Arriving in the foyer of the Crawford Galley there was a small crowd waiting, flanked by a similar number of black-clad ushers. An announcement was made that each usher would be paired with an audience member. The ushers then led us upstairs to the first floor painting room, where Gaitkrash member and sound artist Mick O’ Shea sat behind his desk of strange instruments conjuring up a discordant sound scape of bleeps and wails. There was an air of expectation as people waited for the actor to arrive. I noticed after a few minutes that people were being led from the room. My usher asked if I felt comfortable wearing a blindfold; I responded affirmatively and was led from the space. It is peculiar to be thrown so suddenly into such close physical proximity with a stranger. This is the component of the staging that demands trust from the audience and a willingness to give up control.

 
I was gently guided into a lift, which was filled with the sounds of bird song. A lift is an everyday space, which always evokes an uncanny feeling in me, the closeness to strangers and the slicing movement through the innards of buildings. Being unable to see led me to have an acute awareness of sound. I know the physical space of the Crawford Gallery well, but I felt disoriented and the distance I had travelled did not seem to correspond to the space I thought I knew. Placing one foot tentatively in front of the other I suddenly found the ground changed and I seemed to be walking on grass. I was asked to sit down on a bench and I concentrated on the sounds in the space as I waited. There was a soundscape of whispering and water; it seemed to combine both electronic and natural elements. I could feel other people’s presence in the space. After approximately five minutes we were instructed to remove our eye masks. We were in a small dark room with the only light focused on the mouth of the performer. The words spewed from The Mouth in an almost unbroken stream. ‘Into this world tiny little thing’. Repetition – ‘all the time the buzzing’ – there is no real beginning or end to the piece – it seems like it could loop back on itself over and over, forever.
 
The Beckett estate is notorious for its strict control over the performance of his work; Gaitkrash remained faithful to his text while employing a unique approach to its staging. Their production encouraged attentiveness to perception, to our body in the world, bracketing out a space for a more intimate engagement with Not I.

We first waited in the snug, surrounded by the old décor that has survived the late Mr. and Mrs. Bradley. Mick O’Shea’s subtle sound piece kept the atmosphere quietly animated and off-kilter. When called, we then climbed to the colder upper rooms. In a tight shadowy space Irene Murphy had installed a cluster of small illuminated worlds, on shelves and in cavities under raised floorboards. These small enigmatic groupings of everyday objects pointed to a meaningfulness that was withheld, and invited the production of an imaginary significance that was out of proportion with their literal size.

 
Before long we were ushered up more steep stairs and into the roofspace. There, Bernadette Cronin stood in a greying white wedding dress, dramatically lit in the close space between the rafters. We found our places on makeshift seats only a few feet away, amidst sagging wallpaper and a kitschy religious pictures. Cronin, playing May, then began that strict, metronomic pacing of Footfalls (1975). In her 40s, May ‘has not been out since girlhood’ and confines herself to two repetitious activities: tending her sick mother and walking, backwards and forwards, again and again, in ‘a faint tangle of pale grey tatters’. Cronin’s movements were satisfyingly precise, unflowing, tightly bound and in pieces. Her delivery of Beckett’s intricately crafted text was compelling, although sometimes it was afforded more lyric license than perhaps Beckett himself would have allowed.
 
On the first floor again, a sound piece by Trace accompanied a rendering of Beckett’s Film (1964) by James McCann. Trace gleaned their sounds from the building itself by scratching, scraping and smoothing its physical texture, itself so loaded with imprints of the creaturely routines of everyday lives now past. Aligning nicely, McCann’s Film also used images shot in the Bradley house, amongst others. Corroded, manipulated, set to a Pop-inflected self-destruct, this digital footage overlaid the original Buster Keaton performance, still visible beneath. The effects were both disturbing and enlivening, with conceptual reflexivity and open inter-media experimentation valued over formal stringency.

 
To finish, Máirín Prendergast’s performance of Rockaby (1980) made Beckett’s chilling late play more humanly graspable. Given added charge by its poignant setting, Prendergast’s expressions were intense, startled, desperate. While the atmosphere of despair and alienation was certainly conveyed, for me the emotional demonstration of the performance had the effect, paradoxically, of making the play more palatable and less lacerating: as if the expressive clothing provided some warmth to a text that instead wanted to insist resolutely upon its own cold blood.
 
