In 1945, Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) brought back to Paris six matchboxes filled with the work of his war years: minute figurines that crumbled upon a single touch. Around this time, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-89) began writing plays, first Eleutheria and then Waiting for Godot. When they came together in 1961 to collaborate on a re-staging of Godot, both had turned their attention to different types of figures: Giacometti to lanky, attenuated figures that seem to erode into their environment, and Beckett to increasingly disembodied characters, such as Henry and Ada in Embers.
What can we make of this turn in depicting figures that seem to make and unmake themselves in our processes of perceiving them? Through a close examination of Beckett's dramatic works and Giacometti's art, Lin Li traces the development of this peculiar type of figuration and uncovers its implications on personhood, rhetoric and inter-medial reading.
Lin Li is research associate at the University of Antwerp.