Investigating the Materiality of Respiration in Different Media

The chapter juxtaposes 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 essentialism. The chapter examines the pneumatic readymades by Duchamp, Beuys, Manzoni, Weseler, Navridis' Difficult Breaths, Gary Hill’s Circular Breathing, Kanarinka It Takes 154,000 Breaths to Evacuate Boston, Lygia Clark's Respire Comigo (Breathe with Me), John Latham’s The Big Breather Project, Gabriel Orozco’s Breath on Piano, Giuseppe Penone’s To Breathe The Shadow, Bill Viola’s Fire, Water, Breath, Marina Abramović’s (With Ulay) Breathing In Breathing Out, VALIE EXPORT’s Breath Text: Love Poem so as to investigate points of intersection (connections, linkages, overlaps) between different artistic media (intermediality) and aims to put on view breath’s intrusive actuality and immediacy into the field of representation, by means of an inquiry into the ways that these different aesthetic practices depict the human respiratory system, as the zone of evaporation that separates formlessness from form and life from inertness.

Waste of Breath: The Readymade as a Stage Set

This chapter attempts to further illuminate Breath’s complex relationship between a visual art piece and the theatre by examining Beckett’s choice to fill the stage with scattered and lying rubbish as an effort to escape ‘aesthetisised automatism’, and by arguing that the presence of rubbish is related to Beckett’s ‘anti-aesthetic’ and ‘aesthetics of failure’, as described in his final piece of discursive criticism the ‘Three Dialogues’, that implies the failure to represent (to fail means to fail to represent) and the state of artistic impotence.

Shortness of Breath: Beckett’s Breath in Context

The chapter examines the ways artists and directors have staged Breath. The “stagings” or “displays” of the playlet are examined in an attempt to show how artists and directors have responded to Breath's intermedial structure. The presence of the human body in certain of these works, is in contrast to Beckett's central decision to eradicate the body/subject from the stage. Consequently, these art works disregard (fail to see) the existential and ontological importance of Beckett's decision to eradicate the figure of the performer by presenting the “absence” of the human subject.

Deeptime: Breath and the Look of Non-Art

The first chapter charts a chronological parallel between Samuel Beckett’s piece Breath (1969), as a representative piece of minimalism in the theatre (one of the shortest stage pieces ever written and staged), and Fried’s writing in 1967 of “Art and Objecthood” in an attempt to formulate a basic framework for thinking about the intersection of critical discourses on theatricality in the visual arts and the theatre, specifically about the notion of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and the modernist anti-theatrical impulse in the visual arts. The chapter demonstrates these claims by juxtaposing Michael Fried's polemics of theatricality and Beckett's anti-theatrical strategies. Samuel Beckett is a playwright who attempted to formulate an art theory and Michael Fried is perceived as a modernist art critic, who has written about the theatre and has criticized theatricality. The focus of this chapter is on how the “Three Dialogues” can be applied to a work like Breath, so as to illuminate specific aspects of the playlet, principally, Beckett's decision to eradicate the text and the human figure, hence, the interest lies in the ways that Beckettian aesthetics translates into practice.

Intermedial Breath: Defying the Boundaries between Displaying and Staging

This chapter focuses on Beckett's media environments and his experimentation with technology in relation to the complex contemporary media culture. Beckett explored some cardinal aspects of technology and wrote texts that deployed media so as to create dramatic effects and simultaneously challenged the limitations of the artistic medium. Breath is intrinsically intermedial given that is operates in-between realities, in-between the boundaries of artistic media, the verbal and the visual, the audible and the scenic, in-between visibility and invisibility, absence and emptiness, embodiment and ambiguity of corporeal experience. Intermediality is examined as a combinatory structure of syntactical elements that come from more than one medium, but are combined into one and are thereby transformed into a new entity

Emptied of Theatre: Breath and the Phenomenology of Disembodiment

The fourth chapter examines the variety of means that Beckett applies so as to generate that lack of the subject. The evasion of figuration, the withdrawal from representation and the abeyance of the mimetic are related facets of Beckett’s method of representational reduction. The chapter examines the de-centred field of subjectivity and its polysemous modes of absence and presence and argues that Breath is intrinsically intermedial given that is operates in-between presence and absence/emptiness, in-between embodiment and ambiguity of corporeal experience. Intermediality is traced in the context of the quasi-generic and inter-generic features of Beckett’s late style in the theatre, the de-centred field of subjectivity and its polysemous modes of absence and presence.

Introduction: In the Same Breath − From the Black Box to the White Cube and Beyond

This section introduces a critical framework that discusses the interplay and interconnectedness of media and the dynamic tension between theatricality and the visual arts in the spectrum of Beckett's Breath (1969). Argumentation builds upon the investigation of Fried's seminal theory “Art and Objecthood,” (1967) and Beckett's aesthetic theory in the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”(1949); both discourses are considered in relation to disciplinary or medial entanglements.

Conclusion: The Afterlives of Breath: Breathe – Breathe Again … Breathe Better

The book concludes by focusing on Beckett’s ‘aesthetics of failure’ in his final piece of discursive writing “The Three Dialogues,” and considers the exhaustion of possibilities as a fundamental artistic strategy, as well as the tension between abstraction and expression, the dilemma of artistic expression and the impossibility of expression in painting. Adding to this, the endnotes encourage multiple perspectives on health, art and life and offer original methods of understanding the role that respiration plays in our sensory, emotional and spiritual life.

The Durational Turn: Absorption and the Specificity of Temporality

The second chapter elaborates further on Fried's theory and its negative reception and provides a critical overview of Fried's controversial theory and its ideological ramifications by questioning Fried's high-modernist narrative about the viewing experience of visual art, as either a pure optical experience or as a strong gestalt. The chapter critically examines Fried's binarism between modernist presentness and minimalism's real time by arguing against Fried's claim that the worst aspect of minimalism is the manifestation of unlimited durationality.