Investigating the Materiality of Respiration in Different Media

The chapter juxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialism. The chapter examines the pneumatic readymades by Duchamp, Beuys, Manzoni, Weseler, Navridis' Difficult Breaths, Gary Hill’s Circular Breathing, Kanarinka It Takes 154,000 Breaths to Evacuate Boston, Lygia Clark's Respire Comigo (Breathe with Me), John Latham’s The Big Breather Project, Gabriel Orozco’s Breath on Piano, Giuseppe Penone’s To Breathe The Shadow, Bill Viola’s Fire, Water, Breath, Marina Abramović’s (With Ulay) Breathing In Breathing Out, VALIE EXPORT’s Breath Text: Love Poem so as to investigate points of intersection (connections, linkages, overlaps) between different artistic media (intermediality) and aims to put on view breath’s intrusive actuality and immediacy into the field of representation, by means of an inquiry into the ways that these different aesthetic practices depict the human respiratory system, as the zone of evaporation that separates formlessness from form and life from inertness.

Il corpo dell’auleta

The versatility of the aulos is passed on to the musician, who in turn is transformed into a physical representation of the instrument’s sound. With the precious aid of book iv of Pollux’s Onomasticon it is possible to reconstruct the special set of vocabulary linked to the sound of the aulos. If it could already in itself be considered as ἐπαγωγόν, the additional effect of the movements, gestures, and facial expressions of the aulete resulted in a strong visual, as well as emotional, impact. Nor can we forget, on the other hand, the less than favorable judgments, abundant in philosophical texts, that arose in regard to auletic performances: just as certain physiognomic traits of the aulos are to blame, so too are certain bodily movements of the aulete: almost as if the negative characteristics are passed reciprocally from instrument to musician in a sort of circular breathing. La versatilità dell’aulos si trasmette all’esecutore, che durante la performance diviene così immagine fisica e concreta del suono percepito. Con il prezioso ausilio del libro iv dell’Onomasticon di Giulio Polluce è possibile ricostruire il campo semantico legato alla produzione del suono auletico. Se esso poteva già di per sé essere avvertito come ἐπαγωγόν, inoltre, i movimenti, i gesti e le espressioni facciali dell’auleta risultavano di forte impatto visivo, oltre che emotivo. Non ci si può dimenticare, d’altro canto, dei giudizi poco benigni, affioranti soprattutto dai testi filosofici, in merito alla pratica auletica: come alcuni tratti della fisionomia dell’aulos, così anche alcuni atteggiamenti del corpo dell’auleta sono biasimevoli, quasi che le caratteristiche negative passino vicendevolmente da strumento a esecutore in una sorta di respirazione circolare. This article is in Italian.

Around the Origins of Bagpipes: Relevant Hypotheses and Evidences

This article addresses the complex question of the origins of bagpipes. One of the major problems is to determine the defining features of the instrument, as the denomination includes a broad and heterogeneous family. We propose an explanatory typology based on only three main profiles, interrelated but substantially different: circular breathing (initial and polygenetic), the addition of an external pipe bag (documented in some early civilizations), and the medieval one, which leads to the modern European bagpipe (with bag, one or more drones and the morphology that has survived to the present). Attention is also paid to the intense social symbolism that has surrounded the instrument since ancient times. The study reveals that bagpipes had a marginal position in Greco-Roman culture, associated with livestock and beggars; but in the medieval world their roles and contexts expanded unstoppably.