As part of the citywide Eurydice Found program, the Hammer Museum presents three live performances of Samuel Beckett’s wordless, percussive teleplays QUAD I and QUAD II, first broadcast in Germany in 1981.
QUAD brings together the representational conventions of ritual, computational code, and matheme. This television play presents a clear connection between Beckett’s literary convictions, in particular his concept of the “unword” and its avant-garde possibilities, and the role of mathematics in art. The formal connections between the ritualistic, computational, and allegorical dimensions of this television play render QUAD a “hyperstitional” work, one that is composed of twin formal elements: symbols without significance and superstition without belief. The relation between the television play and mathematics is thus not superficial or referential: Beckett’s “hyperstitional” work produces a literary dimension that echoes the temporal and spatial stakes peculiar to twentieth-century mathematics.*
Thursday, January 23, at 7:30 pm.
Saturday, January 25, at 2 pm and 4 pm.
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.
*See Baylee Brits, “Ritual, Code, and Matheme in Samuel Beckett’s Quad,” Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 4 (Summer 2017), pp. 122–133. Published by Indiana University Press.
Samuel Beckett, Quad I and Quad II. Images courtesy and © the writer’s estate and Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Stuttgart, 1981.
