On Such a Full Sea (2013) Chang-rae Lee Jacket and slipcase design Helen Yentus Book in slipcase. H23o x W150 mm; slipcase only, W110 mm. 368 pages. Edition of 500, of which this is #178. Acquired 1 October 2018. Photo: Riverhead Books and AIGA.
Riverhead art director Helen Yentus and members of the MakerBot team designed this slipcase for Lee’s novel. An edition of 500, made with the MakerBot® Replicator® 2 Desktop 3D Printer with MakerBot PLA filament, a bioplastic made of corn and fabricated by MakerBot in Brooklyn, New York, appeared in 2013 just before the trade edition in 2014.
Welcome to the online celebration of the 125th anniversary of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897).
This is the poem that launched countless works of free verse and experiments with typography and the page. Visually and physically, its arrangement of scattered words in different type sizes and styles across the pages echoes the drama, images and delaying syntax that the text plays out — a sinking ship, its struggling master, cresting waves, a Siren, a whirlpool or abyss, the North Star and its nearby constellation Ursa Minor. Its challenge to the reader heralded 125 years of artistic and intellectual engagements: a crisis in language and representation, the struggle to reconcile pattern and meaning with chance and nothingness, and the never-ending tarantella of the material with the conceptual. Mallarmé’s is the poem that made the world modern and then post-modern.
The poem also launched a host of livres d’artiste in numerous languages as well as homage in the form of film, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, theater, costume, music, dance, programming, and book art. Even exhibitions of book art. The exhibition best known from the 20th century is Marcel Broodthaers’ 1969 show. Academic exhibitions for the 1998 centenary of Mallarmé’s death included artworks. The fact, however, that no less than five art exhibitions in homage to Un Coup de Dés appeared in the first decade of the 21st century demonstrates a rapidly growing recognition of its importance as a muse to book artists.
Together, these exhibitions captured somewhat less than half the relevant works that would have qualified. Following the Pichler exhibition in 2017, the number of such works has only grown. On the 125th anniversary of the first publication of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’abolira le Hasard, it is time to take stock again.*
*Hosted by New York’s Center for Book Arts, Michalis Pichler remounted and expanded his Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé in 2024 (18 January through 1 May). This time it has been accompanied by an extensive anthology: Coup de Dés (Collection): Books and Ideas After Mallarmé (2024), which has been added to the Books On Books Collection and is reviewed here.
The Poem that “Made Us Modern”
The poem arrived May 1897 in Volume VI, No. 17 of Cosmopolis, Revue internationale, published in London. The anticipated shock of the poem’s layout for its readers prompted the editors to request a preface from Mallarmé explaining how to read the poem. Occasionally a worn copy of the issue comes up for sale by a rare book dealer or auction house, but Gallica (France’s National Library online catalogue) offers access where we can see the single-page and double-page spreads that caused such concern.
The Cosmopolis editorial team may have overestimated its readers’ immediate shock (there was little response), but imagine the team’s shock if Mallarmé had insisted that Cosmopolis somehow print the poem as he really wished: across eleven double-page spreads rather than the nine single pages into which it was compressed. Again, Gallica provides the means to see what most of us will never see firsthand: Mallarmé’s mark-up of the later proofs showing his intended double-page spreads. These proofs were for the deluxe edition Mallarmé wanted to publish with the entrepreneur Ambroise Vollard. From their correspondence, we know that prints by Odilon Redon were to be included. We know also that Mallarmé’s instructions on size, weight and placement of words, down to the letter, were meticulous.
The printers proclaimed the whole thing madness. Vollard did not press. And Mallarmé died in 1898. Finally in 1914, with the involvement of Edmond Bonniot, Mallarmé’s son-in-law, Éditions de la Nouvelle revue française (NRF) delivered on Mallarmé’s typographic intentions — almost — the typeface was Elzevir not Didot. Gallimard/NRF has reissued it several times in various trim sizes over the years. Subsequent archival discoveries and close observations led to other facsimiles, many of which are recorded in Thierry Roger’s monumental L’Archive du Coup de dés (2010). The scope of this essay/exhibition does not include every one of the many editions of the poem (or its translations) — only those that attempt an artistic homage as well. They appear chronologically among the artworks in the exhibition.
Neither is the essay/exhibition an attempt to explicate this enigmatic poem. What happens in Un Coup de Dés, what it means, how it made us modern and then post-modern — all that and more — have been the subject of countless books, essays and web pages. Those on which this essay/exhibition has relied for such insights can be found under the heading “Further Reading (and Viewing)” at the end of the exhibition. The aims here are rather to present the reader/viewer with an exhibition as comprehensive as possible of the works of artistic homage to this singular poem that have appeared since 1897. For additional exhibitions marking the occasion,see the heading “Other Exhibitions in 2022”, also at the end of this exhibition.
Covers of the 1914 edition (held by the Bodleian) and 1993 edition (from the Books On Books Collection). Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira “l’Appropriation”
While the experience cannot be the same, the reach of a virtual exhibition can exceed that of a bricks-and-mortar affair in certain ways. Moreover, it can provide building blocks for future organizers, curators and enthusiasts of book art and this unusual poem. By virtue of its virtuality, this exhibition is updateable. Its bibliographical references are linked wherever possible to permalinks, enabling the viewer to locate the nearest physical copy of the work. Where Pichler’s exhibition included a working player piano and piano roll version of Un Coup de Dés and films/videos (albeit not related to Mallarmé’s poem), this virtual exhibition provides visuals and hyperlinks to films/videos directly related to the poem as well as the same for operatic, balletic and musical renditions of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard. The works of homage included come from an exploration of exhibition catalogues, BnF Gallica, the Library of Congress, the Bodleian libraries, WorldCat and Google search — and tips from the scholars and artists themselves.
The word “homage” extends a wide umbrella — over parody, pastiche, livre d’artiste and appropriations in all manner of art forms. One or two works in the exhibition stretch the point of paying homage. Picasso’s pun un coup de thé is one example. Its admission rests on its being the earliest hint of the poem’s presence in other artworks. Subsequent omissions may be intentional or unintentional. In its seeming allusiveness to the poem, Cy Twombly’s Poems to the Sea (1959) petitions for admission. Lacking more obvious appropriation, though, it is more an “homage” to Twombly’s experience of the Mediterranean than of Mallarmé’s poem. Other petitioners, considered or missed, await future curators.
The Artworks
From 1897 to 1959 (5)
Just five works of homage in the first sixty years after the poem’s appearance is not a promising start, but it provides context in which to appreciate the later acceleration.
The earliest homage to Un Coup de Dés came only a few months after its publication. It took the form of Australian Christopher Brennan’s handwritten pastiche scolding the critics of his own poems influenced by Mallarmé. The work has only appeared in facsimile and then not until 1981. Its lengthy title is better appreciated in its handwritten form. More on this work here.
Facsimile edition of the handwritten manuscript. Published by Hale & Iremonger. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
In 1973, the art historian and critic Robert Rosenblum remarked on Picasso’s likely homage in the truncated newspaper headline — from “UN COUP DE THÉÂTRE” to “UN COUP DE THÉ” — for use in his 1912 collage. The connection seems a stretch, but Picasso was aware of Mallarmé and the poem, as were the circles in which Picasso moved. One of the avant-gardists — Man Ray — would be far less subtle in his cinematic homage to the poem.
Man Ray’s set location was Villa Noailles, a villa built for Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens. Not surprisingly for patrons of Brancusi, Mallet-Stevens and Picasso among many others, the Noailles were footing the bill for Man Ray’s cinematic effort. The film opens with a screen quotation from the poem, but, other than the dice-shaped aspect of the villa which sparked the connection, the film develops its own mysterious suggestions apart from Mallarmé’s.
Film, one reel, 16 mm, 19:46 minutes. Posted 26 April 2014. Accessed 1 April 2018.
The Art et Action Laboratoire de Théâtre planned a spectacle including a polyphonic vocal performance of the poem as early as 1919. Thwarted by copyright law, Art et Action joined with the Société des Gens de Lettres for a new orchestration in 1942. Claude Autant-Lara’s 1923 poster for the abortive presentation (along with three other similar spectacles) and his decor (not shown here) foreshadow performance works by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Kathy Bruce and Alistair Noble, Bernadette O’Toole and many others — all noted below.
Another unrealized hommage rests in Camille Soula‘s 1941 annotation of his copy of the 1914 edition of the poem. Soula was a physician who also studied and wrote about Mallarmé’s poetry and prose. The unsigned watercolor below is thought to represent Soula’s interest in staging a ballet version of Un Coup de Dés.
The efforts from 1897 to 1929 did little to prompt others to explore Un Coup de Dés for material and inspiration in the next three decades. Perhaps the first livre d’artiste version of the poem (and the fifth and last homage from 1897 to 1959) was created by Hella Guth in 1952. Guth’s distinctive style of collage foreshadows future extensions into more three-dimensional and material techniques.
Front and back covers of Hella Guth’s livre d’artiste. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France. Displayed with permission of Kate Rys, niece of Hella Guth.
From 1960 to 1969 (5)
The next six decades of the poem’s aftermath give a geometric progression of works in a variety of media by which homage was paid. The 1960s begin with two “over-the-top” works, over the top in very different ways.
Ernest Fraenkel was convinced that, working back from the text of Un Coup de Dés, he had “discovered” additional artwork in Mallarmé’s mind. The forms of the artwork could be shown by connecting the dots (the beginnings of the lines with each other, and likewise the ends) and shading the enclosed shapes — like a Rorshach test, only inverted (words first, then the images). Strange as the theorizing may be, stranger still is the visual results’ prediction of similar impressions almost ten years later arising from completely different premisses. More on Fraenkel’s work here.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.
Seven different diagrammatic renderings. The one at the lower right shows Fraenkel’s sideways view. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The second homage to appear in this decade is André Masson’s near illumination of the poem. It subsequently warranted an extended essay from the 2003 exhibition’s curators: Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert. These three extracts from their essay provide useful touchstones to place against later works in this virtual exhibition:
Far from continuing or elaborating on Mallarmé’s project, Masson has contrived a systematic substitution of graphics, including calligraphy, for a typographical chef-d’oeuvre, thus enabling an unforeseen and uninvited art form to usurp the territory of another. (p. 508)
… in illustrating poetry he more often than not deserves his usual designation of abstract surrealist, all the more so because he combines automatism with the mythological dynamism so characteristic of his paintings and his drawings. (p. 513)
… Mallarmé’s poem, characterized by its avoidance of anecdotal narrative, its deliberate twistings of metaphorical patterns, its deconstruction of rhythmic continuity, practically precludes figuration. How can any illustration, however abstract, lend visual support to a text that compounds to such an extent the problematics of representation? … How could Masson graphically master a text that perversely withdraws from the reader and pores over itself, like the hypothetically sentient waves it repeatedly evokes, questions, and denies? (p. 514)
By the end of the 1960s, a very different form of homage takes over from that of Guth and Masson, one prefigured by Fraenkel’s abstract mapping of Mallarmé’s text into strips of black, one that would recur in several guises into the next century. Call it homage by redaction.
Detectable from its title, Diacono’s work intends a more social or political comment than Fraenkel’s. In an interview, he noted, “The title alternates not only colors, black and orange, but also uppercase and lowercase letters. The wordplay in essence says: the absence of metrics, of language, will not abolish poetry. Neither will the American taboos” (Nickas, 2019). Those comments align with the element of “pop” art and the underground comic in this homage. But does Diacono’s socio-political drive outweigh the rest of a METRICA n’aboolira‘s insistence on “looking at” Un Coup de Dés rather than reading it? Or is the work reminding us to read what we are looking at? More on this work here. The entire work has been digitized here.
