NOTHING DOING: Reflections on Samuel Beckett and American Conceptual Art

Abstract

This essay centers on a reading of Joseph Kosuth's art installation Texts (Waiting For-) Nothing: Samuel Beckett, in Play. In analyzing Kosuth's piece, this essay draws out some of the central tensions historically constituting Conceptual Art and, through that, Beckett's legacy in the work of artists associated with Minimalism and Conceptual Art. The essay proposes a way to understand Beckett as a contemporary of (and not merely an influence for) these artists. I argue here that the collapse of distinctions between figure and ground in the formal patterning of Beckett's late works echoes a similar, purposefully constructed ambiguity in Conceptual Art.Cet article part d'une analyse de l'installation Texts (Waiting For-) Nothing: Samuel Beckett, in Play de Joseph Kosuth. En analysant Kosuth, il permet de faire ressortir quelques-unes des tensions constitutives du Conceptual Art tel qu'il s'est developpe historiquement, et de montrer par-la l'heritage beckettien qui se fait jour dans les oeuvres de plusieurs artistes associes au minimalisme et a l'art conceptuel. Cet essai donne ainsi a voir Beckett comme le contemporain de ces artistes (et non pas seulement comme exercant son influence sur eux). Mon hypothese est que l'effacement des distinctions entre la figure et le fond dans la structuration des textes tardifs de Beckett fait echo a l'ambiguite deliberement entretenue par l'art conceptuel.In the meantime I am doing nothing at all.Samuel Beckett, to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937 (the German Letter)To artists questioning the master-narratives of modernism, such as Clement Greenberg's claim that Abstract Expressionism embodied the apogee of a modem art sustained by autonomous formal self-reflection, Samuel Beckett's insistence on formal precision as coincident with an exploration of contingency, fragmentation, and failure proved crucial. As Benjamin Buchloh writes in an influential survey of the genesis of Conceptual Art, the work of these artists was distinguished by its acute sense of discursive and institutional limitations, its self-imposed restrictions, its lack of totalizing vision, its critical devotion to the factual conditions of artistic production and reception (1990, 141). Beckett's radical atopism was oftentimes claimed as a source by these artists (142). And it is important to remember, as we reckon ourselves with the Beckett of the letters and the archive (Beckett in and of history) that it was this radical atopism that appealed to artists' intent on rejecting the strict formalism they inherited. It was the radically disruptive abstract form of Beckett's work that spoke to artists like Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper and Joseph Kosuth.1In order to explore the legacy of Beckett in postmodern American art, I will examine Joseph Kosuth's 2011 installation at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City titled Texts (Waiting For-) Nothing: Samuel Beckett, in Play. Such attention puts Kosuth's art in a new light - an understanding, in fact, which contrasts with his own influential early writings on Conceptual Art. Reading Kosuth through his recent Beckettian preoccupations shall allow me to set down some theoretical terms, the contested definitions of which shaped the inception of Conceptual Art.Looking at Kosuth's development through the lens offered by Texts (Waiting For-) Nothing allows to understand Beckett in the discourse of late 1960s Conceptual Art. Along with Robbe-Grillet and Borges, Samuel Beckett is mentioned most often in the early literature of Conceptual Art. For example, in a piece of remembrance written after the great Conceptualist Sol LeWitt's death in 2007, the artist Mel Bochner explains that, Unlike most of the artists I knew, with the exception of Robert Smithson, Sol was a true intellectual. We immediately discovered we had similar tastes in authors - Samuel Beckett was an one (Bochner and Baldesseri, 101). Essentially, in this essay I want to explore Bochner's use of obvious in this quotation: is it indeed that Beckett shares strategies or thematic concerns with the American artists of Kosuth and LeWitt's generation? …