Beckett’s 'Thing'

an afternoon on Beckett's engagement with the visual arts: four talks, two performances, and conversation at Bel Ami
About this Event

Bel Ami invites you to Beckett’s Thing, an afternoon of talks and performances exploring Beckett’s lifelong engagement with the visual arts. Drawing on David Lloyd’s account of painting as Beckett’s “thing,” the afternoon asks how visual art, performance, and language open onto one another across Beckett’s work. The symposium coincides with Dan Mitchell and Richard Sides' exhibition (18 July–12 September 2026), a collection of new paintings and sculptures, which, echoing Beckett’s paronomasia, activate familiar words in absurdist rearrangements.

Lectures by Beckett scholars – Leland de la Durantaye (Claremont McKenna), Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (CSULA), David Lloyd (UCR), Katherine Weiss (CSULA) – will be followed by two performances:

Beckett's Not I (1972), performed by Jeni Jones

The chess game between Murphy and Mr. Endon from Beckett's first novel, Murphy, staged on (Dizadji-Bahmani, Santipreecha, Luc Trahand; 2025) with a new composition by Luc Trahand.
Refreshments provided. Attendance is free and open to all.

Schedule:

3:30pm: Beckett’s Art of Mismaking, Leland de la Durantaye (Claremont McKenna)

4:00pm: Beckett and Duchamp, Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (CSULA), on Beckett's subsumption of Duchamp's Large Glass (1915-1923) into the novel, Murphy (1938)

4:30pm: “… another like herself…”, Katherine Weiss (CSULA), on Samuel Beckett’s lasting influence on contemporary female artists

5:00pm: Beckett and Rage, David Lloyd (UCR): on the unaccountable fury that flares across Beckett's work, read alongside Avigdor Arikha's drawing Self-Portrait Shouting One Morning (1969)

6pm: Jeni Jones performs Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972), 15 mins.

7pm: An interactive artwork, Circa Ten to 90, stages a chess game from Beckett's Murphy with a sound composition by Luc Trahand