Marcel Broodthaers’ homage appeared as a three-part centerpiece to the 1969 exhibition entitled Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé: Marcel Broodthaers à la Deblioudebliou/S (“Literary exhibition around Mallarmé at the Deblioudebliou/S”). Deblioudebliou/S puns on a distorted French pronunciation of the letter W and the three initials of the Antwerp gallery Wide White Space, where the event occurred. The three parts consist of ten copies numbered I-X on anodized aluminum, ninety copies numbered 1-90 on transparent mechanographic paper (the original edition) and three hundred copies numbered 1-300 on opaque paper (the catalogue edition). On Broodthaers’ cover, the word Image occupies the same space as Poème on the 1914 edition’s cover. Following that, Broodthaers displaces Mallarmé’s dismissive “Préface” from Cosmopolis with his own preface: the poem’s entire text set in a block of type with the lines separated by slashes. Until the colophon, that is the only legible text to appear in this homage by redaction in which all the lines of the poem are blacked out. As visitors to the show perused the editions, a tape recording of Broodthaers’ reading the poem played in the background. Broodthaers’ multimedia homage would provoke dozens of artists to create works of double-, triple- even quintuple-homage over the next sixty years.
Photos: Top image courtesy of Charles Bernstein; middle and bottom images courtesy of MACBA.
Broodthaers’ bookworks above are not the only forms of homage he created for Un Coup de Dés. The Galerie Michael Werner hosted an exhibition entitled “Footprints of a collector: Reiner Speck. Mallarmé, Broodthaers et les autres” (2 May – 23 July 2022). In addition to outstanding copies of the Image works, the curator Sabine Schiffer and Reiner Speck included Garniture Symbolique (1975), a blue-tinted glossy photo strip with nine photos on glossy paper, showing excerpts and phrases from the poem. Also included was a painting entitled Un coup de dés jamais quand bien même… (oil, gold paint, felt pen on canvas) from 1969, which is owned by Speck and, according to his afterword in the catalogue, has appeared in every exhibition of Broodthaers work since. For anyone looking for a description of Broodthaers’ 1969 exhibition, the catalogue’s essay by Sam Sackerhoff — “Literary Exhibitions” — is the gold standard. The three black shirts across which Broodthaers” had copied the full text of the poem in thin white chalk” that Sackerhoff note are but one of the harbingers of future works of homage to come (in particular, see Michalis Pichler and Kathy Bruce below).
The last 1960s works of homage to mention are Daniel Spoerri’s Un Coup de Dés dinner-cum-artwork, originally held in 1968 and reperformed on numerous occasions, and the Aspen Magazine in a Box [aka : The Minimalism Issue] (No. 5 + 6, Fall/Winter 1967), dedicated to Mallarmé.
Spoerri’s homage is first and foremost performative art with invited dinner guests assigned their seats by a throw of the dice. Afterwards, the meal’s detritus is fixed to a surface for vertical display, like debris on the deck of a shipwreck. No image of one of the Un Coup de Dés after-dinner works has been found for this exhibition. It may be that one or more of these performances also alluded to the literary dinners at which Mallarmé declaimed. Mark Clintberg has recounted one of these Spoerri banquets (held at Haus Maria Theresia in Dusseldorf, Germany, on 5 February 2010), and its social satiric flavor seems distant from those celebrations of the late 19th century. Though not on display here, Spoerri’s performances in homage are worth noting as heralds of the veritable variety show of performances that will appear over the coming decades.
Although The Minimalism Issue is more an homage to Mallarmé in general than one to Un Coup de Dés in particular, it too is a herald. It makes for a mixed bag (or box) and is noteworthy as much for its difficult-to-access LPs and super 8 films as for its name contributors: Roland Barthes, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Dan Graham, Susan Sontag among others. With its mixed media, Aspen’s Mallarmé Box foreshadows even more eclectic and technically challenging efforts to come.
Permission of Whitechapel Gallery being sought.
From 1970 to 1979 (4)
If simply nodding toward Mallarmé’s poetic influence constituted homage, a small town of concrete poems could be put forward to pad the number of artworks of homage to Un Coup de Dés in the 1970s. As for artworks, perhaps artists were momentarily stunned by Broodthaers’ homage, for only four very different new works of homage appeared in the 1970s.
One of the participants in The Minimalism Issue of the Aspen Magazine, Dan Graham moved from his conceptual Poem Schema (1966), which appeared in the box, to an installation as homage. Graham’s primary interest had been Mallarmé’s long-touted Le Livre, which was to be not merely a book but a performance. So his attraction to Brian Doherty’s book as box of mixed media makes sense. Un Coup de Dés, however, may have had just as much influence as Le Livre. Consider these comments by Penny Florence as she writes about how Mallarmé’s poem and Odilon Redon’s prints must be read together:
They are a book with interchangeable pages, with varying directions and registers, with vertical and horizontal movements, with reversals and with shapes that are as important in signification as words. They challenge our notion of coherence and demand that we re-shape the relations between recorded and immediate experience. (p.110) [My emphasis]
That is also what happens in Dan Graham’s installation Present Continuous Past (1974). The installation room consists of two mirrored walls at a right angle to each other. A third wall on which a video camera is mounted above a video screen stands at a right angle to one mirrored wall and opposite the other. The fourth wall at a right angle to camera/screen wall of the room is blank white and provides the entrance to the installation. The video records the viewer and, after an eight-seconds lag, projects the recording onto the video screen. Because the recorder will then pick up the mirror reflection of the eight-seconds-lagged projection playing on the video screen and will then play that back after another eight-seconds lag, the viewer will experience in the present a continuous regress of the past(s).
Jean Lecoultre’s livre d’artiste of “soft varnish” etching resonates with Mallarmé’s dictum peindre non la chose mais l’effet qu’elle produit (“to depict not the object but the effect the object produces”). Lecoultre depicts easily identifiable objects — a stone, a measuring rod, a rope and more — and less easily identifiable ones — a blurred wall and windows, a metallic plate with two rows of six numbered holes (the one numbered “1” filled with red), a pair of draped rectangular columns being sliced with a cheese-cutter-like cable and so on. The soft-focus realistic detail of surreal images, the strange juxtaposition of objects and the way some objects seem to float on the page — these mirror Mallarmé’s arrangement of words and lines among les blancs of the pages, the precision of his images and the suggestiveness of his metaphors.
Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of Jean Lecoultre.
Mallarmé was always drawn to the idea of theatrical performances of his works, including Un Coup de Dés. He may have had a revolutionary grasp of staging text on blank pages, but he lacked any grasp of mise-en-scène for the actual stage. Despite his finger on the pulse of domestic fashion in his one-man magazine La Dernière Mode (1874), Mallarmé had no feel for the audience attracted to his contemporary Sarah Bernhardt.
He might have rejoiced that Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub filmed this Greek-style theatrical reading of Un Coup de Dés even if it came some sixty years after the attempt by Art et Action (see above). By staging the nine-voice reading in the Père Lachaise cemetery on the hill where the last Communards had been shot and buried, and also nearby the memorials to the Holocaust’s concentration camps, Straub and Huillet appropriated the poem for a forced chime with their film’s title, a quotation attributed to Jules Michelet, the 19th century historian of the French Revolution. War poetry and social indignation figure little in Mallarmé’s work even though the end of the Franco-Prussian war as well as the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871 hung like a pall over France in his lifetime. But in light of another line from Michelet — “With the world began a war that will only end with the world, and not before: that of man against nature, mind against matter, freedom against fate. History is nothing but the story of this endless struggle.” Introduction à l’histoire universelle (1843) — perhaps the chime is not so forced. A video of the reading was made available on DVD in 2010.
As will be seen later in the exhibition, Ian Wallace is a “repeat hommageur”. Over three decades, he has created three separate works. With each one, something subtly new appears, but all are grounded in a particular kind of self-referencing shared with Mallarmé’s poem: the creative struggle reflected in the creation. In his own words:
In 1979, I made a large photographic work … which combined images of me in the studio making the work itself, with a text meditating on this concept of self-referencing. … This work was an early attempt to reconfigure a conceptual art practice through its literary antecedent in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, …. After reading [Un Coup de Dés] for many years, I have come to appreciate it as one of the foundational works of modern art. Its theme, that of artistic destiny and a crisis of representation, was expressed through the collapse of metaphysics into typographics and the material space of the page. [Ian Wallace in Un Coup de Dés/Writing Turned Image, curated by Sabine Folie, p. 82.]
Hand-coloured silver gelatine print, 276 x 549 cm. Image and permission to display, courtesy of Catriona Jeffries Gallery.
From 1980 to 1989 (12)
The 1980s begin with the acclaimed édition mise en oeuvre by Mitsou Ronat and Tibor Papp. In addition to trebling the previous decade’s contribution, the 1980s offer the first sculptural installations to pay homage to Un Coup de Dés — Robert Filliou’s Eins. Un. One. (1984) and Geraldo de Barros’ Jogos de Dados (1986) — as well as the first symphony — Claude Baillif’s Un coup de dés, d’après Mallarmé, Op. 53 (1980).
In 1980, Mitsou Ronat and Tibor Papp used Mallarmé’s corrected proofs of the abortive Vollard version to produce an edition closer to Mallarmé’s intention than previously published. They followed the intended unbound-folios approach to the poem but juxtaposed it not with the etchings of Odile Redon but with artistic interpretations by Papp and his contemporaries. A decade later, Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert would comment: “This surprising accompaniment to a scrupulously authentic printing of the original poem pays so to speak a postmodern homage to a quintessential modern master” (p. 508). Over the decades after the Ronat/Papp production, other new editions appeared — also aimed at reflecting the Master’s wishes. Not including Françoise Morel‘s facsimile of the manuscripts and proofs(2007), there are three other explorations of the “true” edition (in French): Michel Pierson‘s (2002), Ypsilon Éditeur‘s (2007) and Alain Hurtig‘s (2012). Not shown in the exhibition, Pierson’s substitutes artwork by Jorge Camacho for that by Odile Redon. Ypsilon Éditeur’s edition restores Redon and appears later in this exhibition. Also shown later, Hurtig’s edition substitutes Catherine Belœil’s artwork for Redon’s and provides an insightful analysis of typeface options, including the Didot. For more on the Ronat/Papp edition, go here.
Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.
Double-page spreads from the 1980 Ronat/Papp edition. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Tibor Papp, Déville. Paul Nagy, Untitled. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Claude Baillif began this symphony while teaching at McGill University in Montréal. The musical composition for five choirs, two double basses, two percussionists, two kettledrums, and electronic tape directly addresses the poem’s shape. As explained in the LP liner notes, Baillif assigned a particular “sound property” to each of the poem’s eleven double-page spreads (with two double basses, two percussionists and two kettledrum players punctuating the change from one spread to another); designated each of the five choirs to each of the five type fonts and sizes; and generated a “ribbon of sound” in the university’s electronic music studio to create additional echoes across the eleven spreads. The result is “essentially grave, still music”, although with a great deal of dissonance. Baillif may have been “helped by the contemplation of the calm vastness of the St. Lawrence Estuary”, but do not expect Smetana’s Vltava (The Moldau); after all, Un Coup de Dés involves a shipwreck. Baillif’s is not the first musical homage to Mallarmé. Pierre Boulez’s Pli selon pli (“Fold on fold”) in 1957 holds that distinction, but Baillif’s is the first dedicated to Un Coup de Dés and signals several others to come.
Part of Gruppo 70, the Italian visual poetry movement, Eugenio Miccini would have been remiss not to have included an homage to Un Coup de Dés in his body of work.
This work first appeared in 1984 and has been displayed in several 21st-century exhibitions, including Robert Filliou‘s first solo exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2013. The constellation of 16,000 multicolored dice, each with all six sides bearing a single dot, delivers one of the more humorous works of homage to Un Coup de Dés. With the guarantee of a single dot, it might be thought that chance has been abolished, whichever and however many dice are rolled. The multiple sizes and colors of the dice and the varied constellations into which they might fall per installation suggest otherwise. Again, even this thought emits a throw of the dice.
