fact in their production and have influenced contemporary visual artists such as Bruce Nauman and Sol LeWitt. Since the mid-sixties, Beckett was interested in the use of radio and television. For over two decades, he wrote and made a film (Film,1964), seven television productions and was adapted to film the play Not I. His was a formal investigation to ensure that the drama had also sought "the strangeness and beauty of the pure image."
Another part of the exhibition (and whose name i cannot remember??) which was of interest to me was a video installation of typing, the viewer watched as the narrator typed up the things that were happening around him, for example...the noise from the TV, the sound of the fridge, creaking off the house (pause) this continues for some time, almost i suppose creating a narrative of time, of exsistence, I felt that it worked closely to Warhols films...(stargazer p41,42) 'viewed psychoanalytically, the voyeur might be somebody who feels excluded...for that reason a figure of Pathos...but he is not excluded; he has absented himself. In doing so, he is solving a problem. presence is theatening to him. distance is essential, itself a source of gratification. distance gratifies because it resolves, and the voyeurs claim (if made)'... as I watched the same thing occurs; the typing swings to and fro, goes forward, (make a mistake), go back, go forward (pause)...oh just remembered what I missed out here and that is the headphones. Yes whilist I was watching the words quickly appearing on the screen I put on the headphones, the distance dissapears and now I am envolved... everything came alive, the sound of typing, and the sounds that surrounded the narrator, you also him talking...as you can see I am trying to recreate that here (video camera switched on)...however it isn't going to be the same, therefore I am going to look into a simular method of writing and recording it??? this will be where the film element comes into my reflective practice..stopping for a moment to check out artist name...back shortly..a ha!! found him, french astist Pierre Bismuth (1963-) the piece is called Postscript / The passenger (OV) 1996-2010.
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| POSTSCRIPT / THE PASSENGER (OV) 1996-2010 |
Taken from the leaflet....The text projected on this work is the vetro-writing of the dialogue and atmosphere of the film by Michealangelo Antonioni The Passenger, 1975, by a women about whom all we know is that she is listening to the soundtrack of the film. Busmuth transforms the cinematic experience into a literary one, in a tension caused by the non-cinematic space, and reveals the fragility of image reading codes, the independence of the eye from the ear, and the redundancy of the ear in a world conditioned by the visual experience.
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