‘Art of confinement’: Samuel Beckett, Alberto Burri

Abstract

The essay attempts to draw a parallel between the ascetic, negative late modernist aesthetics of Samuel Beckett and Alberto Burri, tracing their post-humanist poetics and artistic practices of impoverishment, achievementlessness and their responses given to the crisis of humanist European culture and of a modernist ethos of mastery in the wake of WW2. It attempts to show how Burri’s works in the late 1940s–1950s converge with the articulation of Beckett’s visual aesthetics in his coeval essays on art, and how the artistic procedures of both move from prewar modernist models toward an embodied aesthetic of finitude, toward an ethical rupturing, scarring of frameworks and structures of mastery, by privileging a material imagination of indigence that is grounded in detritus, and finally, by creating forms of an art of melancholia that stage the ongoing disaster of contemporary history.