As Ronat and Papp were preparing their édition mise-en-oeuvre following Mallarmé’s corrected proofs, Neil Crawford came across a copy of Robert Greer Cohn’s Mallarmé’s Masterwork, New Findings (Mouton & Co, The Hague, 1966) and was struck by its reproduction of the set of proofs sold by Pierre Berès to an American collector – the so-called Lahure proofs. Crawford, too, was determined to prepare a typographic translation of the proofs — but in English. Crawford’s choice of the Bodoni typeface as a substitute for the Didot that Mallarmé wanted can be justified on two grounds: first, the two typefaces are historically contemporaneous and inspired alike by John Baskerville’s experimentation with the contrast between letters’ thick and thin strokes; and second, even if there had been an English translation to set in 1897 or 1914, Bodoni was the more available face for English-language typesetters. Having enlarged Cohn’s reproductions to their originals’ size, Crawford undertook the daunting task of figuring out how to squeeze an English version taking up 10% more space than the French into Mallarmé’s careful layout. It would take seven years of evenings in tracing letters, translating, transcribing, adjusting, retranslating and retranscribing to generate hand-crafted layouts that could be stored away until the day that photocomposition would be sufficiently advanced to accommodate the word and character spacing necessary to follow them. Fittingly by chance encounters, Crawford was introduced in 1982 to Ian Tyson, who was planning his own livre d’artiste version. In an ironic reversal of Mallarmé’s concern that the Redon prints might undermine the typography, Tyson and Crawford were concerned that anything less than letterpress printing would not ensure the density of black on the page that would complement Tyson’s aquatints. This led to phototypesetting output as patch setting, then hand pasting according to Crawford’s layouts, and then creation of process line blocks for the relief printing in letterpress. More on Tyson and Crawford’s homage here.
Michael Lechner‘s diptych, a drawing and painting on acid-free, natural white Van Gelder paper, has some affinity with Tyson’s homage. Both oscillate between abstraction and iconography. Both allude to the computational but overlay it with sandy gradations of tint. Lechner himself writes: “by the geometrical, I trap the dream and by the dream I make fun of the geometry”.
Geraldo de Barros created his sculptural forms in the 1980s. Jogos de Dados was among the first large-scale sculptural installations paying homage to Un Coups de Dés. Haraldo and Augusto de Campos and their Noigrandes literary magazine had raised the profile of the poem over the preceding decades, and Augusto de Campos, friend to de Barros, dedicated a poem to his squares.
Mounted on wires stretched from ceiling to floor, the 55 geometric sculptural forms of de Barros’s Jogos de Dados(Games of Dice, 1980s) dominate the space, hanging in clusters facing this way and that. Close to the centre, the originating piece, Pai de Todos (Father of Them All), is a hexagon comprising 12 rhombuses, pristine in its mathematical precision, the simplicity of its black, white and grey colours, and its smooth, almost textureless expanses of Formica. — Rigby, Art Review.
Alessandro Zanella, founder of Edizioni Ampersand, asked the artist and fellow printer/publisher Vernière to join him in realizing this Italian livre d’artiste. Vernière’s abstract woodcuts capture the poem’s imagery of sea foam, shipwreck and the abyss. More on Zanella and Vernière here.
More an allusion than homage, Bernard Chiavelli’s hardcover comic book is the second of a trilogy, following its main character through adventures based on the imagined East African life of exile Arthur Rimbaud, one-time visitor to Mallarmé’s Tuesday soirées, fellow poète maudit, gun runner and Paul Verlaine’s lover. More on Chiavelli’s trilogy here.
Carol Rudyard’s homage is dual, linking Mallarmé to Marcel Duchamp, and may be the first video installation to incorporate Un Coup de Dés. In the video, the title of the poem is chanted. Perhaps recalling Picasso’s collage of newspaper text “un coup de thé”, Rudyard juxtaposes the text uncoup with the image of a goblet (une coupe), and the words le hasard appear, reproduced from a newspaper and repeatedly photocopied. Before that, the words de dés appear beside the glass, behind which is a cloth patterned in black and white squares suggesting a checkerboard or dice, and likewise the words jamais and n’abolira appear. Rudyard’s allusions are as subtle and elusive as Mallarmé’s own experiment with language in his poem as Lyn Merrington’s essay in Australian Divagations demonstrates.
Honorine Tepfer embeds her homage in paper as if taking her cue from Mallarmé’s letter to André Gide about the poem:
… le rythme d’une phrase au sujet d’un acte ou même d’un objet n’a de sens que s’il les limite et, figuré sur la papier, repris par les Lettres à l’estampe originelle, en doit rendre, malgré tout quelque chose […]. La littérature fait ainsi sa preuve: pas autre raison d’écrire sur du paper.
“… the rhythm of a sentence about an act or even an object has meaning only if imitates them and, enacted on paper, when the Letters have taken over from the original etching must convey something despite it all […]. Literature thus makes its proof: there is no other reason to write on paper.” — from Selected Letters, in Rancière’s Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren, pp. 56-57.
Tepfer’s choice of Baskerville highlights the recurring issue of honoring Mallarmé’s wish for the poem to be set in Didot.
One of the more daring of livres d’artiste. Christiane Vielle not only deploys her engravings to take Mallarmé’s poem beyond the double-page spreads he envisioned, she also does so by redistributing his text under folds and across them. In offering her re-reading of the work, Vielle offers viewers the chance for their own re-reading in opening, closing and reopening the folds to see how the poem and images enfold one another in different views.
The number of works paying homage to Un Coup de Dés in the 1990s continued the decade-on-decade increase since the 1980s. Numerous exhibitions and conferences in honor of the centennial of Mallarmé’s death closed out the decade them were:
Mallarmé, 1842-1898 : Un Destin D’écriture (Mallarmé, 1842-1898: A Destiny of Writing), curated by Yves Peyré at the Musée d’Orsay, where the pages of the poem were displayed on the exhibition room’s walls.
In keeping with D. J. Waldie’s reading of Danielle Mihram‘s analysis of the proofs of the intended Mallarmé/Vollard livre d’artiste and Waldie’s own examination of the proofs at Harvard, Young’s four woodcuts are presented separately from the text and aim to honor Mallarmé’s desire for images that are “blond and pale” in relation to the white of les blancs and the sharp black of the type. The design by Young and Felicia Rice used several cuttings of Bodoni to approximate the Firmin-Didot of the original proofs. More on the Young, Rice and Waldie volume here.
Any new livre d’artiste in homage to Un Coup de Dés naturally faces questions of quantity, placement and color of the artwork. Mallarmé’s primary concern was that they not detract from the visual imagery of the text in its careful typography and layout. In all three considerations, Ellsworth Kelly and Limited Edition Press may be honoring Ambroise Vollard’s entrepreneurial hopes more. Despite (or because of) Kelly’s minimalist associations, more is more in this leatherbound volume that runs to 97 unpaginated pages, including 11 lithographs. A double-spread of blank pages follows each recto page of text and each page of lithographs, each of which appears on a recto page. The number of prints is a balancing response to the 11 double-spread pages of the poem, but those intervening blank pages nod toward Mallarmé’s les blancs.
Mallarmé’s poem is one of many literary obsessions for Reinhold Nasshan and has yielded two works of homage: Würfelwurf and Un Coup. Both of these sculptural works are semantically subtle. The first deliberately omits the article eins (“a”). “Throw of the dice”, “dice throw” or “throwing dice” are all reasonable translations of Würfelwurf, but not “a throw of the dice”, which most German translators render as ein Würfelwurf when tackling Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés. But then Reinhold Nasshan is not translating the poem. As the subtitle indicates, he is making “a fragmentary approach”, an approximation. By truncating the poem’s title, Un Coup also projects its fragmentary approach. In its three-dimensional shape-shifting, it presents the “moment of movement itself, the transition between the throw and the impact of the dice, emerge graphically” (moment der bewegung selbst den ubergang zwischen dem werfen und dem auftreffen der wurfel, graphisch hervortreten zu lassen). More on Nasshan’s work here.
This is the second of Ian Wallace’s works inspired by Un Coup de Dés, and as he notes, it had a transformative effect:
… I did make a more assertive reference to Mallarmé’s book by photographing it at a specific page (as well as Jacques Scherer’s publication of Mallarmé’s Le Livre — his incomplete and unpublished ‘great work’ …) conspicuously inserted amongst a random collection of materials on my worktable…. I recognized that the blank pages of this poem were … an early literary equivalent to the endgame aesthetics of late modernist aesthetics of monochrome painting that I had practiced earlier in the 1960s…. and … shifted my work away from abstract monochrome painting to montage photography influenced by the linguistic aspect of conceptual art that I called the “literature of images.” — Ian Wallace in Un Coup de Dés/Writing Turned Image, curated by Sabine Folie, p.86.
Perhaps uniquely, Barry Guy’s musical homage to what he calls “a typographical symphony of words” has architectural origins. In the liner notes for its performance by the Hilliard Ensemble, Guy writes:
The choice of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés as the basis of the piece came about through studies of the conceptual buildings by the architects Richard Rogers and Peter Eisenmann respectively. Rogers’ project was for the Tomigaya exhibition space in Tokyo where modules and floors would operate like an adjustable shelving system, flexing with the needs of the inhabitants. Eisenmann’s project was the Max-Reinhardt-Haus, Berlin, which manipulates the infinite three-dimensional Moebius strip to arrive at a series of topological surfaces which form the prismatic character of the building. The conceptual link was provided by Mallarmé’s poem which transformed the idea of the ‘module’ and the Möbius strip into a dice twisting in the air.
… One of the surprising elements is Mallarmé’s very radical use of upper and lower case lettering. I set about to distil the upper case words in sequence into a new quasi-abstract text that lent itself to vocalisation. Additionally Mallarmé’s ‘landscape’ layout suggested a graphic representation of the music and its movement. The score is accordingly on one large page and portrays the rolling of the dice associated with the desired pitches, execution and text. — Barry Guy.
Guido Molinari, Continuum pour Mallarmé (1994) [Update 23 July 2024]
This work by Molinari was exhibited in 1994, but then disappeared for thirty years. It is a 48-page artist’s book and was displayed at the Guido Molinari Foundation’s exhibition Sophie Lanctôt, Mallarmé, Molinari: Mots Croisés (6 June – 25 August 2024). More on this work and Équivalence, Molinari’s later work of homage, can be found here.
Images courtesy of Fondation Guido Molinari. Photo: Michael Patten.
Over all other hommageurs of Un Coup de Dés, Joëlle Tuerlinckx has the advantage that her name originates in the Old Flemish word teerling(en)/die(dice). Perhaps in some subtle way, this has made her susceptible to the poem’s influence. In correspondence, she writes:
I like to quote ‘rien n’aura (eu) lieu que le lieu ‘. I share this perception / conception of the world and of the space-time that it induces. almost like a philosophy of life, a way of living and exhibiting. — Joëlle Tuerlinckx, 18 February 2021, correspondence with Books On Books.
Tuerlinck’s first throw of the dice in 1994 was occasioned by being asked to place a work in the exhibition’s entrance display case. With no concrete sense of the display’s place or placement of the other objects in the exhibition, she left matters to chance:
On the road when I reached Witte de With, I picked up a green cube that morning, put it in my pocket. I still had a (hard-boiled?) breakfast egg in my pocket that I hadn’t had time to eat. And on a piece of paper, in front of the window, I scribbled a point, and immediately emptied my pocket. Everything happened, as it was obvious, on demand. I marked each object with a few points at random .. by the shape of the egg and its improbability as an object to be thrown or to have a face, and with the two-dimensionality of the piece of paper each stroke was in advance both won and lost. 18 February 2021, correspondence with Books On Books.
For her second throw of the dice (2008), Tuerlinckx placed (threw?) three black undifferentiated cubes on what appears to be a geographical map but is a happenstance stain created by a puddle of evaporating tea. With no markings on the dice, there is no winning or losing, and nothing has taken place but the place marked by the dice on a chance-made map.
Scholar of typography and design, Klaus Detjen presents the poem three times in this volume: first, in French overlaid with an interpretive design, then in French and finally in German. All three instances follow the typography and layout of the first book edition of the poem as published in 1914 by Gallimard. The colored linear frames, threads and markings are allocated to the typographical motifs Mallarmé uses. Using Chinese-fold folios, Detjen carries his color diagrams across the fore-edge to highlight the reading order as he understands the syntax relayed by the typographical motifs. He also takes Mallarmé at his word about les blancs and seizes on the whiteness of the surrounding space and runs to the prismatic metaphor that the spectrum of colors is simply the decomposition of white light. More on Detjen’s homage here.
