For a body of work that gains its force in large part from its consistent, low-grade anger, the piece surprised me with explicit mention of its own sarcasm—its underlying rhetorical device—later on: “Good luck. You’ll need it. What? That’s sarcasm, a subcategory of humor. Sarcasm is—forget it.” The compressed language interrupting itself here recalls Samuel Beckett, building with statements that partially undo preceding ones, but that undoing comes from carefully adding one additional phrase at a time. The effect is language toppling over itself to evoke both a hoped-for numbness and the anger that lies beneath it.

Result #1

Becketts object is to avoid writing, but this work, like its name, is now there, as the verbal disintegration it hopes to avoid is already there, and only half of it is lost. The voice-over figures the words it is trying to read, but cant, so it speaks in a still, almost abstract, voice, suggesting that the words are there, and, perhaps, are being held in an infinite state of disrepair. The piece is here an image of an imperfect, tired body, an idea of a broken body, but one that would be impossible to prove.

Result #2

For a body of work that gains its force in large part from its consistent, low-grade anger, the piece surprised me with explicit mention of its own sarcasm—its underlying rhetorical device—later on: “Good luck. You’ll need it. What? That’s sarcasm, a subcategory of humor. Sarcasm is—forget it.” The compressed language interrupting itself here recalls Samuel Beckett, building with statements that partially undo preceding ones, but that undoing comes from carefully adding one additional phrase at a time. The effect is language toppling over itself to evoke both a hoped-for numbness and the anger that lies beneath it. I see Beckett as a kind of nameless madman. He stands in the world as a truth-to-be-spoken self-parody, and he looks for his audience to listen and listen and to see his work. This, in fact, is the main thing about Beckett. It is not—as I have said before—what a Beckett is, but what an audience is. Beckett is a shaggy dog. He is a black haired dog. He is a black haired dog, a symbol of transience. He is an allusion to his own racial, social, and historical circumstances. He is a kind of white, comfortable, all-too-human embodiment of what the white world—the America that he represents—is not: a white, middle-class America. Beckett is a kind of travesty of it. He makes one wonder if he has just come up with an all-too-human representation of it. The black haired dog may be a humanized animal. He is a black haired dog, and he is a symbol of transience. Beckett is the symbol of transience. He is the white, middle-class America that he is. What the black haired dog means is that he is a symbol of transience. This is a reassuring and very American symbol, one that is used to honor those who have passed and who remain anonymous. What Beckett means is that he is a symbol of transience. He is the American symbol, the symbol of transience, who does not identify himself with the American world, who does not seem to share American cultural consciousness. But Beckett is a black haired dog, a symbol of the American way, and he is the symbol of America. He is the symbol of American culture as well. He is the American way of being black.Beckett is not a figure of an intellectual.

Result #3

For a body of work that gains its force in large part from its consistent, low-grade anger, the piece surprised me with explicit mention of its own sarcasm—its underlying rhetorical device—later on: “Good luck. You’ll need it. What? That’s sarcasm, a subcategory of humor. Sarcasm is—forget it.” The compressed language interrupting itself here recalls Samuel Beckett, building with statements that partially undo preceding ones, but that undoing comes from carefully adding one additional phrase at a time. The effect is language toppling over itself to evoke both a hoped-for numbness and the anger that lies beneath it. I am a scholar of language, Beckett wrote, but I do not feel guilty.” Surely he meant to be mocking a figure whose career has been on the brink of a complete collapse. But a statement like this one is an example of irony, and the very irony of the statement (a subcategory of humor), a sign of a general irresolution. It is like what a joke is: a statement made to be a joke, but in the end one has to laugh. Both language and humor, and even the very notion of the joke, is a tautology—a device to conceal and thus to destroy the paradox that is comedy.Beckett made his statement during the run of the show, when it was still possible to find him, on the fourth floor of the Wexner, working on a parallel project of his own. The show was already over when Beckett finished, but he had not finished, so Beckett could not be sure that the show would be continued. There was no reason to believe he would—it was not his intention to give up the work, and he certainly did not expect the art to be exhibited for the duration of the show. Becketts new work seems to be a form of investigation, and, in my view, a successful investigation. It is an exploration, rather than a replacement, of a position that has been in the spotlight for some time. Beckett believes that it is the existence of an art in the present that is essential to the existence of the past. Beckett wants to bring to the surface an art that is as complete as any of the forms of his art, and he knows that this is impossible. The artist himself has said: Im always looking for new combinations of elements. . . . I dont know exactly what Ive found yet. . . . Ive been looking for a long time. . . . The possibilities are infinite. . . .

Result #4

A poem is always about a time to be read, but in the case of Becketts poem that time is never present. The show was called The Time of the Present, and that makes the words that it does contain—the naked, still-serene, human bodies—the time of the present, in which the artist has found himself. Here Beckett, who has been present for all of Becketts words, is gone, replaced by a new Beckett. But this new Beckett is a Beckett without Beckett. It is an art of the absent Beckett, an art of total nonbeing. It is a painter in search of a work.

Result #5

The piece was punctuated by some occasional visual puns, most notably a lady playing the piano, but most of these came from the duo of Dorothea Lee and Kristin Young, who chime in, wryly, “Who are you? what are you doing?” The provocation, though, was so vaguely personal that it was difficult to see what its intended audience was to make of it. It was, however, an appropriate tribute to a rare exception to the general postmodern tendency to understand art as an end in itself. Unlike all but a handful of the other works in the show, the music was not especially oblique, and it certainly didnt suggest that the art was being used as a backdrop for performance. Of course, it could be that this show was meant to address the crisis of artistic identity in contemporary culture, but there are so many other things going on in the world that it isnt appropriate to focus on the political implications of a cultural and artistic identity that is itself, quite literally, a set of binaries.Gretchen Bender is a critic and the author of The Complete Art History (Sternberg/Sternberg, 1997).