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'Ms Sozita Goudouna's book left me breathless.'
Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research
Examines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and a purely visual representation
Samuel Beckett wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. The piece became emblematic of interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts.
This study considers a wide range of possibilities of understanding and redefining the context in which the corporeal function of breathing is represented in art. Breath is examined here both as a minimalist art work that contributes to the debates on minimalism and (anti)theatricality led by Michael Fried as well as a text for and related to contemporary art production.
Beckett's Breath attends to fifty breath-related artworks - including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art - and contextualises Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.
Preface by David Cunningham.
Sozita Goudouna is the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Performa New York and Teaching Fellow at New York University. She co-curated, with Paul B. Preciado, a project for 'The Parliament of Bodies' at Documenta 14 and worked for the Onassis Foundation in NYC.
Cover image: © Constantine Alivizatos
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN 978-1-4744-2164-5
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List of contents
Acknowledgements; Preface, David Cunningham; Introduction: In the Same Breath - From the Black Box to the White Cube and Beyond; PART I: RESPIRATION, DISCOURSE AND THE QUESTION OF MEDIUM SPECIFICITY; 1. Deeptime: Breath and the Look of Non-Art; 2. The Durational Turn: Absorption and the Specificity of Temporality; Part II: (RE)PRESENTING BREATH; 3. Shortness of Breath: Beckett's Breath in Context; 4. Emptied of Theatre: Breath and the Phenomenology of Disembodiment; Part III: THE EXHALED FIELD; 5. Waste of Breath: The Readymade as a Stage Set; 6. Intermedial Breath: Defying the Boundaries between Displaying and Staging; 7. Investigating the Materiality of Respiration in Different Media; Conclusion: The Afterlives of Breath - Breathe, Breathe Again . . . Breathe Better; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Sozita Goudouna is the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Performa Institute in New York and Teaching Fellow at New York University. She co-curated, with Paul B. Preciado, a project for 'The Parliament of Bodies' at Documenta 14 and worked for the Onassis Foundation in NYC.
Summary
This book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse.
