Samuel Beckett And Contemporary Art

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art-he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Beckett's formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism's theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett's work. Perceiving Beckett's ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett's remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

This book outlines Beckett's passion for the visual arts as he developed his signature style between the 1930s and 1970s.

This book challenges two of the most commonly held assumptions about Samuel Beckett. First, that he belongs exclusively to a literary tradition and second, that he was a reclusive figure entirely uninterested in his public image or reception. Presented here for the first time as both an accomplished artist and curator, this book situates Beckett in a new aesthetic and intellectual lineage. Beckett's later experiments in radio, film, television, theatre and photography – the focus of this study – deserve to be considered from within a new audio-visual context. Samuel Beckett: A Curated Life claims that the importance of Beckett's innovations in sound, moving image and installation, often dismissed as marginalia by traditional textual scholarship, establish his work as a key precursor to much of today's contemporary art. Also outlined for the first time are Beckett's creative collaborations with influential photographers such as Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson and Avedon. Alongside these collaborations, this book will also trace direct lines of affiliation in the works of contemporary artists such as Janet Cardiff, Stan Douglas and Gerard Byrne. What emerges from this new perspective is an understanding of Beckett as an artistic and technological innovator. Recognizing Beckett as a vital participant in the development of 20th century aesthetics, this groundbreaking study overturns the pervasive image of Beckett as the reclusive author 'damned to fame'.

Exploring Beckett's relationship with the visual arts and its influence on his creative expression

The National Gallery of Ireland was one of Samuel Beckett's favorite Dublin haunts. He whiled away many hours there and was particularly drawn to works by Perugino, Poussin, Rembrandt, and Rubeens. Encouraged by his friend Thomas MacGreevy, who later became director of the Gallery, Beckett developed a life-long passion for art. Essays trace Beckett's interest in art from its origins in the National Gallery, through his admiration for the work of Jack B. Yeats, to his art criticism and associations with contemporary artists including Bram van Velde, Alberto Giacometti, and Avigdor Arikha. The book concludes with the proceedings of the round table discussion "Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts." Contributors include Nicholas Allen, John Banville, Riann Coulter, Dellas Henke, Charles Klabunde, James Knowlson, R(c)mi Labrusse, David Lloyd, Breon Mitchell, Lois Oppenheim, Peggy Phelan, and Susan Schreibman.

Discusses the most recent advances in the Beckett field and the new methods used to approach it.

Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet Breath with the visual artsSamuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The 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 thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism. Key FeaturesExamines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representationJuxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialismThe focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expressionFacilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality