Least, uncommum, multiple

the miniature theaters of Samuel Beckett and William Kentridge

Abstract

The paper proposes an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s late fiction Imagination morte imaginez (1965), and the video installation Black Box / Chambre Noire (2005), by South African multi-artist William Kentridge. Understood as two hybrid miniature theaters, both works present themselves as manifestations of a broad redimensioning of the problems of medium specificity an the specificity of the different fields of the arts, operated and theorized above all since the 1960s. Thus, in this path between Literature and an expanded theatrical debate, our aim is to approach ways of reactivating artistic media inherited from different modernisms, emphasizing, on the one hand, artistic manifestations marked by an inventive use of scales; and, on the other hand, operations of overdetermination of the relations among the arts and among the cultural, social and historical times and spaces mobilized by these artistic acts.