Wilfried Dickhoff

NOHOW ON and Art

Opening speech for “The Beckett / Gün Project” Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, Berlin, 14 and 16 January 2009

I would like to begin with what seems to be an end in order to end with a beginning or, more precisely, with the suggestion of starting again in art and in real life. In doing so, I don't intend to offer a commentary and certainly not an explanation, because there is no explanation. And what's more – there is no understanding, only varying degrees of humour. That is actually not as funny as it sounds since it takes a great deal of seriousness to move on a level of humour parrying the facts so there is no understanding. That applies equally to truth, art and real life. But, as Nietzsche remarked: “We have art in order not to die of the truth.”

Beckett's final prose collection comprised three stories: “”, “” and “”. The collection was published as “”. Some simpleton – I no longer recall who it was – claimed the title was pessimistic. Yet it is just the opposite. “Nohow on” is a challenge to continue without ignoring the situation, to carry on with an awareness of the unbearable and absurd though without already knowing how and where, without a future, yet already burdened at the outset with all we know, are capable of and are.

In “Worstward Ho”, Beckett wrote: “Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. … Said nohow on.” – A body where none is. At least, a place for a body where there is no place, a place to be, to move, and to move out of. And yet there is no in or out. There is only in, and staying in. In other words, there is no outside, no exterior. There is only the immanence of a place where no one is, for the body where there is none – and always continuing, not continuing somehow but nohow. In Beckett's words: “Nohow on”.

“Nohow on” promises an openness at the heart of an enclosed immanence. As Beckett noted in an early work: “Stony ground, but not entirely”. In other words, you have to look the in the face – in this case, the indifferent face of our artificial show society and other real and more realistic catastrophes; put simply, the catastrophe of the human being or, as Gottfried Benn wrote in 1912: “The pinnacle of creation, the swine, the human being”. We need to consider the situation of the pinnacle of creation, without glossing it over; we need to name the barrenness of the earth to make this "not entirely" shine in a form sufficient in itself - and that is art. One needs to reveal the impossibility in everything, but to do so as a way of opening up unexpected im-possibilities; as Maurice Blanchot formulated it: “Naming the possible and responding to the impossible”. Art is an answer preceding any question. That is its responsibility; this is an emphatic truthfulness and courage and has nothing to do with pessimism. By taking the risk of non-apathy, non-indifference, art parries the innumerable variations of nihilism and universal indifference. The aspiration to take on this risk is the freedom of art. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted: “There is risk only for and through a freedom; and what is being risked, finally, is freedom itself".

And what about this evening and art? What are we going to see? Two texts by Samuel Beckett, the narrative “Worstward Ho” and the stage fragment “A Piece of Monologue”, presented by actors. And together with the words, the artist Dennis Gün is showing a visual work comprising photography and video – and taking Beckett's texts as what? As a starting and reference point, theme and content? This is not a performance, nor a staging of the works, nor a visual commentary on them. It is rather an installation – though that is, yet again, not absolutely correct since Beckett's texts are not part of Dennis Gün's work. His texts and Gün's images both exist independently and are being combined in a parallel presentation - a parallelogram of images and words. We will be seeing what that is and what it will have been. It too should be sufficient in itself, take up its own responsibility, presuming it is art and art is rare, for example, the material event of a non-indifference that is a concern, though not necessarily of some thing. It rather concerns us or touches us by evoking the proximity of a distant desire or the wish to wish. Alain Badiou wrote that Beckett gave us “the poetry of the desire to think, that desire which never ceases”. As described before: “That at least. A place. Where none. For the body.” It is precisely this, this decision, that gives Beckett's final works their shine. Beginning to speak of starting again in the face of disaster, the shine of an answer preceding any question: that is the beauty … of the responsibility … of a form: “Worstward Ho”.

Samuel Beckett has made me aware of everything that has to be ignored, negated, omitted, excluded and left undone if one wants to face up to what really counts. One has to take Beckett literarily, at the “letter of beauty" (Alain Badiou) which, excluding semblance and even appearance, exposes the universal core of experience. Nothing more, nothing less. Beckett said of “": “It happens that something is happening. That something is happening to us. And art's mission is to preserve and polish these exceptional points, the origin of all truth. That's hard work. To do it, you need the element of beauty rather like a kind light distributed in the words, a kind of subterranean illumination, something we have called the latent poetry of prose. A rhythm of rare colours, a controlled necessity of images, the slow construction of a world designed to make visible the distant needle's eye that saves us: through this hole, we receive truth and courage.”

The great thing about Beckett's artistic mission is that it does not entail any mystification. For example, in his essays on the van Velde brothers, two artists he knew in Paris, Beckett also highlights other aspects of art: ““There is no painting. There are only paintings. And since paintings are not sausages, they are good nor bad. … profit and loss weigh the same in the economy of art where what is not said is the light of what is said and every presence is absence. The only thing you will ever know about a picture is how much you love it (and, at most, why - if you are interested).” … That is just a tiny part of what one never says to an art-lover. It is apparently just as little true as everything else. But it would be diverting for him.”

For your diversion, I would like to close with another tiny part of Beckett's writing in the form of a little dialogue that he called: “Le Monde et le Pantalon”:

Customer: God made the world in six days and you, you can't make me a damn pair of trousers in six months. Tailor: But sir, look at the world and look at your trousers!“

So much for Beckett and art, the human attempt to transform fate into freedom. In Beckett's words: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

In this spirit, I would like to wish you a very interesting evening, and everything else you wish for in terms of what may really count – in the end, which is here and now.

“Nohow on”