Before Fluxus: Samuel Beckett

 

It's kind of hard to get my mind around the fact that Samuel Beckett's plays, Fluxus "happenings", and Beat Generation literature existed in the same time and place. We often think of the 1950s as a decade of wholesome and idyllic American freedom: The US won the war, everyone was buying a car and a television and a dishwashing machine. Jobs were plentiful, labor unions helped working people to get fair wages and working conditions. Prosperity swept the land. That's the mythologizing story that has been taught to us. But is it true? What if the 1950s were roiling in revolutionary ideas about art, politics, race, class, gender, and consumer culture? They were, but only on the margins in the 1950s. The real influence of these movements wouldn't occur until the 1960s and 1970s. 

Most important things in art and culture happen at the margins and force a recentering of the field. The edge might never take over the center, but room is made to accommodate it. This is certainly true when it comes to innovative and experimental art and literature.

This gets us back to Samuel Beckett as a forerunner of Fluxus ideas about literature, language, and performativity. 

Beckett's writing is extraordinarily bleak; he does not have faith in humanity. His later work focuses on the impossibility of knowing or believing. He turns this into comedy. This is not an easy feat. Take, for instance, Not I  from 1973. Beckett really wanted to liberate literature and language from the confines of the page and the book. He embraced, film, video, television, and almost every form of expression. The artists of the Fluxus movement were right in line with Beckett. The "book", like the "museum", was seen as a limiting and outdated form of cultural production. Here is a link to the briefest of his film scores, directed by Damian Hirst.

Late in Beckett's life, he befriended the Irish photographer John Minihan. The resulting portraits are quite amazing. Here's a little-known fact about Samuel Beckett: he was friends with the famous wrestler and actor Andre the Giant, perhaps best known for his role in the cult film, The Princess Bride.