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The South African James Beckett reworks historical material that appears to have been directly borrowed from the archives of some faraway city. His ‘sampling’ of objects in museum collections evokes memories of the past, without it being clear what it is all about.In James Beckett’s studio, a sea of space in an office complex in Amsterdam Southeast, we hear the sound of music from the Cambodian Cassette Archives, a cult collection of Khmer folk and pop music recorded between the 1960s and the 1990s. The interpretations of Western music styles woven into the music are striking. Most of Beckett’s friends are musicians, and he himself plays guitar and saxophone. In 2009, when he was asked to record an album for a project in Germany, he founded The Frèderyck Nùyegen Seaside Memorial Band for the occasion. This pseudo-ethnic band played hurdy-gurdys they had made themselves. Hurdy-gurdys are 16th-century instruments with an indefinable sound that some describe as melancholy and others consider more like howling tomcats. Collections play an important role in James Beckett’s art. Using found historical objects, he creates installations whose objectives are intentionally not always clear. Beckett feels that his works are more open to different interpretations when he is not focussed on their legibility. ‘I am not an historian or a journalist, nor a source of historical discoveries. An interaction with history is unresolved to a large extent. The looser I keep it, the richer the results can be.’ Although his installations at first seem strict and factual, their scientific character is entirely fictitious. One might even label them anti-scientific, as many artists in recent years have turned both to and against science, in line with what Hal Foster referred to as an ‘archival impulse’ in his famous essay of the same name. In these historically-orientated artists, Foster sees a preference for making connections between things that would not be seen as connected from a scientific or critical perspective. The result is a certain distance from any representative order. We might call it ‘making history aesthetic’, but this certainly does not fully cover the substance or content in the work of James Beckett.

Parking Garage

James Beckett, who was born in Zimbabwe in 1977 and raised in South Africa, studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2001 and 2002. The following year, he won the Prix de Rome with his research project A Partial Museum of Noise. This ‘museum’ documented sounds that people have historically experienced as irritating. Seven cabinets made of oak contained texts and objects ranging from information about how the sound of a refrigerator can be adjusted, to a rubber insulator for tramway rails. The project was accompanied by several other segments, including a recital by two string players of a composition by Arnold Schönberg in a parking garage in Amsterdam. The people using the parking garage were the audience of these sounds composed by the pioneer of atonal music. Thanks to this combined approach, Beckett succeeded not only in providing information, but in incorporating an experiential component, an approach that is consistently seen in his work. Ironically enough, at the same time, he consigned the forerunner of twentieth-century avant-garde music to the exhaust fumes and monotone rumblings of the cars driving past. Beckett seems not afraid of a mild form of sacrilege.Museums are a recurring subject for Beckett. Last fall, for the Hilversum Museum, he sought out and compiled objects of which the museum had 15 or more examples from their permanent collection. The objects included carpet tiles, decorative silver work, model airplanes and sewing thimbles. He stacked these objects on top of one another, creating 12 similarly shaped piles. As the artist described it, ‘It had something of an accidental quality, an orgy of history. There is a rawness and spontaneity to it. The specific objects are forced to share the same space. It was about the contrasts between the different collections in the museum. There is no closed analogy of what it means: that would do no justice to the intrinsic richness of these simple objects. It is also proof of the humility and vulnerability of the museum, that they allow me to do this.’The fact that the artist is aware of a museum’s vulnerability does not stop him from imposing his own system of ‘archiving’. But he does not triumphantly claim that his arrangement is better, nor does he melancholically muse about a time when museums believed they held the rights to the ownership of truth. All he offers is a construction that creates space in which to approach the objects from new angles. In fact, they take on new life.

