Fizzles: Existentialism and Pop Art Collide

Join us for a discussion by experts around the iconic collaboration between Irish writer Samuel Beckett and American artist Jasper Johns. The beautiful artist book Foirades/Fizzles delves into themes of duality, contradiction, disintegration and the demise of artistic expression.  Panellists: Curator, Rare Books, Susan Millard,  Associate Professor Anthony White, from the Faculty of Arts and Conall Cash,  Canadian Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, St Francis Xiavier University.

Anthony White is an Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the history of modern and contemporary art. He has written several books and peer reviewed journal articles.

Conall Cash is a Canadian Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature, based at St Francis Xavier University. He was previously Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne, and received his PhD from the Romance Studies department at Cornell University in 2022. His latest article on Samuel Beckett will be appearing in New Literary History at the end of this year, entitled “Mastery and Genericity: Marx, Badiou, Beckett.”

Susan Millard is the Curator, Rare Books at the University of Melbourne. She has previously worked in public libraries and at State Library Victoria in Special Collections. She has curated a number of exhibitions, including Libri: Six Centuries of Italian Books (2013) and Art on the Page (2017) She has a strong interest in the Book Arts, as well as various areas of Australiana and printing history.

This event is being held as part of Rare Book Week, and in conjunction with the exhibition Assemblage: Recent Acquisitions from Archives and Special Collections, on display in the Noel  Shaw Gallery from 5 August 2024.