The Beckett/Guen Project: Date: 14 - 16 January 2009 | This special project was held in the Collection Scharf-Gerstenberg Museum for Surrealist Art, part of the New National Gallery in Berlin

For Worstward Ho

When I first read Worstward Ho at the end of 1989, I found it rather like a visual puzzle where I could easily imagine the text as images. I quickly understood why Worstward Ho is considered one of Beckett's most enigmatic texts.

When I started my present photographic works in 2005, I immediately thought of Beckett again, and especially of Worstward Ho . My photo works are closely related to film and stage. The Street and A Late Evening in the Past series and other works resemble staged photographs, integrating elements from theatre, and frequently seeming to create a film scene. They generate a narrative for the viewer, yet leave space for the beholders' own interpretations. In my project on Worstward Ho , I have changed my approach. On the one hand, the photographs, edited together with a few video fragments, serve as a surface for projection. On the other, since the actor reads the text from the projection surface, space too gains a new significance. In this way there is no longer any extraneous influence between image and actor. Bringing the two elements together in this way does not create a performance but a live installation. Beckett's key phrase "Said nohow on" answers the words at the beginning "On. say on". One could also say: "The end is in the beginning and yet you go on." In my view, Worstward Ho is like a diary. Beckett had written down a quote from Shakespeare's King Lear just before Worstward Ho in his notebook: "And worse may I be yet; the worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst'." (IV.1.27-28).

The title of the piece does not only reference Webster and Decker's Westward Hoe (premiere 1607), but also the Victorianism of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855). However, Beckett's Worstward Ho has much more in common with John Donne's poem Good Friday 1613 Riding Westward . Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906.

I have imagined the text as the prose of life - or rather, of his life. The photos are intended to represent a word and the video sequence a sentence. Beckett often plays with words, sometimes using a sentence as a word or vice versa. That gave me the starting point for my work too. The plot is starkly reduced in Beckett's novels and plays - in actual fact, they have no plot at all. I have avoided imposing any dramatic development onto his work and instead only shown how things form an overall relationship to Beckett and his work. For me, Worstward Ho was rather like a final frame, an image with neither plot nor beginning nor ending. What we find between the opening "On. say on" and the final "Said nohow on" is nothing less than his life.

Dennis Guen

2008 Berlin

Description

"Worstward Ho" and "A Piece of Monologue", two of Samuel Beckett's late works, will be staged in English by two British actors - "Worstward Ho" presented by film and theatre actor Jeff Boyd, and "A Piece of Monologue" presented by narrator and actor Jonathan C. Sloane.

This Beckett evening has been initiated and designed by the artist Dennis Guen, whose photographic video installations provide the optical background for the stage works. Here Guen takes up Beckett's characteristic experimental approach to language: Guen's photos symbolise words, his videos convey entire sentences which - condensed and complex - encounter and confront the style and rhythm of the words. For Dennis Guen, this is a "...live installation, where space, images and text merge to create new meanings...", an attempt to transfer these two complex Beckett pieces into a new audio-visual space, creating a dialogue between the sound of the language and images. The objective is to produce a space-time-light-sound installation of both works, simultaneously fleeting and dynamic.

In this way, the spoken word of Beckett's texts enters into a unique and vibrant connection with the photography and video.

The catalogue published for the performance in the Collection Scharf-Gerstenberg contains the new photographic works by Dennis Guen that inspired the video projection and are, in part, included in it. The catalogue includes a total of 16 reproductions of Dennis Guen's photographs and two texts in English:

Dennis Guen: on his artwork

Wilfried Dickhoff: on Samuel Beckett's relationship to art

Das Beckett | Guen Projekt

All pictures by Dennis Guen for the "Beckett Project" and the other works

If published, please add the photo credit: © Guen |Berlin - London and Galerie Seitz & Partner | Berlin