Intending to dedicate his unfinished and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory to Beckett, Theodor Adorno wrote that in his plays ‘The shabby, damaged world of images is the negative imprint of the administered world. To this extent Beckett is realistic.’ Beckett’s work might be seen as a window onto the bleak affects of our disenchanted world, ones which are most often energetically pasted over with manufactured false consolations. The opposite of the warm, upbeat re-enchantment and accessibility prized by most official arts organisations, this experimental, generous and rare collaborative event plugged Beckett back into precise points in the contemporary world to both critical and fascinating effect.
 

[…t]his is not language ‘transformed’ into art or literature […] or even a language that is experienced […] but rather, experience as simply experience—something that is private, amusing, serious, abstract, unpoetic. […] Language does not have to communicate to affect, to be ‘touching’ (14).

Emma Kay’s Worldview, successfully negotiates the schism between the humanist drive and the conceptual compositional strategy where language is assembled, not written. Worldview is nothing less than Kay’s exhaustive history of the world from the Big Bang to the year 2000 written entirely from memory. Worldview is highly personal, but rather than dwell on experience, and the inherent ability of language to represent meaning, Kay writes in the flattened, infallible tone of a high school textbook, Kay’s history of the world is created not through import, or sociological subject matter but purely on the idiosyncrasies of her own (faulty) memory:

A scientific breakthrough resulted in the discovery of the basic structure of human existence, Dino Nucleic Acid or dna, often known as the double helix. Scientists had been searching for years for the basic building blocks of life, and in 1953 a team of scientists in Cambridge University, with the help of Scandinavian research, isolated dna and saw that it consisted of two intertwined helical chains of genetic material. (107)

Worldview, spends only the first 75 (of 230) pages of the history of the world until the 20th Century, focusing on the encyclopedic reiteration of history primarily from the artist’s lifetime. Worldview works as the non-site documenting the site of Kay’s memory— while appropriating the flawless tone of cultural authority. A sample section of the index to Worldview reveals Kay’s own selective sense of history:

HIV, 156, 181
Holland, 45, 57
Holliday, Billy, 113
Hollywood, 86, 99, 145, 190, 195 Holocaust, 92, 95
holograms, 129
Holyfield, Evander, 197
(220).

Worldview is a maddening text, as it testifies that a contemporary artist could actually conceive of a world where ‘Aerosmith’ (p. 132) and ‘Archimedes’ (p. 16) have the same historical credibility. Kay presents a text which is both encyclopaedic in purview, but also centered on the fallibility of personal recollection.
 
Worldview’s non-interventionalist practice is typical of much conceptual writing, as the filter between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ becomes a theoretical one. Kay accumulates language and representation in a way that foregrounds the materiality of text, but even more so the documentation of experience. Materiality here is not one of humanist poetic — ‘the stuff of poetry’ — but rather one that is developed through the sheer mass of the extraordinary ordinary. It is typical of Conceptual writing that the author should work with extant material to re-contextualize and refocus an already existing genre (typified by what Kenneth Goldsmith refers to as ‘uncreative writing’) with a focus on materiality, collection and accumulation. It is the documentation of processual writing, as exemplified by Kenneth Goldsmith’s No.111, Craig Dworkin’s Parse, Rob Fitterman’s The Sun Also Also Rises and Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy’s apostrophe.
 
Sol LeWitt, in his ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ — thirty-five sentences published in 1969 which operate both as a manifesto and as a piece of conceptual art in their own right—postulates that

28.Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly.[…]
29.The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course. (222)

This shared processual base for conceptual art and conceptual writing is not to suggest that conceptual writing is a temporally-displaced adjunct to conceptual art, but instead that the two share æsthetic values, and that conceptual art can be understood as a moment of Oulipian ‘anticipatory plagiary.’
 
LeWitt wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but a generation of writers later, these statements have taken on new weight. His statements on mechanical procedurality in visual art are also vital for conceptual writing, as ‘[t]o work with a plan which is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity’ (LeWitt ‘Paragraphs’ 214), while his resistance to humanist subjectivity seems even more relevant. A comparable stance, referring directly to literary work, can be found in Robert Smithson’s 1968 statement ‘Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’: ‘poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation’ (107).
 
In his famous defence of Joyce’s Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett argued that ‘[h]ere is direct expression—pages and pages of it’ and chides the reader that ‘[y]ou are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other.’
 
Beckett’s defence of Work in Progress is temporally adaptable to become a slogan for conceptual work in general: ‘[h]ere form is content, content is form [.…] this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. [… this] writing is not about something; it is that something itself’ (502–503).