Beckett’s Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts

233 Pages·2018·7.39 MB·English

by  Sozita Goudouna

FIN_GOUDOUNA_PPC outline.qxp_Layout 1 05/01/2018 13:04 Page 1
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance
This series of monographs extends our understanding of performance and Modernism
by stressing the relationships between them and initiates new conversations between
scholars, theatre and performance artists, and students.
Series Editor: Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts
‘Ms Sozita Goudouna’s book left me breathless.’
Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of
Philosophy at the New School for Social Research
Sozita Goudouna
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. Breathis
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 Breathattends to fifty breath-related artworks – including sculpture, painting,
new media, sound art, performance art – and contextualises Breath within the S
intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field o
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of intermedial Beckett criticism. i
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Preface by David Cunningham. G
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Sozita Goudouna is the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Performa New York d
and Teaching Fellow at New York University. She curated a project for ‘The Parliament of o
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Bodies’ at Documenta 14 and worked for the Onassis Foundation in NYC.
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a
Cover image: © Konstantinos Alivizatos, graphic design Dimitris Tzavaras
Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk
ISBN 978-1-4744-2164-5
edinburghuniversitypress.com
BECKETT’S BREATH
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance
Published
The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema
Anthony Paraskeva
Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the
International Left, 1892–1964
Susan Cannon Harris
Modernism and the Theatre of the Baroque
Kate Armond
Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts
Sozita Goudouna
Forthcoming
Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice
Robert Leach
Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance
Olga Taxidou
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecsmdp
BECKETT’S BREATH
Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts
Sozita Goudouna
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-
edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce
academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our
website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Sozita Goudouna, 2018
Preface © David Cunningham, 2018
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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and printed and bound in Great Britain.
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ISBN 978 1 4744 2164 5 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 2165 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 2166 9 (epub)
The right of Sozita Goudouna to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI
No. 2498).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Preface vii
David Cunningham
Introduction: In the Same Breath − From the Black Box to the White
Cube and Beyond 1
PART I: RESPIRATION, DISCOURSE AND THE QUESTION OF
MEDIUM SPECIFICITY
1 Deeptime: Breath and the Look of Non-Art 45
2 The Durational Turn: Absorption and the Specificity of Temporality 79
PART II: (RE)PRESENTING BREATH
3 Shortness of Breath: Beckett’s Breath in Context 105
4 Emptied of Theatre: Breath and the Phenomenology of
Disembodiment 120
PART III: THE EXHALED FIELD
5 Waste of Breath: The Readymade as a Stage Set 141
6 Intermedial Breath: Defying the Boundaries between Displaying and
Staging 148
7 Investigating the Materiality of Respiration in Different Media 161
Conclusion: The Afterlives of Breath: Breathe – Breathe Again . . .
Breathe Better 182
Bibliography 196
Index 216
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the A. S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for the award
of a four-year scholarship to pursue this research (2003–7); Professor David
Bradby at Royal Holloway University of London for his supervision and for
encouraging me to pursue this research, that was initiated in 1999 during the
MA Text and Performance Studies at Kings College University of London in
conjunction with RADA Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; Professors Dr David
Cunningham, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Jen Harvie, Olga Taxidou, Adrian
Heathfield, Joe Kelleher, Dr Sophie Nield, Dr Mischa Twitchin, and the anon-
ymous reviewers for their precious feedback; Professor Leonee Ormond for her
exceptional kindness and generosity and Professor Katherine Worth, leading
authority on Beckett; Professor RoseLee Goldberg for selecting me as the
inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at Performa Biennial in New
York, and for her trust, long-lasting inspiration, personal vision and insight
for the future of interdisciplinary arts; Professors Helen Spackman, Anna Furse
and Stella Sandford for the initial stimuli; all my collaborators for their trust;
my friends, family and Gerasimos for their solid love and support. And most
importantly Beckett and the conspirator(s) for letting me conspire.
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PREFACE
For a Respirateur: Goudouna’s Beckett
David Cunningham
I do not know what it is, having never seen anything like it before. It
seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories are
correct. Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues
Visitors to the remarkable collection of Marcel Duchamp’s work at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art currently pass through an installation by
the American artist Joseph Kosuth with the enigmatic title Plays of / for a
Respirateur. Occupying an entire room, and juxtaposing facsimiles of various
Duchamp works with nine of Kosuth’s own pieces, the title is taken from
Duchamp’s famous reply to the question of how, in the last years of his life,
he spent his time: ‘I’m not an artist. I’m a breather.’ Je suis un réspirateur.
Strictly speaking, the claim is a typically Duchampian feint: Duchamp’s sup-
posed artistic silence actually hid the fact that he was secretly making his final
work Étants Données, which today holds pride of place in the Philadelphia
collection. But as an articulation of a blurring of the lines between art and
non-art, the poetry of the work and the prose of the world, which Duchamp’s
career always seemed to emblematise, one can see its obvious appeal not only
to Kosuth but to an entire generation of post-war artists and thinkers. The
great contemporary German thinker of Pneuma, Peter Sloterdijk, connects, in
this vein, the (near) silence of this late Duchamp as réspirateur to the concerns
