Scenes from an Execution

by Howard Barker

Commissioned to paint a vast canvas celebrating the triumphant Battle of Lepanto, the free-spirited Galactia creates instead a breathtaking scene of war-torn carnage. In her fierce determination to stay true to herself, she alienates the authorities and faces incarceration. Her younger lover Carpeta is approached to take over and seizes the assignment for himself.

Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution makes sixteenth-century Venice the setting for a fearless exploration of sexual politics and the timeless tension between personal ambition and moral responsibility, between the patron's demands and the artist's autonomy.

Art is opinion, and opinion is the source of all authority.

This edition includes a new essay by Howard Barker, entitled The Sunless Garden of the Some Destinations Beyond Catastrophe

Genres: Plays, Theatre

80 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 2012

About the author

Howard Barker is an English playwright. His plays have been produced at the Royal Court, the RSC and the National Theatre, throughout Europe and the USA and by his own company, The Wrestling School. He is best known as the exponent of the Theatre of Catastrophe. He is a theatre theorist, a poet and a painter. His work has been the subject of a number of book-length studies and academic conferences.

Reviews

[Ayob Alaie · Rating 5 out of 5]

تازه مرشد و مارگریتا رو تموم کردم و بین نمایشنامه‌ها صحنه‌هایی از اجرای ی اثر رو گذاشته بودم اول بخونم همزمانی جالبی شد، هردو شاهکار به تمام معنا خالص.
صحنه‌هایی از اجرای یک اثر از روابط قدرت و نقش هنرمند در برابر اجتماع رو دنبال می‌کند همان نقشی که میخایل بولگاکف در مرشد و مارگاریتا، گالاکتیا وار در دوره استالین مخوف انجام داد. آیا هنرمند باید باید در میانه اجتماع بایستد و به بازگویی و نشخوار وضع موجود و آلتی در دست قدرت حاکم باشد، یا اینکه با شوریدگی وضع موجود را درهم‌شکند و مرزهای موجود را جابه‌جا کند و اثر خود را با دهن کجی و با قدرت به نمایش بگذارد همان کاری که بولگاکف با کتابش در واقعیت و گالاکتیا با نقاشی‌اش در نمایشنامه انجام دادند و حرف ولند (شخصیت شیطان مرشد و مارگاریتا) که دست نوشته‌ها هرگز نمی‌سوزند را به اثبات برسانند.
بولگاکف که اثرش پس از انتشار از تیغ سانسور حزب حاکم در امان نمانده بود. اما باز با این حال راه خود را باز کرد و تیغ سانسور هم نتوانست این اثر ناب را بسوزاند.

[Mohajerino · Rating 4 out of 5]

جدال یک‌ هنرمند با دولت!
جدالی که نشان میدهد حتی متجاوزترین هنر هم‌میتواند از طرف دولت انتخاب شود.

[SARAH · Rating 3 out of 5]

صحنه های از اجرای یک اثر،نمایشنا مه ای در باب جدال همیشگی هنرمند و حکومت و قدرت... هنرمندی که دست و پا می زند استقلال خود را در برابر فشار و اعمال سلیقه قدرت حفظ کند و هنرمندی که تن به سر سپردگی ارباب قدرت می دهد...خب نمی توانم بگویم لذت بردم از این اثر، یا دوست اش نداشتم، یا... اثری بود نه چندان دلپذیر، و نه همسو با سلیقه من.... این بن مایه مستعمل بنظرم سال هاست در هر هنری چه نقاشی و چه سینما و چه.... به بحث گذاشته شده .واقعا از خودم می پرسم هنرمند مستقل کیست؟اصلا هر اثری می خوانیم ،و هر نظری داریم ؛گیرم در مورد من اینطور باشد؛به حال و هوای من ربط دارد،اگه دوست اش دارم یا نه کاملا مربوط میشود به حال و هوای فکری و روزگاری که در ان نفس میکشم.... خب این روزها کمترین دغدغه من استقلال هنرمند و خلق اثار هنری است؛ اینه که نه! تعارف چرا؛ به من نچسبید.... ولی دوست می داشتم شخصیت این زنِ نقاش بیشتر و بیشتر پرداخت میشد کارهایش، حرف هایش.... با تمام این اوصاف تصمیم گرفته ام، در روزگار دیگری بخوانم اش، و بیشتر فکر کنم در باره اش. روزگاری که شاید مساله ارتباط خلق اثرهنری و هنر مند و قدرت دغدغه ام شد....

[Neda · Rating 4 out of 5]

از دیرباز جدال بین هنرمند و قدرت حاکمه، وابستگی و سرسپردگی و سفارشی سازی در زمینه هنر به وفور مطرح بوده و هست. این کتاب نیز به همین موضوع می‌پردازد. اینکه هنرمند در خلق اثر خود چقدر تحت تاثیر نیروهای حاکمه قرار می‌گیرد و یا استقلال فکری و هنری خود را برمی‌گزیند و در این مسیر تا چه حد موفق است. بارکر این نمایشنامه را در قالب نمایشنامه رادیویی نوشته است و روح هنرمندی را در قالب زنی سرکش و مستقل به نمایش درآورده است.
**ادامه مطلب حاوی اسپویلر است**
گالاکتیا، هنرمند واقعی این نمایشنامه است. آنجا که روح هنرمند، شهوت‌آلود و سرکشش به زنجیر هیچ قدرتی در نمی‌آید و حاضر نیست هنر خود و آزادی فکر خود را برای نمایش آنچه که می‌بیند و خلق می‌کند، اسیر جاه‌طلبی‌های مقاماتی کند که انتظار دارند هنر او را به یوغ قدرت نمایی خویش بکشند. درست در نقطه مقابل او کارپتا را می‌بینیم که هنرش در خدمت بزرگ‌نمایی و قهرمان پروری کسانی است که به واقع هیچ نقشی در خدمت به مردم خویش نداشته اند. بی‌پروایی گالاکتیا به مراتب ستودنی‌تر از هنر کارپتاهایی است که حتی اختیار هنر خود را نیز ندارند.

