An essay on Paul Harrison and John wood

John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple
Claire Doherty

Estragon: What shall we do now?
Vladimir: While Waiting.
Estragon: While Waiting.
(Silence)
Vladimir: We could do our exercises.
Estragon:Our movements.
Vladimir: Our elevations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: Our elongations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: To warm us up.
Estragon: To calm us down.
Vladimir: Off we go.
(Vladimir hops on one foot to the other. Estragon imitates him.)

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot[1]

Are Wood and Harrison alter-egos for Estragon and Vladimir, Beckett’s existentialist anti-heroes condemned to wait for Godot? Are their ‘elevations’, ‘relaxations’ and ‘elongations’ similarly marking time, one small death after another? Certainly their procedures share the same apparent futility of Beckett’s piece of Absurdist theatre. They are baffling, inconclusive, yet deeply compelling. Enacting a series of choreographed experiments in silence, within the frame of a white void, Wood and Harrison remove themselves from time and place. Narrative is strictly contained within the parameters of each exercise and becomes cyclic, like the fate of Beckett’s protagonists, as each climax or denouement is replayed on a continuous loop. The artists assume random parts. They are victim and conspirator. They are stooge and hoaxer. They are the odd couple.

The comparison with Beckett is widely appreciated by admirers of Wood and Harrison’s work[2]. Having developed their practice collaboratively since 1993, it would appear that their brand of physical theatre has changed little in essence over the past nine years. For example, Table (1993), a video work produced after graduating from art school in Bath, shows them jumping together onto a trestle table and trying to stay on board whilst minimising wobble. It bears a close resemblance to the mutual dependence and agility required in the recent Semi-Circle (2001). But just as each of the works produced for the exhibition Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling Things) required an elaborate process of refining from sketches, storyboarding, set-design, rehearsal to post-production, so too the bristling co-dependency in Table has been heightened for Semi-Circle. The sculptural quality of the object onto which they climb has been perfected and their gestures and facial expressions, attire and timing have been fine-tuned through numerous exercises, so that only that which is absolutely necessary remains. It is this precise economy of means, this significant absence, which links them directly to Beckett.

To many viewers, they are not just Estragon and Vladimir, however, but rather the everyman double-act. (“At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us[3].”) They share the self-parody of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They bring to mind the slapstick partnerships of early 20th century film and music hall. They epitomise the, “if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again,” tactics of Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. Now and again they even venture into the mutually treacherous territory of Hope and Crosby, Morecambe and Wise. As members of this slapstick lineage, their physical comedy requires them to be masters of timing, uninhibited by potential danger and most significantly, poker faced.

The immediate impact of watching a Wood and Harrison video work (no single sequence lasts longer than three minutes – Jo to confirm!) is without doubt the physical nature of their endeavours – the ways in which their individual (or joint) uniform presence addresses each given obstacle. Gravity is the constant against which their bodies and/or objects are variously hurled, pulled, squashed and dropped. One could apply to their work a recent comparison of artist Bruce Nauman and Samuel Beckett, “(their work) is held or called by the ground. In both artists’ work, gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always visibly. As with all human beings, the ground-ward tug effects or exerts (as an accidental by-product) shapeliness, grace and balance, even as it deforms those things, pulling them into disorganisation, flatness or comic indistinction[4].”

Similarities can certainly be drawn between Wood and Harrison’s obsessive/compulsive behaviour with that of Nauman. In particular, video and audio documentation of his studio-based performances of the late 1960s[5]. Nauman described his art-making process as, “I was trying to see if I could make art […] that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down[6].” (The spirit of slapstick once again.) It is this apparent effortlessness that belies a complex pre-production process in Wood and Harrison’s practice. Extraneous detail is stripped away, leaving the bare bones of each occurrence – Door Marking Floor, Box Test, Breeze Block, Ladder, Handle/Rope (it does what it says on the tin).

Wood and Harrison’s geometric drawings bear a close resemblance to Nauman’s pencil studies for performances such as Untitled (Study for Slow Angle Walk) (1968-69)[7]. John and Paul, the double-act – like Nauman the iconic conceptual artist – begin to disappear in these sketches. What remains is a sequence of arrows and rudimentary stick figures. Yet, cast as art objects in their own right, rather than preparatory studies, these drawings begin to give us an insight into the rationale behind Wood and Harrison’s work, beyond the superficial similarities to comedy double-acts. They are animated hieroglyphs, premonitions of premeditated accidents in space and time. As one moves from one screen to the next in Twenty-Six (Drawing and Falling Things), the characteristics of the individual (whether Wood or Harrison), as in the drawings, become less important. It is here that their work departs from Nauman’s performance pieces and crucially from the self-representational work of their contemporaries.

In this new body of work, the artists have distilled the movements of slapstick, coaxing the viewer with a nod to familiar comic scenarios. They have then erased extraneous detail so that the viewer is drawn to observe the monitor as a consistent two-dimensional surface on which they set in motion a series of three-dimensional actions. Wood and Harrison’s works are not documentations of performances, but rather single screen investigations in time and space. They are drawings. They are sculpture. They are paintings. They are theatre entirely without spectacle. They are certainly about the relationship between two figures, but also between those odd couples of form and line, perception and perspective, the body and the void. Each scenario is a small death, an inconclusive ending, that achieves a moment of at which as Nauman hoped, “art is there all at once” and then it is lost…until the next time.
Notes

fn1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot in The Complete Dramatic Works, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1990, p. 11.

fn2. See for example, Charles Esche, ‘Nohow On’, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Film and Video Umbrella minigraph, ellipsis, London, 2000, pp. 7-15

fn3. Estragon in Waiting for Godot, op. cit. p. 13

fn4. Steven Connor, ‘Shifting Ground’, Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman, 2000, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, pp. 80-7. Their touring exhibition Obstacle Course and Other Works (1999) was perhaps the site at which this aspect of the work became most apparent.

fn5. See Bruce Nauman, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, in particular Gijs van Tuyl, ‘Human Condition/Human Body’, pp. 60-75, Marcia Tucker, ‘PheNAUMANology’, pp. 82-87 and Willoughby Sharp, ‘Interview with Bruce Nauman’, pp. 88-97.

fn6. Bruce Nauman, 1987 in Willoughby Sharp, op. cit.

fn7. Also known as Beckett Walk Diagram
Bibliographical Information:

Originally published in John Wood & Paul Harrison, Chisenhale, 2002