of a much earlier work, also included in the Philadelphia collection.1 A gift to
his patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg, 50 cc of Paris Air was ‘constructed’
in 1919 when, before boarding a ship to New York, Duchamp purchased an
‘empty’ vial from a pharmacist in Le Havre who he had persuaded to pour out
its contents and reseal. One of Duchamp’s first readymades, as well as, char-
acteristically, a joke shared with these patrons – who, he said, already owned
1 Sloterdijk, Peter. Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2009.
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beckett’s breath
everything else he could have bought them − 50 cc of Paris Air also posed a
typically Duchampian question concerning what might be the most insubstan-
tial artwork possible, a work that was barely there at all.
Sozita Goudouna’s book is perhaps, first and foremost, about this ques-
tion too, although its nodal point is neither Duchamp not the readymade
but Samuel Beckett’s 1969 Breath; a literal ‘play of / for a Respirateur’ that
is a work of theatre in much the same sense that 50 cc of Paris Air is a work
of visual art. The problem of what to make of such work, which is, as two
of his most astute readers put it, precisely ‘nothing on the order of what we
have been trained to think of as significant or interesting in art’, is of course a
common one in criticism of Beckett – indeed, in some senses, defines it – and
would often seem to place the challenge posed by Beckett at the very limits of
criticism itself; particularly as regards the later works.2 But it is a problem into
which Goudouna breathes new life − something worth bearing in mind when
considering what might otherwise seem the extraordinary gall of a book such
as the one which you have in front of you. No doubt monographs devoted to
single works always have a job persuading the reader of the necessity of such
sustained attention, but when that work is not The Divine Comedy, King
Lear or Ulysses, but instead a piece that lasts less than half a minute, without
dialogue or characters, supposedly written for an erotic review − a play that
literally invites the accusation that it is a load of rubbish − it would seem
the author has their work cut out. And in fact this is precisely the point. For
while it has, until Goudouna’s excellent book, yet to receive anything like the
level of academic attention that the likes of Duchamp’s Fountain and John
Cage’s 4’33” have acquired, Breath belongs with them in being one of those
modernist works that, in operating at the very historical and formal limit of
what might be thought of ‘as significant or interesting in art’, paradoxically
generates, from very little, almost nothing, a kind of centrifugal force that is
immensely productive of critical discourse, as Samuel Beckett’s Breath itself
makes clear.
As far as its own critical discourse is concerned, the crux of Goudouna’s
study could perhaps, first and foremost, be identified in an exploration of
the transmedial meanings and histories of artistic Minimalism – both in its
narrow sense, as a specific moment of post-war art, literary and musical
history, and in its wider significance as what is a central dynamic of modernist
practice in general. As Jean-François Lyotard has suggested: ‘Whether or not
they belong to the current that art history calls Minimalism or arte povera,
the investigations of the avant-gardes question one by one the constituents
one might have thought “elementary” or at the “origin” of the art of painting
2 Bersani, Leo and Dutoit, Ulysse. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993: 53.
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preface
[or theatre]. They operate ex minimis.’3 However, there can be little doubt
that this more general dynamic of subtraction or elimination is taken to an
extreme in Breath. One result is that that any presentation of it as a work of
art or theatre must assume what would appear itself to be an irreducibly para-
doxical but productive form: on the one hand, as something like the purest art
– utterly autonomous and utterly abstracted, referring seemingly to nothing
outside of itself, a form stripped of any readable social or historical content,
artistic form as form and nothing else − but, on the other, as art converging
on the condition of what would in fact be non-art − utterly literal, devoid of
all traditional aesthetic semblance, a blank ‘this-ness’ repelling all those forms
of experience that we would conventionally associate with the artwork. The
‘one object of fifty years of abstract art’, asserts Ad Reinhardt, writing in
1962, ‘is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing
it is only, separating it and defining it more and more’.4 Yet, if this objective
broadly conforms to the dynamic of Lyotard’s ‘ex minimis’, the reduction of
art to what Reinhardt calls its solely ‘art meaning’ also threatens to become
perversely ‘unartistic’ at this point, indistinguishable from ‘no meaning’ and
from ‘non-art’. It terminates, as Adorno puts it, ‘in a literal facticity’ which
undoes the very making of it ‘into the one thing it is only’ that Reinhardt’s
art-as-art seeks.5
Such ‘literalism’, as Michael Fried terms it in a still influential 1967 essay,
entails what is a ‘projected and hypostasised’ objecthood that, he asserts,
makes it fundamentally ‘antithetical to art’. In this respect, it also intersects,
as Goudouna reminds us, with what Fried notoriously defines as theatre: a
‘profound hostility to the arts’, ‘the illusion that the barriers between the arts
are in the process of crumbling’. The spectre of the Gesamtkunstwerk (as of
Duchamp and the early twentieth-century avant-gardes) looms large here, and
as a threat to the delimitation of modernist reduction as progressive purifica-
tion of a specific medium – a conception that Fried takes over from Clement
Greenberg – in which ‘quality and value’ are only ‘meaningful’ within ‘the
individual arts’, the aetiology of Fried’s anxiety is clear.6 Against this, however,
would be a view for which, as Adorno writes around the same time, ‘art stirs
most energetically’ precisely where ‘it decomposes its subordinating concept’.
3 Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity, 1991: 103. See also David Cunningham, ‘Ex Minimis:
Greenberg, Modernism and Beckett’s Three Dialogues’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui,
13 (2003): 29–41; ‘Asceticism against Colour, or, Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of
Beckett’, New Formations, 55 (Spring 2005): 104–19.
4 Reinhardt, Ad. ‘Art-As-Art’, in Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1991: 53.
5 Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997: 220.
6 Fried, Michael. ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Battock, Gregory (ed.). Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995: 141.
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