Ofer Lellouche‘s homage consists of marine plywood covered in black leather, dice embedded in the spine and stand, 9 etchings, trim size of H76 x W56 cm, and Arches 250gsm printed in 22 pt Times New Roman. The pages of text replicate those of the then-current Pléiade edition of Mallarmé’s Complete Works. Of course, the size of the work is scaled up. The replication results in the placement of “JAMAIS” and certain other phrases and a typeface not as Mallarmé designated in the proofs for the deluxe edition. It also means that page numbers appear, and it accounts for the use of Times New Roman. There is an underlying reason for the scaling up and replication. Lellouche not only wanted the scale for the display of his double-page spread prints (below) but also for the allusion to Picasso’s rumored habit of using his copy of Mallarmé’s poems as a sketchbook. Ever since his “brick wall” encounter with Un Coup de Dés and its white-on-black, black-on-white aesthetic, Lellouche has felt its influence on his art — including self-portraiture, the figurative and landscapes.
The chosen trim size foreshadows Alastair Noble’s monolithic homage Mallarmé 2000 (H96.5 x W66 cm), and the ghostly etchings foreshadow the effects achieved by Raffaella della Olga’s phosphorescent ink in Un Coup De Dés Jamais N’abolira Le Hasard – Constellation (2009). But this homage is the only one that brings the poem together with all three artistic traditions of self-portraiture, the figurative and landscapes.
Alastair Noble‘s installation work focuses on the “Comme si / Comme si” double-page spread in Un Coup de Dés. Transparent overlapping sail-like shapes angle across the words printed at an angle within two frames hung on a wall at angles to one another. Hanging at angles from the ceiling by steel cables and holding screen mesh are three frames shaped to echo the diptych’s sail-like shapes. Seen longitudinally the three hanging frames form what could be the listing hull of a ship or the pages of a book opening or closing. Across and within two and three dimensions, Noble’s multiple mastery of space honors and rivals Mallarmé’s mastery of the double-page spread. The installation first appeared at the View Gallery in New York. The diptych was later displayed in the exhibition “The Next Word” (1998) curated by Johanna Drucker at the Neuberger Museum in New York.
Valise for Mallarmé is one of several aesthetic expressions of Kathy Bruce‘s experience of the poem that “made us modern”. With this homage, she takes Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en Valise and Joseph Cornell’s boxes in an original direction and replaces their mysterious surreality with the mysteries of Un Coup de Dés and the surreality arising from chance-found objects and their juxtaposition. The Duchampian valise opens to show that it has been pressed into a Mallarméan voyage. In the deeper compartment sits a Cornellian glass-covered wooden box. It contains a red die; collage of an engraving of penguins, a spouting whale, a ship under sail against towering glaciers and a flight of birds; scraps of paper marked with Chinese ideograms and handwritten numbers and symbols; and mechanical diagrams. A reflective, smoky blue sheet surrounds the glass-covered “raft”. It is a piece of X-ray film discarded from Gramercy Hospital in New York City. The film is face down and affixed to a sheet of paper that later developed ripples. The excavated book on the shallow side of the valise is John L. Stoddard’s Lectures (Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Supplementary Vol 1). Stoddard was a prolific writer and prodigious traveller. The lecture series appeared 1897 to 1898, haply coinciding with Mallarmé’s poem and death.
Solitary Plume continues exploring Cornellian techniques with which to pay homage to Mallarmé. Cornell, too, was influenced by Mallarmé. He remarked that his boxes “are life’s experiences aesthetically expressed”, an echo of Mallarmé’s exhortation to describe not the thing but its effect. Even before it is opened, this cigar box wafts the effect of plumes of cigar smoke said to envelop Mallarmé as he held forth to the regular visitors to his Tuesday night salons. The solitary plume inside the lid poses as the “found” plume solitaire éperdue in Un Coup de Dés. In the poem, that plume solitaire is followed by the very lines printed on the edge of the triangular block of wood resting on a scrap of stiff, midnight blue material — the kind from which a cap (toque) might be made — in turn resting on a piece of crumpled velvet.
Comocíon, Contucíon, y Compresíon Cerebrales continues to reflect the influence of Joseph Cornell, but if it were viewed in any other context, we might miss that Mallarmé’s poem inspired it. The altered book’s title, difficult to make out on the spine, is Patología y clínica quirúrgicas (1873), a medical manual by Joseph-Auguste Fort, a French contemporary of Mallarmé. The manual’s shredded pages are packed around the wooden box embedded in the gutted medical manual. Inside the box, the dice can freely roll over the collaged print of ships. Among the packing at the foot of the box is a barely decipherable shred of a heading from the book that gives this work its title. How can Comocíon, Contucíon, y Compresíon Cerebrales (cerebral concussion, contusion and compression) be avoided in an altered book hanging tilted in a frame? What can protect against Chance that no roll of the dice can ever abolish or against the “bookwreck” in which the dice are embedded? What surrounds the altered book implies that they cannot. The crumpled white cloth (from the poem’s velours chiffonné) evokes not only a fallen sail but also a coffin’s lining in which the book lies.
Kathy Bruce and Alastair R. Noble, Foldings (1998)
With Foldings, Bruce and Noble joined forces. Six masked dancers wear costumes that are in effect human-size folios across which the pages of Un Coup de Dés have been printed front and back in French. As a prerecorded English translation is read by numerous voices corresponding to the changing fonts, the dancers rotate and display the lines being read. A performance was given as part of the exhibition A Painter’s Poet, held at the Leubsborf Art Gallery (Hunter College). This fell under the aegis of the Millennium Mallarmé celebrations in New York, the poster for which can be seen below overlaying the staging sketches for the performance. Later, as part of an installation under the title Navigating the Abyss (Brookdale Community College, Lincroft, New Jersey), the costumes were suspended from the ceiling along with a framed screen mesh reminiscent of Noble’s As if / As If (see above).
Update: 25 February 2023. The gallery of Dunoon-MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Scotland reprised the display of the six costumes in February-March 2023. Location: 18 Ferry Brae Dunoon PA23 7DJ. Hours: Friday & Saturday 12-5pm and by appointment.
For a more “tech-fashionable” version, scroll down to Bruce and Noble’s Digital Mallarmé (2008), a collaboration with James Cook.
Michael Graeve‘s series of paintings appeared in the group exhibition “On the ashes of the stars …” curated by Michael Graf at Monash University in Australia to explore Mallarmé’s influence on the arts. Like many of the works seen so far, Graeve’s is a multiple homage, but his is the first to include composers in a visual medium. The series distinctively pays homage to Un Coup de Dés by taking it as an intermediary to John Cage and Pierre Boulez. Graeve had found the three of them drawn together in letters between Cage and Boulez in the 1950’s. In his website, Graeve writes:
for Cage, Mallarmé’s poem was a precursor and invitation to include chance procedures and indeterminacy into compositions. Boulez on the other hand was much more concerned with the retention of compositional control, and as a result incorporated explicit choice for the performer (rather than chance) into his work. — Michael Graeve, 2003.
With images from a reprint of an early Sears Roebuck Catalogue and drawing on John M. Bennett‘s poetry as well as Un Coup de Dés, Jim Clinefelter composed his book on a borrowed Macintosh SE — the late twentieth-century substitute for penmanship. Mallarmé only thought of having some images from his friend Odilon Redon separated from the text Un Coup de Dés. Clinefelter’s sense of fun and close attention to the original led him to integrate those Sears images throughout with the text to mimic Mallarmé’s textual and typographic road signs. More on this parody here.
Denis Cohen‘s musical homage for five instruments, recorded voice and computer was commissioned for the Musée d’Orsay exhibition in 1998. The homage to Un Coup de Dés is indirect. In his notes to the composition, Cohen explains that he is using only a framework of durations derived from two verses of Un Coup de Dés (unidentified) by which another of Mallarmé’s poems is read (La chevelure/”The head of hair”). The title of Cohen’s work means both “veil” and “sail”, which is a dual meaning that Mallarmé exploits in his poetry: a veil of hair, a sail in the wind. A brief extract can be heard here.
In 1981, Imants Tillers had already begun a collective body of work known as The Book of Power, which has its roots in Mallarmé’s dictum “tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre“, variously translated as
“everything in the world exists to end up as a book”, “everything in the world exists to end up in a book”, “everything in the world exists in order to end in a book” [Susan Sontag’s version]
Tillers compiled the paintings from multiple individual canvasboards done in synthetic polymer paint and gouache. In 1998, he began to incorporate lines from Un Coup de Dés almost as a textual frame holding together the multiple canvasboards. But while the words inevitably contribute shared themes or motifs from Mallarmé’s poem, they are fully appropriated into Tillers’ own agenda, which leads in the next decade to a fruitful collaboration with Michael Nelson Jagamara.
It is a shame that no image of Mairey’s work of homage could be found for this exhibition. Fortunately, the brief catalogue for the 2003 exhibition in which it appeared has a useful description of it.
Françoise Mairey’s 1999 tribute to Un Coup de dés, like Masson’s, differs radically from Mallarmé’s original — it is compact, repetitive, and grid-like. She repeatedly typed each line of the poem until she created three-by-two-and-a-half-inch blocks of words, one block — or line — to a sheet of paper. Mairey recorded the date and place of her work at the bottom of each sheet, and she also noted the number of mistakes she made (both “evident” and “non-evident”), acknowledging the element of chance that caused her to hit the wrong key. Cheryl Hartup, Visual Poetics.
Also fortunate, but still without an image, is the entry on Mairey in The Art of Typewriting (2015):
Mairey’s masterpiece consists of 220 cards, each incorporating a repetitive word or words taken from Mallarmé’s poem. These typed cards are mounted within 20 frames of varied dimensions, each frame denoting one page of the poem. P. 334.
Mairey’s combination of the performance of creation with the artifact of creation recalls Ian Wallace’s approach in 1979 and 1993 and foreshadows that of Raffaella della Olga in 2018. Her metricizing and documenting the number of errors in the work shows an affinity with the Lettrists and Concrete Poets.
The wooden box holding this work and its transparent cubes may evoke thoughts of Joseph Cornell, but its exuberant Lettriste interior runs in a different direction entirely. It is a rare work, so Albert Dupont‘s description of it and the photos in Livre / Typographie, as well as its online presence at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, offer welcome glimpses and insights. Dupont identifies the constituent parts of the work as five transparent dice variously inscribed and loosely embedded in the spine of a box-like tray of varnished wood encasing two renditions of the poem. Dupont calls these renditions poèmes-blocs. The first replicates the Ronat/Papp edition of the poem on transparent pages. Dupont calls the second section Calme-bloc, words taken from Mallarmé’s Le tombeau d’Edgar Allan Poe:
Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur (Silent block fallen here from an obscure disaster)
Calme-bloc, also on transparent pages, consists of Dupont’s Lettrist interpretation of Un Coup de Dés, deploying type, hand-lettering, cursive script, drawings, diagrams and colors. In another layering, Dupont “revises” Mallarmé’s preface to the poem. He first prints the original, which begins famously “J’aimerais qu’on ne lût pas cette Note ou que parcourue, même on l’oubliât” (I would like this Note not to be read or, if read, to be forgotten even). Dupont alters it to “J’aimerais qu’on lût cette Note et que parcourue, même on s’en souvînt” (I would like this Note to be readand, if read, remembered even). Dupont’s re-reading/re-writing of the preface increases the chances of appreciating not only Mallarmé’s les blancs but also Dupont’s additional “unusual poetic elements, the geological or underwater transparency, les blocs“.
Unsurprisingly, Poème Bloc Poème was one of the works of homage selected for the 2003 exhibition curated by Renée Riese Hubert and Judd Hubert at the University of California-Irvine. The link above in this entry’s title leads to the WorldCat listing, from which other locations of the work can be found.
As noted at the start of this essay/exhibition, this decade boasted no fewer than five exhibitions of art paying homage to Un Coup de Dés, and its richness in works of homage continued that of the previous twenty years. It begins with two distinctly different installations.
Bill Seaman‘s installation consists of two video projectors, a Macintosh G4 computer, Red Dice software, laser disc player, electronic tablet and pen, sound system, and a desk and chair. In 2001, it was presented under the auspices of the Daniel Langlois Foundation and Cinémathèque québécoise. Jacques Perron of the Foundation writes:
By assembling different forms of expression in a “recombinant poetics,”(2) Seaman appeals to our memory, our imagination and our perceptions as we weave our own web of meanings. For not only does the participant play an active, even performative, role that is necessary for the meaning to emerge, this role also calls the notion of author into question. Like his predecessors in conceptual art, Seaman steps aside in favour of his work, leaving the greater share to the navigator.
