Beckett's Breath by Sozita Goudouna | Preface David Cunningham

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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 supposed 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 to not only 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 re-seal. One of Duchamp’s first readymades, as well as, characteristically, a joke shared with this patrons – who, he said, already owned everything else he could have bought them - 50 cc of Paris Air

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also posed a typically Duchampian question concerning what might be the most insubstantial artwork possible, a work that was barely there at all.

Sozita Goudouna’s book is perhaps, first and foremost, about this question 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.

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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-Francois 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 [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 seem itself to be an irreducibly paradoxical 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

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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 purification 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’.

‘In this decomposition, art is true to itself: It breaks the mimetic taboo on the impure and the hybrid’.7 Among the many and extensive merits of Goudouna’s book is the way in which, then, it inserts Beckett’s Breath, as a historically and aesthetically specific ‘interface between the theatre and the visual arts’, into the broader context of this ‘decomposition’ or ‘crumbling’ across the arts, and the arguments surrounding it, while, at the same time, never effacing the singularity of the work itself. In this way, Samuel Beckett’s Breath may well be said to echo what another art critic, Rosalind Krauss, has to say of her own juxtaposition of Beckett with Sol Le Witt: ‘To speak of what Le Witt shares ... with his generation is not to diminish his art; rather it is to help locate the real territory of its meaning’.8 Yet this ‘territory’ is far from simply historical, or of a merely scholarly interest, in Goudouna’s book. For it also provides the ground for what is an extraordinary critical meditation upon our own ‘post-medium condition’, and the inescapable paradoxes and tensions that define it. Here, the reader finds not only Beckett and Fried, Donald Judd and Tony Smith, but also Bill Viola, Valie Export and Marina Abramovic, Gary Hill, William Kentridge and Lygia Clark. If, like Duchamp, Goudouna’s Beckett is un réspirateur, it is through the works of such contemporary artists, and their perceptive and remarkable reading here, that he continues to breathe new life today.

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Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 2 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 53. 3 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 103. See also David Cunningham, 'Ex Minimis: Greenberg, Modernism and Beckett’s Three Dialogues’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 13 (2003), pp. 29-41; ‘Asceticism Against Colour, or, Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of Beckett’, New Formations 55 (Spring 2005), pp. 104119. 4 Ad Reinhardt, ‘Art-As-Art’, in Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1991), p. 53. 5 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 220. 6 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Gregory Battock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 141. 7 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 182. 8 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p.

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