Reinventing the Wheel : A Restoration Comedy

       

To see the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames.

- Marcel Duchamp : Arturo Schwartz, The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, p.442

    

Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century

     
Monash University Museum of Art

Caulfield campus

3 October – 14 December 2013

Presented in association with the Melbourne Festival

                   
"Many curiously significant remarks are made about silence in the trilogy. Molloy, for example, says: 'about me all goes really silent, from time to time, whereas for the righteous the tumult of the world never stops.' The Unnaneable says: 'This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says, too old perhaps and too abased ever to succeed in saying the words that would be its last, knowing itself useless and its uselessness in vain, not listening to itself but to the silence that it breaks.' Only when one is sufficiently detached from this compulsive babble to realize that one is uttering it can one achieve any genuine serenity, or the silence which is its habitat. 'To restore silence is the role of objects,' says Molloy, but this is not Beckett's final paradox. His final paradox is the conception of the imaginative process that underlies and informs his remarkable achievement. In a world given over to obsessive utterance, a world  of television and radio and shouting dictators and tape recorders and beeping space ships, to restore silence is the role of serious writing."

  - page 236 : Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage 

    ed. by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman

'To restore silence is the role of objects'


         

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