Seaman’s work presents the text of Un Coup de Dés and his own interactive audio/visual meta-text. It involves large-scale projections, and via a Pen/Wacom tablet interface, the viewer/user can touch words with the pen and activate their vocalization. This is the first digital work of homage and a nearly prescient response to Rosemary Lloyd’s comment in the same year:
Mallarmé’s evocation, in his study entitled “Étalages”, of a “reseau de communications” may not have included the world-wide web, but he would certainly have enjoyed finding himself transformed and represented in electronic media, and may well have reformulated Un coup de dés into something more digital.
Following the installation As if / As if and performance Foldings, Alastair Noble embraced the tradition of “homage by redaction” with Mallarmé 2000, which was included in a well-reviewed installation at the Robert Pardo Gallery in New York. Arthur Danto remarks in Artforum:
The sculptor leaned six large, thick panels of glass against the wall, perching them on shelves. Deep troughs were sandblasted into the panels, corresponding to the way the lines and fragments of lines are arrayed in Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Des. The opaque troughs, from which Noble had entirely etched away any trace of language, were reflected as shadows on the wall. This almost metaphysical use of glass, with its vocabulary of transparency and translucency and its contrast between deep green edges and clear central area, manages to escape the decorativeness that dogs the medium.
In Sculpture magazine, Robert C. Morgan notes how the work signifies “the collapse of language through the cancellation of signs, the space in-between things” and comments:
The leap that Noble has taken is profoundly conceptual, yet visually exquisite….It is a revelatory exegesis on mental space and opens the threshold for how mental space can manifest itself as spatial presence through the cancellation of conventional signs,….
Like Mallarmé seeking to create a unified whole from syntactic, spatial and typographic leaps across eleven double-page spreads, Alain Satié places small paintings, collages and book-like objects into pockets in the clear plastic sheet shown. Although the items differ from one another, the arrangement of pockets impose an order. The interpolation of bien ou mal armé (“well or badly armed”) in the title of Satié’s work deftly picks up the teetering, the diffidence and indecisions in Mallarmé’s poem. In their technique, the forty items seen here allude to Satié’s corpus: body art, collage, assemblage and, above all, Lettrisme.
From www.coupdedes.com captured 05 January 2012, Wayback Machine. Accessed 16 March 2021. Permission to display, courtesy of Michel Pierson.
From www.coupdedes.com captured 05 January 2012, Wayback Machine. Accessed 16 March 2021. Permission to display, courtesy of Michel Pierson.
With the encouragement and contribution of the late Cuban Surrealist, Jorge Camacho, Michel Pierson and Denis Péraudeau undertook a limited edition to match Mallarmé’s typographic wishes. Rare as that print edition is, we are fortunate that the Wayback Machine has captured the supporting website launched in 2010. At that site, the poem can be viewed and downloaded (pdf), although Camacho’s artwork is not shown. With the earlier efforts of Neil Crawford (above) and the later ones of Alain Hurtig (below), we have three clear views of the poem set in Didot.
In the first three minutes of this extract from the film Molinari: la couleur chante (2005), Molinari walks through an exhibition of Équivalence, discussing it with Roald Nasgaard and commenting on Un coup de Dés, its visual musicality and his transformation of it into his colourful geometric abstractions. The opportunity to see all of the poem ranged along one wall and all of Molinari’s abstractions along a facing wall is a pleasure. More on this homage here.
Mutel’s appropriation of Un Coup de Dés looks forward to Sammy Engramer’s reproduction of the poem in sound waves and recalls Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s nine-voice reading in the Père Lachaise cemetery. There are three connected volumes in this work. They seem to present four speeches from George W. Bush, four from Tony Blair and the text of Un Coup de Dés — in the form of phonograms. The reality is that the images are all the same — sound waves from an unidentified man reading Mallarmé’s poem. The false visualization of the politician’s speeches implies we are no wiser to what they were saying than we are to “reading” Mallarmé’s words shown as sound waves.
Chris Edwards‘ A Fluke follows in the footsteps of several parodists of Un Coup de Dés. He mingles bilingual homophonic mistranslation with the monolingual variety, false cognates, mis-contextualization and more to deliver his “fluke”. Part of that “more” leads off with the subtitle and side-by-side prefaces. The pun in “pretext” plays out not just in the word itself but in Edwards’ squeezing into one page the French pre-text alongside its English exaggeration. The squeeze harks back to Mallarmé’s “Note” being added to the Cosmopolis issue, where it first appeared, at the insistence of the editors. Having led with the pun and clown-car layout, Edwards follows on with a fright wig (mixed metaphors, too, are part of the “more”). He turns Mallarmé’s tongue-in-cheek “I would prefer that one not read this Note or that having read it, one forgets it” into “I wish I knew what lunatic pasted this Note here — …”. Edwards’ madcapping his way to A Fluke must have been part of a global warming trend in pastiche. How else to explain Jim Clinefelter’s A Throw of the Snore Will Surge the Potatoes (1998), John Tranter’s “Desmond’s Coupé” (2006) and Rodney Graham’s Poème: Au Tatoueur (2011)? More on Edwards’ homage here.
These two works of homage run the spectra of small to large as well as three- to two-dimensions. Each one lays claim to being thething for summarizing, critiquing, parodying and paying homage to le Maître‘s work. If the game is “the total expansion of the letter”, as Mallarmé declaimed, would the dispersal of the poem’s spaces and letters across the many faces of a Rubik’s cube not be the total reduction of the letter? Or would it be the collapse of the spacing and text in its various type sizes and styles into one 70 x 100 cm double-page spread? Noury provides us with two works by which to contemplate these questions. More on Noury’s work here.
The Bedside Book Project is a quintuple homage. It begins with this anecdote:
In 1945 René Magritte gave Marcel Broodthaers a copy of Mallarmé’s poem as ‘a way of explaining his art to a young admirer without explaining it literally’. In 1969, Broodthaers modified an edition of the poem by covering all its words with black stripes that correspond directly to the typographic layout used by Mallarmé to articulate the text. In this way, Mallarmé’s poem, which Broodthaers considered had unconsciously invented modern space, is reduced to its structure.
From here, Marine Hugonnier‘s imagination takes hold. As if in a film scene, she moves into the bedrooms of Redon, Schwitters and Hamilton, steals their copies of Un Coup de Dés from their bedside tables, alters each one by inserting images and then replaces them. The result is a series of installations in which the pages of their altered books are displayed on the gallery walls. Each has its “book title”: La forme du mystère (Odilon Redon), Altération (Kurt Schwitters) and L’espace social (Richard Hamilton). Here is Hugonnier’s description of Redon’s book and the installation performance in which it is presented:
The Bedside Book Project: La forme du mystère (Odilon Redon). Source: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, displayed with permission of Marine Hugonnier.
The Bedside Book Project: Altération (Kurt Schwitters). Source: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, displayed with permission of Marine Hugonnier.
The Bedside Book Project: L’espace social No.2 (Richard Hamilton). Source: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, displayed with permission of the Marine Hugonnier.
More on this challenging and rewarding installation here.
Despite other publishers’ earlier efforts to publish an edition of the poem as Mallarmé intended it, Isabella Checcaglini, Ypsilon Éditeur’s founder and director, felt that gaps remained — specifically, first, that there was no version that included Odilon Redon’s three prints (top row below) and, second, that there was no version in Arabic (bottom row below). Checcaglini arranged with the renowned Moroccan poet Mohammed Bennis to fill the latter gap. In addition, she compiled a separate volume of essays: Bennis’ journal of translation notes and his correspondence with Checcaglini and Bernard Noël, the French writer and poet; her own essay recounting the history of Mallarmé’s uncompleted livre d’artiste with Ambroise Vollard and Odile Redon, including excerpts of correspondence among the interested parties; and Bernard Noël’s appreciation of the poem. The suite consists of four volumes: the poem in French and Arabic, the essays in French and Arabic.
This important edition should be read with Penny Florence’s book near to hand. Mallarmé, Manet and Redon insists that Un Coup de Dés must be experienced with Redon’s prints in place and shows us how to read it. Florence’s guidance has the added benefit that its example can be followed with the other works of homage in this essay exhibition.
With Navigating the Abyss, Kathy Bruce picks up the Cornellian baton again. Rigging-like thread wraps around a copy of Intermediate Reader, a relic from a series of readers compiled between 1867 and 1927 for the Brothers of the Christian Schools, headquartered in Montreal, which recalls Mallarmé’s school-teaching days. Three triangles of wood panelling are attached to the book’s back cover, a deft choice of material for the sail-like seams and shape. A glossy piece of postcard or a cut from the cover of an art book depicting a gilded hand, open as if having just rolled the dice, occupies one corner of the cover. It’s impossible to say whether it is the lower or upper, left or right, as the book has been turned upside down and back to front in its altering (note the photos above). The three loose lenses add to this effect of shipwreck detritus, as does the convex lens embedded like a porthole in the book and revealing a torn page and part of a handwritten letter presumably left in the book. Across from the convex lens, the pasted-down diagram is a scaled drawing of a template for what appears to be a rigging pulley with a diameter of 9 and 3/4 inches. The collaged precision diagram alludes not only to the ship but also to the poem’s reference to anciens calculs. It adds to the artifice and abstraction of poem, book, ship and flotsam that Bruce has created.
Kathy Bruce, James Cook and Alastair Noble, Digital Mallarmé (2008)
Mallarmé — as editor and heteronymic author of La Dernière Mode, as fellow admirer of new technologies with Octave Uzanne, and as ecstatic theorist of the dance in his essay Ballets — would surely have embraced Digital Mallarmé. Following their Foldings performance (see above), Kathy Bruce and Alastair Noble engaged with James Cook (then Chair of the 3D Division in the University of Arizona Tucson School of Art) to submit this entry for the College Art Association’s “Social Fabrics: LEONARDO Educational Forum Exhibition” in Dallas, Texas. Employing screen mesh, fabric, bamboo frame, Japanese rice paper, LCD displays, video monitors, CD player and power packs, Digital Mallarmé displays text with interpretive digital video images extracted from Un Coup de Dés. [Update, 25 February 2023:
It is curious that it took so long after Bill Seaman’s Red Dice for another digital work of homage to come along. The year before, Émile Fromet de Rosnay at the University of Victoria (Canada) mounted a web-rendering of Un Coup de Dés that enables the user to undertake the kind of syntactic and semantic tracking and re-presentation of the poem that Claude Roulet did in print with his publications in the 1940s as well as that by Klaus Detjen in his 1995 homage. Fromet de Rosnay’s and his colleagues’ work also foreshadows the digital techniques in the later works of homage by Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato, Tayyib Yavuz and Derek Beaulieu (see below).
Michael Maranda calls his work a “meditation on les blancs“, the term that Mallarmé used in his 1897 preface to Un Coup de Dés to draw attention to the blank spaces surrounding the carefully scattered lines of verse. It is also an homage to Marcel Broodthaers as much as to Mallarmé. In all of the pages that follow the preface (“translated” by Babelfish into Dutch, then into English, and then printed in black for the English and reverse-out against a cream-colored background for the French), Maranda inks around Broodthaers’ blancs with cream-colored ink. Paradoxically, Mallarmé’s text and Broodthaers’ black stripes have become blank spaces, and les blancs to which they drew attention have been printed in cream. More on Maranda’s homage here.
Michalis Pichler appropriates Mallarmé through Broodthaers’ design and production: an efficient and direct double appropriation. He follows the trim size and layout of the 1914 and 1969 works. Further underscoring the double appropriation, he reprints verbatim Broodthaers’ preface (the full text of Mallarmé’s poem set in small type as a single paragraph with obliques separating the lines of verse). Like Broodthaers, he produced limited editions of three versions: 10 copies in plexiglas (rather than Broodthaers’ 10 in anodized aluminum), 90 copies in translucent paper (just as Broodthaers had done) and 500 copies in paper (rather than Broodthaers’ 300). Where Broodthaers had solid black stripes, though, Pichler substitutes laser cuts in the translucent and paper editions and engraving or abrasion in the plexiglas edition. Hence Sculpture (2008), rather than Image (1969) or Poème (1914). In 2017, Pichler would expand on his appropriation and inventiveness (see below in the next decade). More on Pichler’s works of homage here.
