Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art

by Robert Reginio (Editor), David Houston Jones (Editor), Katherine Weiss (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783838210797
Publisher:	ibidem Press
Publication date:	10/31/2017
Series:	Samuel Beckett in Company
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Houston Jones is professor of French and visual culture at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on modern French literature and Samuel Beckett and is the author of Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism (2016), Samuel Beckett and Testimony (2011), and The Body Abject: Self and Text in Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett (2000). He most recently coedited Assessing the Legacy of the Gueules cassées: from Surgery to Art, a special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies (2017).

Robert Reginio is an associate professor in the division of English at Alfred University in New York. He has published works on Samuel Beckett and conceptual art and Beckett's engagement with the problem of history, in addition to essays on Bob Dylan and on Virginia Woolf.

Katherine Weiss is a professor in the department of literature and language at East Tennessee State University. In addition to her work on Samuel Beckett, she has published on modern playwrights such as Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Introduction Robert Reginio 9

1 Beckett as Contemporary Artist

Beckett in a box: Texts for Nothing 8 in Brian O'Doherty's Aspen 5+6 Sarah Garland 37

"Play it again, Sam": Undoing and Redoing Samuel Beckett's Molloy in Contemporary Art Carla Taban 65

Theatrical Minimalisms: On Place in Beckett and Judd Zachary Tavlin Kinn Wachter-Grene 87

Specific Objects and Inscrutable Activities: Beckett in the Landscape of Post-War American Art Robert Reginio 107

2 Beckett in Contemporary Art

A Singular Totality: Beckett, Salcedo, Hatoum and Installation Art, from Closed System to Embodied Cognition David Houston Jones 135

Transformations of Samuel Beckett's Work in Contemporary Video Sculpture and Radio Art Katharina Knüppel 155

Walking…Stumbling…Falling…Lying Down: Beckettian Operations in the Art of John Barbour and Ugo Rondinone Russell Smith 183

"…gently light unfading…": Traces of Samuel Beckett in the Works of Claire Lise Holy Katherine Weiss 213

Samuel Beckett and Steve McQueen: Imprisonment, Sight, and the Screen Rachel Wells 241

Beckett and Sonic Art Derval Tubridy 265

3 Artists on Beckett

The Tragic Romance of Language: Paul Chan and Samuel Beckett Sara Collins 293

Reverberations: Stan Douglas on Beckett Marisa C. Sánchez 315

Instant Light Vault Wall White Black Bodies Ground Heat Semicircle Arnold Dreyblatt 335

Cocentricity Dorothy Cross 343

Beckett: The Failure Sense Mary McIntyre 351

Notes on Contributors 361