‘Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit’

Art criticism is most often expressed as monologue rather than as dialogue, and is generally disseminated in printed text rather than in embodied performance. The Three Dialogues between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, a series of debates on contemporary painting first published in 1949 in Paris, present a valuable opportunity to question, to counter, and to reframe this tradition. These dialogues highlight some of the ways in which criticism is already a performance, and their actual staging – undertaken in three different contexts in Dublin between 2010 and 2011 – foregrounds the extent to which art criticism can be an embodied, performative practice. The treatment of this text as a script for performance and its insertion into critical contexts raises methodological questions of value to the art historiographer: how can performance function as a tool of criticism, and how to account in art history for ‘events’ of criticism that may not be secured in print