Pichler’s Sculpture editions: paper, translucent and plexiglas. Photo: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Michalis Pichler.
Cerith Wyn Evans‘ 2008 homage adopts the neon medium for which he is well known. Although his 2009 work reverts to paper, it does so in a way that continues his trademark celebration of light and shadow. Of course, Evans’ version of Un Coup de Dés pays double homage to Mallarmé and his redacteurs such as Broodthaers. Rather than in book format, though, the pages are framed and hung, allowing the pebbled wall behind the excisions to show through. More on Evans’ work here.
In Rainier Lericolais‘ homage, the words and lines of Mallarmé’s poem take up their positions as perforations on a continuous paper roll used for a barrel organ or hurdy-gurdy. For a multidisciplinary artist and musician, Lericolais’ choice of medium here is highly appropriate, as is the choice of Mallarmé’s poem for an artist in pursuit of “grasping the elusive“. The work is now in the permanent collection at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou.
Six years after Raffaella della Olga created this homage, Paulo Pires do Vale included it in the “Pliure” exhibition at the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris. An attendant ushers the visitor into a small enclosed area where a white volume is propped on a stand. The attendant moves behind the book, the small room begins to darken, and the attendant begins to turn the pages. Phosphorescent ink painted on each letter of the poem begins to glow, and the words emerge like stars in a constellation. More on della Olga’s work here.
Jérémie Bennequin argues in the preface to his multi-volume boxed work that Un Coup de Dés does not abolish chance but rather enhances, elevates, ennobles it, and he poses the two questions that initiated his homage. The first is Or, le hasard peut-il abolir Un Coup de Dés? (So, can chance abolish Un Coup de Dés?) He argues that, being an artist of the eraser, he is well-suited to erasing or abolishing Mallarmé’s work, and that rolling the die to direct his act of erasure or abolition is fitting. But then comes his second crucial question: … comment définir au juste, dans le détail, la cible de chaque coup? (how to define in detail the target of each throw?)
After considering such targets as the letter, the word, the page, the double-page spread, Bennequin settles on the syllable for reasons reflecting Mallarmé’s own theories of poetry and music. Booklet 1.0 represents the starting point displaying the poem in its entirety, with the next volume 1.1 being the outcome of the end of a live performance on 23 October 2009, which involved Bennequin decomposing Mallarmé’s poem by repeatedly rolling a die then locating, vocalising and erasing the syllable corresponding to the number rolled. This occurred on computer screen in real time. With each of the subsequent eighteen performances, the starting point was the state arrived at in the preceding booklet; 1.2 began with 1.1, 1.3 with 1.2 and so on. By the last performance, very little — but something — of Un Coup de Dés was left. So Bennequin has the answer to his first question. As he puts it in the last sentence of his preface: Le hasard jamais n’abolira Un Coup de Dés (Chance will never abolish Un Coup de Dés). More on Bennequin’s homage here.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from Jérémie Bennequin.
Where Fraenkel, Diacono and Broodthaers gave us images of the text covered up, and where Evans, Lericolais and Pichler gave us images and planes of the text excised, Sammy Engramer presents us with sonograms — visualizations of the text being read aloud. Superficially, Engramer’s work might be considered an homage to these other homage. Unlike them, however, the text is still there, not blotted out or cut out, and yet, the visualization is not readable. Theoretically, one might scan the printed sonograms and generate a mechanical reading-aloud of the text, but that’s another artwork to be read. More on Engramer’s homage here.
Michalis Pichler‘s Musique version of Un Coup de Dés had its visual precursor in Rainier Lericolais’ Carton Perforé, but as a working mechanical homage, it is without precedent. In the next decade, in Pichler’s Milan solo exhibition appropriating Broodthaers’ Antwerp exhibition, visitors were allowed a “feet-on” encounter with the piece. More on Pichler’s works of homage here.
The number of works in this period almost doubles that in the previous decade, which is reflected in Michalis Pichler’s 2017 exhibition that expanded his appropriation of Broodthaers’ appropriation of Mallarmé. Not only did the exhibition include his Sculpture version of Broodthaers’ Image version of Un Coup de Dés and appropriate the title of Broodthaers’ exhibition that introduced the Image version, it also included appropriations from a dozen or so other artists. Among them was Sammy Engramer’s Wave (2009), but in 2010, Engramer held his own exhibition expanding Wave from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional as well as adding an animation.
For this exhibition, Engramer prepared eighteen 3D PVC renderings of the sonograms and a large-scale animation of a rolling die. In one room, the pages from Wave ranged along the wall. In a hall-like room with the animation projected on the endwall, the PVC renderings occupied the walls leading to the die at the end. As tangible as the PVC renderings are — sounds made palpable — we are now more removed from the text than we were with the haptic book of printed sonograms. Where, with les blancs and the shape of the page, Mallarmé was addressing a crisis of language and representation in the face of chance and nothingness, Engramer amplifies the address with these visual, physical and multimedia renderings or transformations of Mallarmé’s entire poem. More on Engramer’s homage here.
Images and permission to display, courtesy of Sammy Engramer.
On Raffella della Olga’s website, there is a link behind the image that goes to an online presentation. The image, however, is of a unique, analogue work. The artist has taken apart a Gallimard edition of the work, folded the double pages and deleted with white paint all of the poem except each of the words from its title. A close look at the framed pages will detect the faint shadows of the painted-over text. On the wall, the permutation arises in the changeable order of hanging, which the online algorithm permits the viewer to perform.
The photo in question is the 78th among 81 photos that mirror and document an installation exhibited by Alexandra Leykauf at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2010. In the photo, a double-page spread has been removed from a book, folded and creased into a three-dimensional shape. Or perhaps, as hinted in the interview at the end of the book, it is an enlarged re-creation staged for the photo. The catalogue provides no caption for it or any other image. The text concluding the catalogue does not clarify what it is. Only for someone familiar with Marcel Broodthaers’ homage to Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard are the pages recognizable. More on
Given that the first “intermedial” response to Mallarmé’s poem was Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929), and given the performative homage of Art et Action, Strauss and Huillet, and Bruce and Noble, how much of a stretch for the poem’s influence can it be to inspire an opera for two sopranos, mezzo-soprano, six dancers, orchestra, live electronics, and live video? John King describes his work as “a chance-determined opera, where order, duration, spacing of each vocal part, all orchestral parts, dance fragments, order, spacing and duration are all chance determined TWICE, once for the first ‘act’ (30 minutes) which is followed by an entr’acte of 5 minutes, followed by a separately chance-determined second ‘act’ of 30 minutes duration”. The link above goes to a roughly 8-minute segment of the full version as presented by CalArts. The opera had its world premiere at his alma mater the California Institute of the Arts. Reviews here.
As with many of the homage to Un Coup de Dés, the subtitle here matters. Being in quotation marks, Rodney Graham‘s subtitle indicates that what follows is a missive, not a form. The missive addressed to a local tattoo artist was arranged à la Mallarmé and described an image of Popeye that Graham wanted. But the twist that makes Graham’s version work is the translation of the instructions into French and their publication in the 1913 format of Mallarmé’s poem. This is an intricate “set-up”. In a way, it is analogous to Mallarmé’s careful attention to the positioning of words and lines, the kind of mise-en-scène that characterizes much of Graham’s photography and painting. More on Graham’s homage here.
This is the third of Ian Wallace’s works of homage to Un Coup de Dés. On each canvas, the rectangles of pastels and white that overlap one another like working papers on a desk surround a photo displaying a work surface in the artist’s studio. This could be Wallace’s version of Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu (Nothing will have taken place except the place). For Wallace, the “place” that is central to so many of his works is the site of creation — the paradoxical place where nothing will have taken place except the place of creating, which is also the creation (work of art) that we are viewing.
Ruth Loos and Frouke Hermens, “Eye Drawings” (2011)
Under the guidance of Professor Johan Wagemans at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven, Frouke Hermens and Ruth Loos created this animation to show captured eye-movements evoked by the features of the fourth page of the poem. Nature may not proceed by leaps, but in reading, the eye moves by leaps only, called saccades. The white line in the animation tracks side-to-side movements, the blue dot tracks ones up and down. In her article on the experiment, Loos declines to call the results of the animation an artwork, even though it was displayed in the Nottebohm Room of the Library Hendrik Conscience in Antwerp (6 August to 11 September 2011) positioned between the 1914 edition and Broodthaers’ “redacted” version. But why not? Compare and contrast this animation with Donnachie and Simionato’s work below.
Daniela Deeg in Germany and Cynthia Lollis in the US use pairs of Dutch, French, German, and/or English words printed on translucent paper illustrated with flat screenprinted simplified versions of photographs to address a core challenge that Mallarmé faces in his poem: in the presence of chance, how is language — the essential act of creativity — possible?
In Deeg’s and Hollis’ work, the pairs of words are synonyms. But, they ask, are they the same? Given how language is laden with connotations, can a word in one language really represent what a word in another language represents? And, if direct translation from one language to another is not possible, can language directly translate experience? More on this work here.
Jorge Méndez Blake’s originality in the homage Mallarmé Library arrives through multiple juxtapositions: the idea of the poem’s shipwreck with the resinous burnt detritus on the table; the detritus with the book-shaped rectangular blocks on the table; the flotsam and floating books in the print on the wall; the two-dimensional prints with the three-dimensional blocks; the black rectangular blocks with the idea of Marcel Broodthaers’ black redactions in his homage or appropriation.
Appropriation is very much a theme in 2011 exhibition and the other two works. The title Du fond d’un naufrage (From the bottom of a shipwreck) is lifted from Un Coup de Dés, and the artist has placed a copy of the poet’s Collected Poems and Other Verse on the floor, spine out as if on a shelf and squeezed tightly between two columns of bricks. Using the poem’s final line for the title of Toute Pensée Émet un Coup de Dés (All thought emits a throw of the dice), the artist reproduces with colored pencil nine classic shipwreck scenes and tilts them in their frames, thus paying homage to Mallarmé’s use of layout to evoke the image of a foundering ship. More on Méndez Blake’s works here.
Brian Larosche‘s oversized version of Un Coup de Dés requires the intervention of 3D glasses. Its large black cover suggests a dark movie screen on which Larosche’s version of the poem will play out in 3D. But why 3D? Trying to read Un Coup de Dés while wearing a pair of 3D glasses challenges the eyes’ patience just as much as the poem’s ambiguities challenge the mind’s. Within the Coup de Dés genre, there is a necessary strain of strained humor. Without it, art runs the risk of taking us too seriously. More on Larosche’s analglyphic slapstick here.
Little information has emerged about this artist or her work that arrived in a shipment from a dealer based in Italy. He seemed to recall that she was young and at a table of her own at an exhibition in … was it Barcelona or Madrid? There is only the artist’s signature at the end of the work and an indication that it is the sixth of six copies. The dealer remembers that each of the six varied due to their handmade nature. Without a date, in which decade in this exhibition does it belong? With its three tipped-in pages inside a double-sided accordion structure, with their mix of laser-cut and printed text, with the bright collage of abstract and figurative images, the work speaks for itself. The cuts place it among the “works of homage by redaction”, for example, Bennequin (2009), Nash (2012) or Lorand (2015), but it comes after the adoption of laser cutting in artists’ books, for example, that by Pichler (2017). Its bright colors place it among the bursts of color from Deeg and Hollis (2011), Méndez Blake (2011) and Larosche (2012).
Richard Nash‘s manipulation of Daler-Rowney 180gsm Jet Black Canford paper into this concertina of inverted silhouettes of Broodthaers’ redactions proves that originality in paying homage to Mallarmé and his redacteurs has not been exhausted. Nash has converted Mallarmé’s les blancs into the night sky against which the excision of Broodthaers’ redactions enacts a constellation — just as the poet implies the words will do. The concertina structure introduces an enhancing movement to Mallarmé’s double-page spreads that mimics both the rise and fall of waves and the transit of stars at night. Nash has wed simplicity to Mallarmé’s complexity and the redacteurs’ abstraction.
