Breathing, Watching, and Weeping under Surveillance

Abstract

Reflecting on new materialisms and performance, the author uses autoethnography to link his bodily experience with the materiality of wool (including a childhood friend’s flock of sheep, yarn as a man who crochets, and his dead father’s coat) to a spontaneous, prereflective decision to “lean in” to one of Joseph Beuys’s felt suits on display in a museum.