Murmur, Hum, Shout, Crash!

Abstract

The murmurs, hums, shouts, and crashes explored in this paper are not merely sound effects. They are fundamental material in the avant-garde attack on the traditional work of art as a distinct object of interpretation and exposition. They are thus instrumental in producing the experimental forms and temporalities of what Rosalind Krauss calls the ‘post-medium’ condition of late 20th century and early 21st century multi-media installation and video performance art. Moving from Beckett’s late television plays (Ghost Trio, 1975) to contemporary installation and video art of central and peripheral avant-gardes such as Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials (Tate Modern, 2004), John d’Arcy’s Beckett’s Basement (Castle Coole, 2011), and Harrison and Wood’s video performance Unrelated Incidents (Gallery Den Haag, 2012), this paper explores how murmurs, hums, shouts and crashes index two temporal phenomena brought to the fore by 20th and 21st century experimentation whose ephemeral, ungraspable nature demands a kind of perception more akin to listening than to looking. The first has to do with the lingering resonance of a continuously passing audio-visual movement — the indistinct murmuring, organic or mechanical rustling, humming and shimmering that are particular features of Beckett’s work and phenomena fundamental to contemporary aesthetic practice. The second has to do with the sudden, inexplicable appearing of an audio-visual presence - the shouts, crashes, flashes and other momentary events associated as much with the Benjaminian shock of the modern as with the instantaneity of contemporary performance. The wonder and pleasure of Beckett’s work, as of those of his 21st-century contemporaries, is that they incite us to ask ‘what’s happening’ without ever being able to identify, narrate, or explain definitively what happened.