In the previous decade, Aurélie Noury collapsed all of the poem’s text inventively into a poster-size double-page spread. Here, for his homage in book form, Hurtig displays his originality by avoiding the red-bordered NrF cover and collapsing all of the text into a single-page text block for his cover. In addition to his freely downloadable version of the poem, Hurtig insightfully provides side-by-side views of different versions of Bodoni and views of a page of the poem set in three different typefaces that he considered as substitutes. Hurtig’s essay stands well in comparison with Robert Massin’s in Livre / Typologie, edited by Hélène Campaignolle-Catel et al.
Not entirely an homage to Un Coup de Dés, Johanna Drucker‘s work nevertheless hits the bull’s eye with “Constellationary living / language” and “MOOmeNTARY CoNsTeLLaTiOn” on its unnumbered pages 27 and 40. In the midst of a scattering of words and letters that make Un Coup de Dés look staid, Drucker’s two phrases could not more clearly evoke Mallarmé’s lines “Nothing will have taken place except the place… except perhaps a constellation”. Once the connection with Un Coup de Dés is detected, the etched aluminum cover shown on the left below will recall Broodthaers’ anodized pages photographed by Charles Bernstein (see above). While these sparks of recognition between Drucker’s and Mallarmé’s poems may be feeble for some, this brief passage from one of her essays may add wattage:
Another set of three phrases “Except” “Perhaps” and “A Constellation” form a typographic group. Indeed, they express the crucial exception to the terms of abyss and dissolution, scattering and fragmentation, …. Redescribed in the smaller roman font as features incidentally created through “obliquity” and “declination” –- astronomical terms -– that are reinforced by invocation of the “Septentrion” or Big Dipper, and the north star …. The final line, “All thought expresses a throw of the dice,” recapitulates the theme of the whole work, showing that thought as well as language is caught in the probabilistic system between chance and constellationary form. — Drucker, 2011, pp. 12-13.
Jérémie Bennequin‘s second homage to Un Coup de Dés literally picks up where the first left off. In his preface to the first homage, its last sentence is Le hasard jamais n’abolira Un Coup de Dés (Chance will never abolish Un Coup de Dés). The inversion of Mallarmé’s title is a signal of further inversions to come, and that subtitle OMAGE is a signal within the signal. Recall that Broodthaers replaced Mallarmé’s subtitle Poème with Image; now open Bennequin’s Omage to find Mallarmé’s words reappearing, albeit inverted and reversed out, against Broodthaers’ black bars of redaction. Further inversions are revealed here.
William G. Franklin‘s “video reverie” begins with a video clip of an indistinct vessel on the ocean, then comes the sound of dice being shaken and then suddenly comes the view and sound of dice striking a wall, coming to rest on a gray surface that begins to undulate. As the dice “roll” with the surface, another clip suddenly comes into view — a rain-swept road seen through a windshield — only to be displaced with another throw of the dice against the wall and again their undulating on the gray surface — only to be displaced by a video clip of a bronze statue of a dog or wolf in a city garden — only to be displaced with another throw of the dice … and so on for six minutes. The external-world clips range around the globe — as if everything in the world exists to wind up between the dice throws of this video reverie.
This installation takes its title from Kathy Bruce’s 2008 homage (see above) and was featured in the exhibition Tracking the Cosmos,Simons Center Gallery, Stony Brook University, Long Island, New York. Expanding on the wooden block in Solitary Plume (1998), Bruce has distributed all of the lines of Un Coup de Dés across the planes and edges of dozens of wooden blocks of various shapes. Walking along the trestle table, a viewer could read the entire poem and be reminded by the planes, edges and entire blocks covered with astronomical maps what is taking place is “perhaps a constellation”. More on Bruce’s works of homage here.
Jean-Jacques Birgé‘s homage is a series of improvisatory performances driven by cards drawn by the audience from Oblique Strategies, the creativity deck designed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Each card in the deck offers an axiom, question, instruction or simply a word — “Discard an axiom”; “Honor thy error as a hidden intention”; “What are the sections sections of?”; “Reverse”. In the throes of recording, painting or improv, draw a card and act on it.
The performance below includes Birgitte Lyregaard and Linda Edsjö and Jean-Jacques Birgé. Other performances with Pascal Contet and Antonin-Tri Hoang available here and with Médéric Collignon and Julien Desprez here.
Jeff Clark has designed this book for a dramatic entrance: eleven double-page spreads presenting in large type the English title (interrupted with a full-bleed double-page spread of random-light burst-mode photographs of black-and-white laserprints) followed by Mallarmé’s name in equally large type. The words in all caps Helvetica type bounce across the pages like dice, or rise and fall like waves.
Both the English and French versions of the preface and poem occur without interruption by images (as Mallarmé would have wished) and in the layout implied by Mallarmé’s mark up of proofs before his death. Their relatively plain sailing, contrasted with the book’s dramatic opening, actually draws attention to the disruptive and groundbreaking nature of the poem’s intended layout and variations in typography.
The dramatic opening of double-page spreads returns at the end of the English version. Four spreads of undulating photographs of the seabed separate it from the French version. The spreads begin with a blow-up shot of seaweed or coracle and encrusted wreckage, then back off to a slightly longer shot in the next two spreads and return to a blow-up in the fourth spread. Although these are stills, their manipulation over the pages conveys a sense of underwater movement. Four more double-page spreads conclude the book with photographs so blown-up and darkening that they leave the reader/viewer wondering if the phosphorescent underwater world has metamorphosed into a constellation. Bononno and Clark’s edition was well-reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more on this homage can be found here.
At first glance, Michel Lorand’s Après Un Coup de Dés (2015) appears to replicate the approaches of Michalis Pichler and Cerith Wyn Evans in the previous decade. Look closer though. Après presents as an unfinished work, a book not yet trimmed and bound, which reflects not only Mallarmé’s unfinished realization of the poem as a book but also his unfinished life’s pursuit: le Livre, the thing in which everything in the world would end up — the thing that, by virtue of a spacious mobility of typographic layout and the interplay of its elements, would be “the total expansion of the letter”. Lorand’s attention and manual precision in excising the blackened blocks where the text would otherwise appear also evoke Mallarmé’s attention to the minute details of typeface, size and font shown in his handwritten mark-up of the proofs for the book edition he was planning before he died. More on Lorand’s homage here.
Although Penny Florence released an interactive CD ROM celebrating Un Coup de Dés in 2000, it is curious that it took so long for a digital work of homage to validate Rosemary Lloyd’s comment in 2000:
Mallarmé’s evocation, in his study entitled “Étalages”, of a “reseau de communications” may not have included the world-wide web, but he would certainly have enjoyed finding himself transformed and represented in electronic media, and may well have reformulated Un coup de dés into something more digital.
Together, Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato and, separately, Tayyib Yavuz delivered on the potential at the same time. Because of the proliferation of works of homage, Donnachie and Simionato wondered whether the poem contains some sort of self-propagating seed. After analyzing the poem’s layout and type styles with geospatial statistical tools, they built an algorithm that served up its double-page spreads, then reordered them according to throws of two die, and redistributed the poem’s text from its original order into the new order of spreads. While the results were interesting in an Oulipo-esque way, their breakthrough came in hitching up the algorithm to Google’s reCAPTCHA system.
The reCAPTCHA system is a version of the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) system. To thwart unauthorized access by mechanical means, CAPTCHA presents distorted characters that a human can recognize but Optical Character Recognition systems cannot. A part of the the Google book-scanning project, reCAPTCHA used crowdsourcing to train its scanning system.
Now instead of using Mallarmé’s text to repopulate their algorithmically generated series of Mallarméan double-page spreads, they asked reCAPTCHA to supply words that would resist parsing or semantic understanding by computers. As Donnachie and Simionato put it, “In this way, A Throw of the Dice becomes a recombinatorial, recursive, self-productive machine capable of making and unmaking meaning across both Mallarmé’s cryptic ‘unfinal’ book of poetry and Google’s book project, each meeting points of the book a century apart.”
Tayyib Yavuz‘s digital artwork also follows the premise of the book as an autonomous and autocratic object rather than just a container for plain text. Using the game engine Unity3D, Yavuz animates the poem in a 3D virtual reality.
As the application opens, the viewer sees black dice floating upwards (or perhaps the viewer is floating downwards). Behind the dice and in the background is the black-on-white text of the poem, curving as if printed on the inside of a sphere. Broken beams like a ship’s hull come into sight above and around the falling viewer, and the viewer lands on a walkway leading to stairs ascending to the single dot on the ever-enlarging face on one of the black die. The animation carries the viewer forward up the stairs; into and through the dot, which has a swirling, watery appearance; and into a blackness shaped like the single dot. The blackness suddenly disappears, and the viewer sees a red curtain with the text of the poem’s title page on it; the curtain flutters and floats against a completely white background. As the curtain moves along an axis toward the viewer, expands, fills the screen and, seemingly, passes around and behind the viewer, the first page of the Préface comes into view in the distance, moving toward the viewer. When the first page “passes through” the viewer, and the second page appears in the distance, the white background that was above, below and to either side of the first page disappears. Blackness fills the space on the left and right. Overhead and underfoot (as it were), two white scrolls with blurry text roll past. Approaching in the distance are the pages of the poem, ranked one behind another. Yet, each page consists only of its lines of text as blocks floating in space.
Using the cursor — much as in Google’s Street View map — the viewer can move 360º “inside the poem”. As the pages continue to move along their axis, the viewer can see the edges of the blocks as they pass by. If the viewer rotates the perspective with the cursor by 180º along that axis, the pages reverse their direction of movement, and the blocks of text move away from the viewer. The viewer can also look 180º up and down. The scrolls unrolling overhead and underfoot are, in fact, the poem. For a peek at LE MAÎTRE with the dice in his hand, go back to the application’s start and look straight up.
James Reynolds describes the work as “a scenario for narrator, cello, percussion and trumpet”. It was commissioned by the Sydney Conservatory of Music and premiered there on 5 September 2017.
Reynolds’ choice of the word “narrator” and his description of the narrator as a “non-participant” in the story he or she is relating in a calm demeanor are interesting. In his preface and correspondence, Mallarmé downplays any intended narrative line, but when discussing the performance of the long-intended Livre, he describes a role that aligns with the one Reynolds assigns.
The music does not attempt to relate to the imagery of the poem. My goal in writing the scenario was not simply to provide a musical accompaniment, but rather through the use of suggestion, allusion and ambiguity to explore simultaneous and sequential moments rather than goal orientated event progressions.
Son of Giorgio Maffei (bookseller, curator, scholar and book artist in his own right), Giulio Maffei has made video catalogues for Studio Bibliografico Giorgio Maffei since 2015. In this twenty-sixth outing, Maffei has created a video that morphs the 1914 edition into Broodthaers’ 1969 Image version of Un Coup de Dés.
Within a project developed in cooperation with Belugoa Z/B, this performative homage promised a three-way conversation in two parts between dancer Israel Galván, artist Pedro G. Romero and graphic designer Filiep Tacq “in which Israel Galván will act, dance, what he says, his way of speaking. Minutes before this, Pedro G. Romero and Filiep Tacq will try to explain the performance; they will give clues and hone in, and maybe help with the reading of the movements to come; they will fail, gloriously, in their attempt to translate the gestures, music and silences of Israel Galván into a book, a text, a way of speaking.” Unfortunately, no video recording of the homage has been posted, but additional images can be found at Museo Reina Sofía.
Una tirada de dados…, Israel Galván, Pedro G. Romero and Filiep Tacq. At Playground, November 2016. Photos: Joeri Thiry / STUK. Displayed with permission of Joeri Thiry and Israel Galván.
Serge Chamchinov, Le Hasard à l’Infini (2016)
Serge Chamchinov has been inspired by Un Coup de Dés repeatedly. His Le Hasard à l’Infini, a unique work, was featured in a special issue of Ligature: revue critique du livre d’artiste, which also devoted space to Odile Redon, Ernest Fraenkel, Mario Diacono and Marcel Broodthaers. Although several artists have seized on the poem’s dice for allusion, Chamchinov has elevated and placed them central to his visual and material homage. The black box contains a suite of books whose titles and imagery play on the face of the die and chance.
