In this essay, I will explore the work of Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp, find parallels between both playwrights’ style of performance, and their effect on the audience via their use of medium.
The first instances of experimental theatre dates to the 19th century. Theatre was one of the two main forms of entertainment next to literature, and for it there was always a particular set of rules that was expected among many of the plays at that time, such as the ‘well-made play’, popularised by realist dramatists, like August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov, which still remains the standard model for constructing a play.
Certain playwrights and directors of that time wanted to create a whole new genre of theatre by rejecting and protesting against the traditional norms of writing and performing plays.
Theatre is considered as one of the first forms where this idea was shown, and eventually it spread into other mediums of the arts, such as ‘anti-art’ in the beginning of the 20th century, and music in the 21st.
Marcel Duchamp is one of the pioneers of the Dadaist movement. He is known for his conceptual art, most notably, the controversial, yet infamous Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. It’s an abstract painting Duchamp made, as a response to two other works – Eadward Muybridge’s Woman Walking Downstairs, an 1887 stop-motion photograph of a nude woman walking down a set of stairs; and Etienne-Jules Marey’s Man Walking, a similar stop-motion timelapse photograph. While it is an abstract painting, it did cause a lot of controversy during its debut, mainly due to the title of the piece, when the hanging committee attempted to reject the piece because of it for the Salon des Independants’s spring exhibition of Cubist works. Despite this, it was very well received, especially by American audiences. The piece, or rather the scandal behind it, helped attract 87,000 visitors to its American debut at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913.
The scandal has fuelled Marcel Duchamp’s rebellion against established art standards. A turning point happened in his artistic career when he read Max Stirner’s 1844 text The Ego and Its Own, a philosophical tract about ego, and how it “is always there in everything”. This is when he began experimenting with different mediums in a way of expressing his art, and leave what he called “retinal art”. His work ‘Fountain’, a 90-degree rotated urinal, is widely considered to be the piece that created readymades.
A few years before the introduction of Fountain, Duchamp went to an exhibition of aviation technology, and told his friend Constantin Brancusi, a French photographer: “Painting is washed up. Who will do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?”. Since the inception of readymades as a subgenre of Dadaism, the work within that spectrum has been a controversial subject even to this day – specifically, the question of ‘What is art?’. Before that, it was general knowledge that ‘art’, most commonly paintings, had to be created and shown to an audience, that then the audience would identify it as art. This is why works like Fountain has spawned a new era in the art world.
In the book Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, it is suggested that the fact that Fountain was ‘different’ is what made it art. “Fountain was (1) not created by an “artist“, (2) not intended to express a sense of beauty, and (3) not intended to elicit a sense of significant form. Duchamp’s intention was to make people think and question the very definition of art.”
Similarly, Samuel Beckett also had a slow transition from traditional forms of art to more minimalistic later on in his career. He is arguably most known for his 1953 play Waiting for Godot – about two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for the mute character of the play, Godot, who never comes. During this play, the characters participate in a variety of, at times bizarre, discussions while waiting for him. For example, in Act 1, Estragon wants to hear a joke from Vladimir, which he cannot finish because he wants to urinate. After that happens, Estragon suggests that both of them should hang themselves.
The play breaks the norms of traditional theatre, while in a way playing with people’s expectations throughout the entirety of the play. For example, while it formally has a beginning and an end, the plot itself is continuous, and there is no ‘deus ex machina’ element in which the plot is resolved. “After all is said and done, Waiting for Godot is a two-act play in which nothing happens twice, as Irish literary critic Vivian Mercier so famously said”.
Similarly to Fountain, it has sparked a lot of discussion and various interpretations from the public, ranging from political to autobiographical.
Despite this, unlike abstract art like Fountain, I think that Godot would not have the same effect as it did, had the context behind it would be presented in a different medium. As mentioned before, while there is a lot of ways to interpret the play, Beckett as a playwright had the ability to put some constraints and limits to the audiences imagination. The audience can interpret the meaning behind the play itself, but some elements within the play are clear, and is there to be interpreted as that. (ie there is a tree, therefore it is set outside; there are characters on the stage communicating with each other/audience – what they talk about can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways, but they are characters that are intended to be interpreted as that.)
In her 1983 review, Barbara Ruben wrote about Waiting for Godot that “As the escape into repetitive patterns of waiting, hoping, and passing time governs the characters’ behaviour, so the repetition of circular patterns is the governing motif of the production, giving visual expression to Beckett’s sense of human experience as endless routines within a succession of life cycles.”
Normand Berlin said of the play in 1999: “The attempts to pin [Beckett] down have not been successful, but the desire to do so is natural when we encounter a writer whose minimalist art reaches for bedrock reality. 'Less' forces us to look for 'more,' and the need to talk about Godot and about Beckett has resulted in a steady outpouring of books and articles.” Even Beckett himself was quoted as saying: “Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can’t make out.” Later on, however, he realised that various interpretations and readings were part of the reason why Godot was so successful. In 1999, Waiting for Godot was voted the most significant English language play of the twentieth century in a British Royal National Theatre poll of 800 playwrights, actors, directors and journalists.
This is not the same with Fountain, where unlike the play, the audience can limitlessly imagine and ask questions about the piece – “Why is it there? What does it represent?”, etc.
A lot can be said about Marcel Duchamp’s use of medium. He once said that works of art have a shelf-life of about a decade, and masterpieces may retain it for 50 years. I both agree and disagree with that statement. With the ever-changing world, a lot of new, sometimes revolutionary, forms of art is embraced and enter the public spotlight, and with that, a lot of older art forms usually tend to not have the same effect as it did in its heyday, like Fountain did. On the other hand, just because it passed its ‘shelf-life’ does not mean it is ‘expired’. Here I am typing, researching and thinking about it. In my mind, I have my own interpretations of what Fountain is about, as does a lot of other artists with an interest in the direction of readymades and Dadaism. Just because a piece of art doesn’t have the same effect as it did doesn’t mean that it is not recognised and respected as being the originator or an important highlight in the history of art.