The title of this show referred to a novel by Samuel Beckett, Murphy, in which Murphy eventually ties himself to a chair and dies with the gas pipes open in an attempt to reach a state of absolute mental immobility [1].
I was young and depressive and tried to piece the world together for myself, but it had the tendency to fall apart all the time. [2] The show consisted of three large panels, black and white copies of felt pen drawings that showed weird blobs intertwined with each other: above each panel there was a copy of a black and white photograph. One showed myself on a park bench, barefoot; another my father in a reclining chair in our garden; a third one showed a woman that was lying down on the board of the Seine in Paris, wearing a long black coat. Each of the persons was lying there inert, concentrated on him - or herself; further distanced from the viewer by the use of the cheap copies. The abstract blobs beneath them were maybe the excellent chaos going on in their minds.
My bare foot had a special significance for me; at the time I had very little money and sometimes I really felt like a bum. I was travelling a lot and had sometimes had to spend the night on a bench somewhere outside.
I had put some books with black and white copies in plastic covers on a small table. They were all copied from b / w photos that I had taken during my travels, and enlarged myself with a very hard gradation. When they were copied, some of them had so much contrast that you could hardly make out the picture.
The idea was to have a stock of pictures, and to make a different selection for each book. The books had titles like: Die Stadt (The city); Der Arbeitslose (The unemployed man); Ein Nachmittag in Paris (An afternoon in Paris); the pages of one of the books were entirely chosen by chance; the others tried to tell stories that never took place in this way. In the book about Paris for example, I also had photos from London or Stockholm or India. I mixed them all, because for me they were all the same, but also to prove that signification is produced by making connections between one picture and another, or one word and another [3]. Since they didn't make any sense that wasn't arbitrary to me, they equalled the abstract drawings that followed their own basic rules without producing any meaning.
[1] Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938), Grove Press, 1970
“Written in English and later translated by Beckett into French, Beckett's second novel was rejected by over forty publishers. Murphy is by its own admission a puppet show, in which Menippean characters with prodigious vocabularies deal with the absurd costs of living: insanity, lust, and love. Despite his stout Irish everyman's name, Murphy himself is not a puppet, but a consciousness in crisis: "Murphy's mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it."
This "seedy solipsist" is driven into action (such as it is) by a horoscope his lover, Celia Kelly, procures at his request: among other things, it advises him to wear lemon as a lucky color, to place faith in the years 1936 and 1990, and to take great care "in dealing with publishers, quadrupeds, and tropical swamps." At Celia's urging and in a notably reluctant and listless manner, Murphy casts about London for a job, eventually finding a real vocation as a nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (called the MMM). Unfortunately for Celia and the other characters looking for him, Murphy finds the catatonia of the MMM patients, especially the oblivion of Mr. Endon, supremely attractive - an alternative to consciousness and its attendant pains and inconveniences. After surrendering to him in chess, Murphy stares into his own reflection in Mr. Endon's unseeing eyes and, thus blessed, retires to his garret in the MMM and "soon his body was quiet." Perhaps the "excellent gas" from the heater kills him before his final immolation.
Murphy is a funny and precocious book, but also, it must
be said, a mean one. There is a quintessential pointlessness to all its characters'
endeavors, with the notable exception of the search for oblivion, which of
course needs not to be sought to be eventually encountered. The schemes of
Neary, Wylie, and Miss Counihan get nowhere. Cooper does manage to sit down
and remove his hat, but he ultimately relapses into drink. Despite his wishes
to have his remains flushed down the toilet, Murphy's ashes are scattered
about in a barfight. Celia grimly returns to prostitution. (Indeed, this
book of all Beckett's works shows least sympathy for women, to put it mildly.)
Only Mr. Kelly's kite achieves transcendence, in what might be the book's
most beautiful and terrifying passage (…).”
www.themodernword.com
back
[2] My favourite poems, which I knew by heart, were by Michelangelo Buonarotti:
Sol io ardendo all'ombra mi rimango,
quand'el sol de' suo razzi el mondo spoglia:
ogni altro per piacere, e io per doglia,
prostrato in terra, mi lamento e piango.
I' piango, i' ardo, i' mi consumo, e 'l core
di questo si nutrisce. O dolce sorte!
chi è che viva sol della suo morte,
come fo io d'affanni e di dolore?
Ahi! crudele arcier, tu sai ben l'ore
da far tranquille l'angosciose e corte
miserie nostre con la tuo man forte;
ché chi vive di morte mai non muore.
And than, after all this lamenting, crying
and burning, the bliss of the dark night
(I suffered from insomnia):
O nott', o dolce tempo, benchè nero,
con pace ogn'opra sempr'al fin assalta.
ben ved'e ben intende chi ésalta,
e chi t'onor, ha l'intellett intero.
Tu mozzi e tronchi ogni stanco pensiero,
che l'umid ombra et ogni quiet'appalta
e dall'infima parte alla piú alta
in sogno spesso porti, ov'ire spero.
O ombra del morir, per cui si ferma
ogni miseri'a l'alma, al cor nemica,
ultimo degli afflitti e buon rimedio;
tu rendi sana nostra carn'inferma,
rasciugh'i pianti, e posi ogni fatica,
e furi a chi ben vive ogn' ir'e tedio.
[3] I was studying Philosophy and was very interested in Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was this interest in "picture games" that made me write my thesis in University about Öyvind Fahlström.
See Also
Antje Majewski: Grundgedanken im Werk von Öyvind Fahlström
(dt.)