Samuel Beckett's 1976 Television play Ghost Trio is one of his most beautiful and mysterious works. It is also the play that most clearly demonstrates Beckett's imaginative and aesthetic engagement with the visual arts and the history of painting in particular. Drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, On Ghost Trio demonstrates Beckett's exploration of the relationship between theatricality, absorption and objecthood, and shows how his work anticipates the development of video and installation art. In doing so Conor Carville develops a new and highly original reading of Beckett's art, rooted in both archival sources and philosophical aesthetics.
Beckett's work has been important to several generations of post-war visual artists, and continues to figure strongly in contemporary work. Although this relationship has often been seen in terms of a shared minimalist aesthetic, the present essay argues that a more significant engagement emerges in the work of several artists who emerged alongside and in reaction to minimalist art in the late 1960s. These artists saw Beckett's work as departing from Clement Greenberg's late modernist notion of the autonomous artwork, emphasizing instead an openness to the body, popular new technologies and everyday life. It is this version of Beckett, rather than the minimalist one, that remains influential in today's art world.
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