Industrial Heritage

What we see as a clearly present preference for industrial heritage in Beckett’s work first took shape in his Vacuum project at the Utrecht Jaarbeurs in 2003. It was here, in 1937, that Philips first introduced the television to the Dutch public. For this project, Beckett made an installation accompanied by a female voice-over discussing the business and moral aspects of the history of vacuum tubes, then the most important components in televisions. ‘In the voice-over, I abstracted the history of the vacuum tube by not mentioning any dates, place names, names of companies or persons. It became a sort of mantra, because there are no details in the story. During the story, certain objects in the installation were highlighted. The whole thing formed a metaphor for absence, specifically a lack of spirituality for the sake of profit.’ All the objects in the installation were from Energetica, a museum of energy technology that opened in 1999 in the former Amsterdam power station, built in 1903. The museum, which has in the meantime already closed its doors, shed light on both energy production and how gas and electricity are used. Since 2002, the building has protected status as a national monument as part of Dutch national industrial heritage. Because working with found objects, to return to the comparison with music, sometimes began to feel like sampling, in 2008, Beckett began incorporating making things by hand, such as paintings or drawings, into his artistic practice. ‘That was difficult, because painting is a history unto itself. I integrate the paintings into my historical installations. I use them as an extra layer. I try to take on a different character with them, for example, a factory worker from the history I am concerned with at that moment. That gives me a sort of theatrical licence, because I can deal with it in a romantic way without being accountable to the history of painting. The paintings are just as dry and prosaic as the writings I use in my work.’ This handmade aspect also returns in scale models and embroidery works that can be incorporated in his installations. Here, Beckett directly refers to William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement. ‘At the end of the nineteenth century, this movement purposefully took on a craft role, in opposition to the industrialization of society. Craft has a certain authenticity to it. It is believable. It has something naïve, but also offers an uninhibited perspective. That is why I like to use it in my installations. The use of very diverse media within one work makes it stretch itself into lots of directions.’ Beckett recently transformed a number of scythes he found into indefinable instruments by providing them with multiple bronze cutting edges and wooden handles. These instruments might have come from a 19th-century colonial museum, if it were not for the fact that their frames present an angular pattern of shapes which more closely approach cubist or futuristic characteristics. The object can no longer be pinned down to historic or functional qualities, and with this, it seems to resist all forms of formal order. It has no function in the here and now.

Living Factory

Last year, James Beckett set his eye on Poland’s industrial heritage. This resulted in Zaklady na Zycie (Plant Life), which is made up of an installation in the form of a museum and a performance. For his research, Beckett visited 25 factories in the three regions that were once Poland’s most important industrial centres. ‘In the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, many industrial buildings were either totally renovated or demolished in economic boom times. Many were bombed as well during the Second World War. In Poland, most of these brick buildings from the mid-nineteenth century are still there. Some are being used as cultural centres, but most are empty: architecturally too important to be pulled down, but not significant enough for someone to put them to use. The steel has mostly been pulled from the constructions to sell off. You see lots of ruins that are inhabited by homeless people, who keep themselves warm by burning furniture and paper documents.’ Beckett went in search of fragments that were able to say something about the histories of these locations. On his quest, he came across such things as logbooks, health regulations and letters of complaint. He was able simply to pick up most of them and take them away with him. He also purchased related documents and objects, such as workers’ certificates, in second-hand shops. For his museum installation, all the objects of this kind were carefully framed and provided with tags with relevant information. They were then hung on walls painted light green in a labyrinthine series of corridors that visitors could follow along a fixed route. The performance segment of the work was also provided with original furniture and requisites from the factories. The performance includes two scenes. In the first, an actor reads from compact historical texts, but he also tells about the establishment of a brass band in one of the factories. The texts are repeated, so that the audience is carried along in the rhythm of the sounds, and here too, as in Vacuum, a sort of mantra is created. ‘Through repetition, the audience distances itself from the details of the history. The meaning of the events recedes into the background and the musicality of the sounds becomes more important. It becomes a rhythmic exercise.’ The second scene takes place in an office, where two women in the role of secretaries perform a kind of choreography. Together, the two scenes last about 45 minutes, forming an introduction to the museum, which people then walk through in groups, to be briefly confronted with the actual objects of that history. ‘Viewers want to look upon the two scenes as being theatre, but when you approach it like that, it can be disappointing. It is non-linear: there is no narrative. It may look rich from a visual perspective, but is quite poor in entertainment value when you are sitting there. For the viewer, there is a lot of room for projection.’ James Beckett goes on to say, ‘I offer alternative perspectives on history, not necessarily better ones, but at least less directly implementable or functional perspectives. When you only apply rational ways of understanding things, you will not get very far. This also applies to the cultural sector: when you only look at its economic properties, you do not take into account all the other qualities it possesses.’ However much James Beckett is engaged with historical objects and facts, he does not allow himself to be hamstrung by a retrospective, melancholy perspective. His work consequently carries him beyond any classification as a purely historiographic artist. In his case, we can also imagine a different world and a different future. His alternative perspectives of history might even one day be of considerable service to us. Alexander Mayhew is a freelance art critic, The Hague James BeckettNeuer Kunstverein, Vienna21 April–29 May Translated from the Dutch by Mari Shields