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Essays
October 1999--Edward Beckett: Meanings & Mechanisms
By Peter Frank, Los Angeles
August 1997--Critical Commentary on Edward Beckett
By Gordon Fuglie, Director, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
October 1999--EDWARD BECKETT: MEANINGS AND MECHANISMS
By Peter Frank
Los Angeles
The cartoon spirit animates (as it were) the mediumistically varied but stylistically cohesive work of Edward Beckett. But if Beckett festoons his paintings, prints and pottery with unlikely machines, starkly described, curiously anthropomorphic, and propelled into a perpetual motion of apparently antic energy, he does not do so merely to provide the fine-art equivalent of Saturday-morning kids' television. Neither, of course, did Roy Lichtenstein or Keith Haring, artists (also in a variety of media) synonymous with a cartoon aesthetic. Like theirs, Beckett's less evidently and less directly narrative art conveys concepts, sensations and responses to a world of inner passions and outer pathos, of human history and the responses of a single soul to that history's tragedies and triumphs.
It would be presumptuous of this writer, however well informed, to describe (much less analyze) the iconography of Beckett's imagery. That which Beckett wants to convey, he -- certainly through his art -- can best delineate. (He refers to the possible content of his work in deliberately oblique terms, describing them only as "the unseen but felt powers and influences" that "shape us and elude us".) Indeed, as in any essentially abstract mode, the sources of the images are arguably secondary to the sensation(s) conveyed by those images; the encoding of meaning here serves to communicate the envelope of that meaning rather than its mere account, rather like the musical setting of a poem couched in obscure language.
Suffice it to acknowledge that Beckett responds fervently, sensitively, and with abiding hope and faith to the often-disturbing headlines of our era and our century. His vivacious forms, his similarly vivid employment of color, and the eccentric conformations on which he is wont to rely (especially but not exclusively in clay) all bespeak an optimistic outlook on life. But from their intricacies, their un-mechanistic (indeed humanoid) contours, and the intensity of their rendering, a viewer can readily tell that those forms are as capable of anguish and tragedy as they are of wit and exuberance. Although they mimic functional mechanisms (often seeming to be mechanisms at the point of malfunction), Beckett's images are not merely robotic, but metaphoric in their curious and delightful sinew.
Again, what concerns us here is not what is being metaphorized, but how Beckett's images metaphorize -- not meaning, but the mechanism of meaning. Quite obviously, it is the working of mechanisms that is itself the overriding metaphor; if we are to see ourselves in these devices, how they operate is how (Beckett says) we operate. In this light, it is remarkable that the artist does not insist, as is the fashion, that we are, one and all, headed for a breakdown. Beckett's effervescent style underscores his evident belief that we may be due for a tune-up, even overhaul; but we are not clanking and whirring our way to oblivion. If entropy is inevitable, Beckett's eccentric but persistent contraptions aver, it is not imminent. Humanity has not yet reached the lip of its own obsolescence.
So what are Edward Beckett's images, and how are they saying all these reassuring things about us? They do so by exploiting some of the most eye-catching materials available to artists, as well as by engaging Beckett's own skill, cleverness, and innate verve. His woodblock prints, monotypes, low- and high-fire ceramics, and acrylic paintings normally muster the across-the-room impact of a circus poster. Certain of his designs would make ideal screen-savers, their pipes and gears, sprockets and sunbursts glowing and convulsing with a rough-hewn expansiveness mercifully free of most screen-savers' glib, over-compliant slickness. In fact, cinematic animation would seem the logical medium for Beckett to explore next.
Animation would seem a natural realm for Beckett not only because his images share a common stylistic language -- comically conceived, simply and forthrightly drawn -- with filmic cartooning, but because a preoccupation with time itself underlies his work. Beckett considers his art "...the beginning of a challenging quest to capture the visual representation of time's influences on our lives, our decisions and our ultimate passing." If he encourages any specific interpretation of his loopy, tendrilous machines and spectral humanoid figures, Beckett directs us to the consideration of temporality, even describing his images, at least by inference, as "the ropes and worms of time," or enmeshed in as much. In their apparently repetitive but eccentric motions -- and in the entropy that seems to be creeping over them -- Beckett's clanking characters, be they creatures or contraptions, live in time every bit as much as we do. This despite their imposing bulk or power -- which, in Beckett's view, is an ironic monumentality, an Ozymandian pretense that proves no match for the forces of decay.
There, you see? No sooner does this writer declare it presumptuous to interpret Beckett's iconography, but he reads vast narrative concepts and moral precepts into it. Despite his own caveats, the artist's temporal allusions and fanciful imagery make it hard to ignore their content -- or at least to ignore the fact that they are content-laden. We are hard-pressed to comprehend Beckett's work as eyewash, no matter how sweet his colors, no matter how clownish his forms; the ambition clearly invested into his personages and contraptions insists we take them seriously, compassionately, even empathetically. Edward Beckett's abstraction finally pays homage to the modernist tradition not just by eliding prosaic equivalents, but by encouraging the apprehension of poetic ones.
Interpretation is as irresistible as it is incompletable. With Beckett, the volatility of mechanism and of meaning leads to stability in the mechanism of meaning -- a stability that not only allows, but requires you, the viewers, to be crucial cogs in that machine.
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Peter Frank is art critic for the L.A.Weekly, contributor to many art and general publications, author of several books, and organizer of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in America and abroad.
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August 1997--CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON EDWARD BECKETT
By Gordon Fuglie
Director, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
With acrylic paints, ceramic sculpture and printmaking media, Edward Beckett produces images that examine the range of human communications from the electronic media to the interpersonal, and with the divine. As such, his paintings and prints are simultaneously somber and playful, surreal tableaux that uncannily incorporate large areas of decorative pattern around his humanoids, machines and framing devices. Beckett's work seems to refer initially to the cacophony of electronic sound and projected imagery that has swamped so much of our public and private spaces, but they also serve as metaphors for interior aspiration and compassionate action. In these perceptions, his zig-zags, diagonals, saw-teeth and jagged ovoid burstsÐexternally the equivalent of the sonic bombardment of our consumer cultureÐare Beckett's personal signs for his spiritual and socio-political concerns that he places within his intense compositions.
In his desire to discover and define the plethora of communications and transmissions of our age, Beckett will employ frequently as a motif a quirky mechanized being composed of connectors, wires and transistor-shapes. These forms are perhaps realized best in his color woodcuts where strong linear and chromatic contrasts give them a darkly radiant mysterious presence.
Beckett attempts in his paintings and prints a re-invigoration of the "marvelous", a notion that gave a charge to the early images of the Surrealists. He differs from them, however, in that rather than creating a "new" (sur)reality, he reckons directly with his time and place through symbols that embody the myriad possibilities and perplexities of communication.
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