Krapp's Last Tape (2012)
Mixed-media installation
The Krapp's Last Tape installation transcodes a 45-minute video performance of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play into a stream of viscous honey. The honey pours from a height of three meters creating a continuous floating seismographic string that oscillates to the sound of the performance, visualizing every Beckettian pause, cough and stutter, and leaving its transient traces on the surface of an overflowing honey pool.
In the course of the performance, the suspended vat gradually empties out. The honey, which momentarily transforms into a semantic carrier, slowly accumulates in the base container, which becomes, in effect, an embodiment of the performance. The honey intermixes inside the container, reconstituting a volume of undifferentiated mass. As it settles back into its immobile state, the “interpretive data” is visually and symbolically absorbed back into its material carrier, and all interpretive schemes are reconstituted as potentialities.
Beckett’s play is an exposי of the life of Krapp, a bitter and self-contemptuous 69-year-old man, disillusioned with the hubris of his youth and with the narratives that had fed his choices and sacrifices. In a birthday ritual of self-indulgence, Krapp records his musings on the passing year, while scornfully retorting as he listens to similar recordings he had made in his late twenties and thirties.
Within the Israeli cultural context, Krapp’s obsessive regurgitation of his past narratives alludes to the compulsive recycling of Israel’s national historical narratives. Krapp’s obsession echoes that of a 67-year-old state absorbed in the recapitulation of its own childhood and adolescent myths.
ארכיוני המרכז הוקמו בתמיכת קרן אוסטרובסקי וארטיס
