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VIEW Kate Joyce WATT OR FALL low res.pdf (in progress)

BOOK
~190 pages
14x11 inches
~210 color photographs

INSTALLATION
Wall Grid
9 ft x 17 ft (dimensions variable)
144 photographs of house interior
8-12 photographs of landscape exteriors
Audio (readings by various participants of the passage from Watt)

Samuel Beckett’s Watt is a World War II novel centered on a home that is also a labyrinth of the mind. The plot takes place in an ordinary house whose occupants are forced in their movements to follow the near-mathematical logic of the mythical architect  Daedalus. Fallingwater is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Vitruvian temple, an architecture of body and nature, and an edifice designed to continue the natural contours, materials, and spirit of the building’s site.

In "Watt or Fall" I explore the interface of Wright and Beckett by placing Watt's Daedalean labyrinth inside one room of Wright's Vitruvian temple.

Fallingwater is set amongst Mesophytic forest whose seasonality establishes an organic motion set against the stasis of architecture. While photographing the bedroom in accelerated time I photographed the exterior seasonal landscape which seems to change in decelerated time. Moving from within a designed space to the outside evolved space, while each iterates forward through time, there seems to emerge a life cycle within a life cycle; the fast repetitions of domestic life and the slow repetitions of seasonal light. The stone building becomes consciously tethered to the orbit of the earth.

From 2007—2010 I worked for the architectural photography studio Hedrich Blessing as an apprentice and their first female photographer to work with clients on location. In 1937 Frank Lloyd Wright commissioned Hedrich Blessing to photograph the newly completed house at Bear Run. Founder Bill Hedrich made several photographs of the interior and exterior, the most famous of which is his view looking up at the staggered cantilevers projecting dramatically over the falls.

In 2024, as the house nears its 90th anniversary, I began an artist residency at Fallingwater asking how I might approach these two monuments: one of architecture, the other of photography. I found one answer in Watt, a piece of writing Beckett claimed to have helped keep him sane through the Second World War.

For “Watt or Fall” I made part of a passage from Watt into a structural template for experiencing Fallingwater. The passage describes a man in his bedroom moving back and forth between bed, window, door, and fire. Beckett is less interested in narrative and more interested in the failure of reason, and the internal workings of mind and language. The passage is both labyrinth and Ariadne’s thread; it is the puzzle and the solution. He writes an exhaustive list of combinations of movement between these four areas of the room. It begins like this:

"Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; …"

And the passage continues for another thirty-one lines.

The main bedroom at Fallingwater, known as Liliane’s bedroom, also contains these four areas—a door, a bed, a fireplace, and windows. I have photographed this bedroom as though a character in Beckett’s imagination.

Concentrated into contiguous photographs Beckett's permutational language becomes a time-lapse of the infra-ordinary within Wright's extraordinary creation. All rooms are witness to endless repetitions which language and photograph concentrate into unexpected patterns.

Though it is one of his more technical novels, Watt was a pivotal work for Beckett marking a shift in his relationship with narrative and reason. Just as Fallingwater was a pivotal work for Wright marking a late career renaissance. They are both radical experiments in their respective art forms with Wright’s insistence on living in nature and Beckett’s insistence on living in language.

This project will result in a book and an immersive installation. With support from, and in collaboration with, Fallingwater Institute and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

Thank you to the Fallingwater Institute for this gift of time and space, support and creative openness.
https://fallingwater.org/fallingwater-institute/artist-scholar-in-residence/