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a real play of ideas and yet still a racy comedy. Galactia has been commissioned by the Venetian Doge to paint the Battle of Lapanto, a large-scale public wall painting to celebrate Venice's conquest over the Muslims. She is an unexpected choice: an unknown but enormously talented woman known for her brutal realism, a quixotic woman working in a period in which her male rivals are all making the same pious icons full of baby Jesuses and allegorical sheep. But Galactia wants to paint the truth: the grim realities of war, the unadorned fact of slaughter, the human cost of triumph. She has no sense of jingoism, she is not sure how to paint "pity" or "pride". Everyone tries to dissuade her from painting in this style of unfettered truth-telling: her lover admonishes her to play politics, the Doge himself wants her to give more place to his brother the admiral in the battle, the admiral wants to be painted as genteel (more of a "homosexual gardener" as other painters have), her daughters (Supporta, who paints the backgrounds; Dementia—meaning madness—who helps sketch the figures) dissociate themselves from the painting.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses the sculptor Pygmalion fashions a statue of the most beautiful woman and immediately falls in love with her; when Venus brings her to life, he calls her Galatea. Galatea is male fantasy incarnate, the art and object of the male gaze made flesh. Our Galactia, however, is not the art but the artist, and she is not just moved by love and desire like Pygmalion but by mania—she loves Carpeta and wants to kiss him even as she paints him; she is fascinated, rather than horrified by, Prodo, the bizarre disemboweled survivor of the battle with an arrow in his head; she is surprised by the admiral, his gentleness, but hates his vicious deeds. She rapidly oscillates between explosive anger, jealous love, and defiant indifference. Everyone wonders if she is "mad". But for all her emotional outbursts, she has a callous disregard for feeling, "Don't sulk," she tells her lover when he tells her he feels neglected, "there's isn't time for all this mending and accommodating to your sensitivity, which in any case, isn't really sensitivity, it's brutality." Galactia is not—like Galatea—an idol of romanticized womanhood; she is the irascible, capricious, hot-headed artist.

"Try not to think of me as a woman. Think of me as a painter," she tells one of her sitters. And yet it is impossible to disentangle her gender from her artistry. As a woman, she can see through the male vanity of epic battle; as a woman, she can probe her sitter's inner psychology and get them to reveal their sensitivities (even if she will callously ignore them in her painting). While she might prefer to see herself as a painter than as a woman, she also scorns the aesthetic of "male painting" which—in her eyes—means celebrating battle, giving homage to homicide. And yet, she is not like the women of her age—ribald, irreverent, impious. She jokes at funerals, flirts in public, and argues with the powerful. To be an artist, in her view, "is to boast." Artists must hew to the conviction that they can do better than nature—a stance that rejects all the dainty conventions of female docility and agreeableness.

This is a genuinely philosophical work but still biting and comic. It is a play of dialectics: male vs. female, epic vs. realism, sacred vs. profane, mimesis vs. truth, flattery vs. truth, patron vs. artist, critic vs. artist. And yet the play is never sonorous or tediously cerebral. It's brilliant drama.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the height of Venetian power art and politics clash in Renaissance Venice when Galactia is commissioned to paint in the form of a massive canvas "The Battle of Lepanto", a naval victory in which Venice triumphed over the Turk.

Such an important commission by the patronage of the Doge of Venice is seen by some as an "opportunity to promote the rights of women" while Galactia sees it from the position of the individual artist and her creation. Instead of the expected "glorious triumph", she chooses to paint the horror of war and sets out on a disastrous course which threatens to dishonour the state and put her life at risk.

[AG]

gonna be pondering this one for a minute...part of me wonders if this would be that interesting to people who don't want to do art professionally but more of me is extremely interested in the questions it poses and how it relates to my own morals

[Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not saying anything interesting, but the dialogue is lovely.

[Noemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need a revival of this show in the west end RIGHT NOW!!!

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s never been a woman onstage with the matching passion and abrasiveness of Galactia, a fascinating character study with an abrupt and unsatisfying ending.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did an unrealized lighting design for this play, i had fun so 5 stars

[Damon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably my favorite Barker play. It's about a young artist commissioned by the state to paint a giant mural of a famous battle. But the farther she gets the more it disturbs the government officials. Controversy ensues. As increasing control is imposed upon her creative license, and perhaps because of the painting itself, the artist begins to go mad. In all honesty I had no idea it was supposed to be set in Venice until I read the synopsis on Goodreads; I always assumed it took place in some imaginary totalitarian regime. Oops!

[ina · Rating 4 out of 5]

- I remember watching the stage play, absolutely amazing