Steve McQueen: Into This World
1 April – 15 May
www.thomasdane.com
In an early
review of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot a critic wryly noted that it
was a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’ – a reference to the series of
repetitions and sense of ennui that pervades the performance. Repetition,
constriction and languor, however, can be both thematically productive and
formally innovative – a paradox that Beckett explored with scrupulous
rigour. In Steve McQueen’s work, likewise, not a lot happens. In both
Illuminer (2001) and 7th November (2001) there is the immediate restriction
of the medium itself: the camera, for example, remains stubbornly fixed
throughout both works, while the stringent framing – a familiar device in
McQueen’s work – abbreviates our view to an image of a solitary recumbent
figure. The restraints attending the act of giving voice – one of Beckett’s
abiding preoccupations – are also examined, as are the limits (if not the
patience) of the viewer’s response to such pared-down work.
The reference to Beckett here is given further purchase by McQueen’s choice
of overall title for the show: ‘Into this world...’ are among the first
urgent words spoken by the disembodied, cramped mouth in Beckett’s play Not
I (1973) – a part memorably performed by the actress Billie Whitelaw. In 7th
November a similarly incessant voice recounts, almost despite itself, a tale
of fratricide in which the speaker accidentally shot his brother. The voice
is halting and occasionally strained, but the story seems to have been
rehearsed again and again – if only in the speaker’s own head – giving it
the quality of an incantation, an effort to bring something into being.
Occupying an entire wall, and therefore physically present in the space
itself, a single, constant image of a prone body viewed from above has been
projected. Across the head a puce scar trails like an artery from ear to
ear. The framing offers no context beyond the head and shoulders of this
prostrate figure and we are left with the narrative voice (and all its
inherent fragilities) with which to make sense of this image. Given that the
speaker shot his brother in the head, are we to believe that this is the
dead brother, hemmed in by death and yet brought into ‘being’ – brought
‘into this world’ – through the sheer physicality of the imagery and the
demand of his brother’s voice? The dynamics of the somewhat distressing and
violent narrative, in marked contrast to the almost transcendental
peacefulness of the onscreen image, would be nonetheless usurped if any
clear-cut answer was forthcoming to that question.
Violence, again off-screen and disembodied,
is also present in Illuminer. On a bed (possibly in a hotel room) another
prostrate body lies, lazily waving a remote control at a television and
flicking from channel to channel. The blue haze of reflected television
light is all that gives form to this nebulous figure. Off-screen,
newscaster’s voices intone an inventory of disaster, tragedy and war while
the man idly scratches his leg and flicks to another channel. Illuminer
exudes ennui, a sense of a world not only inured to carnage, anomie and
horror, but only capable of comprehending them (if at all) in bite-size
chunks of infotainment. The projected image, unlike that in 7th November,
blurs in and out, both allowing and yet restricting the viewer’s impression
of the television-screen image. Like 7th November, however, we are made
aware not only of the severity of framing but the very skein of the film
surface itself. Almost nothing occurs throughout this scenario and
everything in it exists on the cusp of both imminence and the imminent
threat of dissolution. Nevertheless, almost nothing happening is never akin
to nothing happening; even nothing squared (as Beckett deftly observed) is
still formally something – and it is within this illuminating chink between
almost nothing and something that McQueen’s work operates.
Anthony Downey