This homage originated with an article by David Dernie, “Elevating Mallarmé’s Shipwreck” in Buildings (Vol. 3, 2013). As an architect and visual artist, Dernie writes about and demonstrates collage as a means to explore spatial ideas. Here, his use of the practice of drawing-as-research, the spatiality of drawing and the nature of paper inspired this collaborative homage with the writer Olivia Laing. More on Shipwreckhere.
Organized with Kunstverein Milano and hosted by Il Lazzaretto, this exhibition included the three variants of Pichler’s Sculpture version of Un Coup de Dés as well as the Musique version. Pichler also brought together numerous “editions of Mallarmé’s chef d’oeuvre as well as many of its historical and contemporary editions and appropriations by other authors such as Jérémie Bennequin, Bernard Chiavelli, Jim Clinefelter, Mario Diacono, Sammy Engramer, Cerith Wyn Evans, Ernest Fraenkel, Elsworth Kelly, Michael Maranda, Guido Molinari, Aurélie Noury and Eric Zboya…. [and] a variety of publications (backgammon tutorials, pulp fiction, and militaria books) that feature the phrase ‘Coup de Dés’ on the cover without explicitly referring to Mallarmé”. Pichler’s effort celebrates almost every metaphor and material aspect of Un Coup de Dés that could be extracted. The exhibition video demonstrates the musical version, as does this separate video. More on Pichler’s works of homage here.
This permanent sidewalk at Fundación Proa Buenos Aires, Argentina, may be the only large-scale installation homage to Un Coup de Dés. Like Christiane Vielle’s earlier homage, this one departs from the double-page spread. Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan, however, must accommodate a rather different gutter as well as the external limits and punctuation of a crosswalk and bollards.
Derek Beaulieu‘s back-to-back works of homage present an unusual phenomenon: the digital preceding the analog. In 2013, a text editor appeared, called BodySearches/PoetryMachine. In 2016, it was introduced as 3D Poetry Editor at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. Below Beaulieu has applied 3D Poetry Editor to Un Coup de Dés. Or is it, Beaulieu below has applied Un Coup de Dés to 3D Poetry Editor? Any one snapshot of the shifting tides of Beaulieu’s rendition would recall Aurélie Noury’s poster (see above). It is precisely the shifting-tide effect that makes Mallarmé’s poem and 3D Poetry Editor a perfect match.
3D Poetry Editor credits: Michiel Koelink, David Jonas, Jon Ståle Ritland and Michael Hambleton.
Tattered Sails provides a wordless, expressive analog homage to Mallarmé’s poem while also alluding to Broodthaers and other more linear redacteurs. Tattered Sails refreshes perception — of the work in itself and those on whose metaphors and techniques it stands. Turning our eyes into hands, it is part of a book art genre — “a genre of Un Coup de Dés” — in which works not only recall the original’s words, their shapes on the pages, the shipwreck tangling and untangling of syntax, the images and meanings bouncing into view like numbers on the side of rolling dice but also recall the rolls of the dice by others before.More on Tattered Sailshere.
Eric Zboya‘s book is one of the several tours de force among the works of homage to Un Coup de Dés. Zboya uses graphic imaging software to transform each letter, mark of punctuation and pixel into an abstract image based upon the original topographical placement of the type on the space of the page. Text mutates into a graphic, nonlinear entity. Zboya calls this “Algorithmic Translation”.Due to a randomization function, the program never yields the same image from the same input. In keeping both with the title (Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard) and the poem’s last line (Toute pensée émet un Coup de Dés), no run of the program ever abolishes chance, and every input (thought) generates a roll of the dice. More on Zboya’s intricate work here.
Zboya has also published Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard: Translations in Higher Dimensions (Visual Writing 003, Ubu Editions, 2011), which includes a transliteration of Un Coup de Dés in the 3D alphabet Univers Revolved designed by Ji Lee as well as the pages from his own algorithmic visual translation.
Nicolas Guyot’s livre d’artiste sits self-assuredly in a long line of works inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal 1897 poem Un Coup de Dés. Unlike Ellsworth Kelly (1992) but like Christiane Vielle (1989) and others, Guyot integrates his images with the text. In print technique, his silver bromide echoes the silver gelatine of Ian Wallace (1979), but Guyot’s unique cover prints and hand binding distinguish his work from any other in the long line. His technique and layout evoke a feeling of the late 19th century, the contemporary images respond creatively to the original poem’s own cryptic imagery, and altogether the effect is a simultaneity across time, poet and artist. More on Guyot’s homage here.
Raffaella della Olga refers to this work as a tapuscrit. Typewritten on tracing paper with fabric and carbon paper, and measuring H32 × W50 cm, Trame echoes Un Coup de Dés materially and linguistically — without any words except for its title. Trame is the plural of trama in Italian, meaning plot, storyline or frame, weft, warp and texture. Even though Mallarmé disavowed any narrative or storyline in Un Coup de Dés, he avowed the alignment of the typographical layout with events and images in the poem. The hazy result of repeated keystrokes on tracing paper aligns with the elusiveness of Mallarmé’s text while still emphasizing the frame of the typographical layout. The strokes look like stitches in sail fabric, suggesting the weaving in and out of Mallarmé’s typographical motifs. It is as if dell Olga were adhering to Mallarmé’s dictum peindre non la chose mais l’effet qu’elle produit (“to depict not the object but the effect the object produces”). More on della Olga’s work here.
Bernadette O’Toole follows in a long line of distinguished “serial hommageurs”: Ian Wallace, Jérémie Bennequin, Marcel Broodthaers, Kathy Bruce, Marine Hugonnier, Jorge Méndez Blake, Alastair Noble, Michalis Pichler, Raffaella della Olga and Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Like many of them, she extends her work across multiple media. Like all of them, she is driven by the metaphysics and motifs expressed in Un Coup de Dés.
The book Variant Sail contains reproductions of twelve digital prints (H38 x W57 cm, four displayed with the book cover below) created by scanning and digitally manipulating each of the double-page spreads of Un Coup de Dés in Photoshop to produce twelve variants, each foregrounding the gutter in a different way. The prints in turn inspired paintings (same dimensions) that are reproduced in a second book As If. Mallarmé’s poem in translation supplies the titles of both books, but what matters equally is the repeated pattern of two words. Two recalls the double-page spread and is a factor of twelve, recalling the Alexandrine of French poetry as well as two faces on a die.
In another version of Variant Sail, O’Toole incorporates an inventive sculptural work that she calls a “gesture”. In a black presentation box, a translation of Un Coup de Dés rests beside a small painted gesture, oil on plaster. Here is her description of the process by which a gesture is created:
The process of making the work involved tracing my brush-stroke into a bed of clay, pushing into the surface which proved resistant at first. Plaster was poured into the indent, casting the absent gesture [brush-mark]. Once the form had set, I separated it from the bed of clay and took hold of the object. The absent gesture [brush-mark] had become embodied. The form was simultaneously liberated from the mould, and from the limitation of the painting surface. It was cast out, recalling the Japanese practice known as, ‘flung-ink’, which Norman Bryson observes is ‘thrown’ as one throws dice. — Interview with Josie Jenkins, 22 November 2020.
A Rare State consists of 12 booklets (H38 x W57 cm), each with its own cover and title. Each encloses 12 loose interchangeable folios. Each captures images from different performative readings (by the artist) of Un Coup de Dés or from animated patterns of marks and numbers appearing and disappearing. Some of the patterns occupy the positions of Mallarmé’s text on his double-page spreads. Others appear in sequences of 1-6 within a square or diamond suggesting the face of a die.
Like Variant Sail and As If but on a wider scale and, perhaps, more intricately, A Rare State expands on the idea of a numerical or mathematical principle at play — be it 1-6 on the face of a die, the 12 syllables of the Alexandrine that the poem explodes, the 2 of the double-page spread as a factor of 12, or the 4 triangles across the double-page spread above as another factor of 12. More here on these works.
When Benjamin Lord takes the predicate of Mallarmé’s title (“abolish chance”) and elevates it to the main title, substitutes the word “sequence” for the subtitle Poéme, and places it all in a cover layout reminiscent of the 1913 NRF edition of Mallarmé’s book, he raises expectations and questions. Perhaps chance can be abolished? Perhaps by a certain sequence — of words?
Bowling over the textual expectations raised by the cover, the interior pages offer only images — images that gradually shift from linearly arranged black rectangles to what seem to be digitally generated Rorschach tests, shifting QR codes or snapshots of a bitmap computer game, all blurred by the turning of the translucent paper. The translucency and images add another layer to each page and double-spread of images and also add another set of expectations and questions. What determined the starting point of those arranged rectangles? What drives the sequence of their change?
Without Lord’s own description of the work, a highly developed form of art-historical, science-historical visual genius is required to answer those questions. A genius able to recognize that thefirst spread of Lord’s book copies the last spread of Marcel Broodthaer’s Image version. A genius able to recognize that the sequence is “generated using a simple mathematical formula known as the Game of Life, originally devised by the mathematician John Conway, also in the year 1969.” More on Lord’s homage here.
In Sylvain Moore‘s video, the words and lines of the poem appear and disappear at varying speeds in white against a completely black screen. Sometimes they wax into view placed where Mallarmé intended; sometimes they move across the screen into position. Moore realized three Coup de Dés, each following the variation in layout of the print editions consulted. There is no delineation on screen marking the gutter, but the positioning of the fragments indicates that the Troisième Coup de Dés is based on an edition following the prospect of the double-page spread.
Each waxing and waning of text is accompanied by Tristan Murail’s Bois flotté (1996), written for trombone, string trio, piano and synthesized sounds played live on a MIDI keyboard. The interval between the disappearance and reappearance of text is timed to coincide with silences in the score. It is not only the music’s structure that makes Moore’s choice so appropriate; it is also its title referring to wood washed ashore. Like all of the musical homage before it, Troisième Coup de Dés is spurred by Mallarmé’s comparison in its Préface of the poem to a symphony. Its twofold significant difference from many of them, though, lies in the absence of vocalization and the challenge to remember the disappearing words and lines and their relation to one another within the poem’s disjointed syntax. The screen’s blackness has taken the place of the white spaces (les blancs); the bright letters have taken their place in a moving constellation.
The ingenuity and organization of Guillaume Theulière‘s curation suggests the exhibition as another genre of homage to be considered. And how fitting that Par Hasard occurred on the cusp of two decades as if to look backward and forward simultaneously. This extensive exhibition held in Marseilles at La Friche la Belle de Mai did not restrict itself to works of homage but rather took the poem as a starting point for its Alexandrine of 12 themes by which its 50 artists were selected and organized. Alongside only two of our hommageurs (Bennequin and Filliou), Theulière placed John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (best of thirty six attempts ) (1973), Sophie Calle’s Suite vénitienne (1980), and 45 others.
Par hasard à la Friche la Belle de Mai – Marseille – Vue de l’exposition. Curated by Guillaume Theulière. Images and permission to display, courtesy of Guillaume Theulière. The work featured in the middle image is Adrien Vescovi’s Infusions (2019); in the right-hand image, Virginie Sanna’s Cubes de 10 (2015-2019).
Only thirteen copies of this work were produced. To examine it in person would likely not be by chance. Fortunately, the artists have provided some images for online viewing, and the colophon helpfully reminds us of the pandemic situation from 2019 to 2022 challenging any form of collaboration. As the images show and the colophon points out, the pandemic was not the only contributor to chaos.
The sheets in Aleatoric Collaborations were overprinted purposefully from work produced (all Journal of Artists’ Books related) on the Heidelberg GTO offset press by Brad Freeman at the Center for Book and Paper / Columbia College Chicago from 2014 to 2019. The text on Asuka kozo was written by Johanna Drucker– responding to our difficult times and inspired by Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé. The font on the Asuka kozo is Agenda. This book was bound by Brad Freeman in April/May 2020 during the time of COVID-19. The artists and writers are Isabel Baraona, Johanna Drucker, Brad Freeman, Yukie Kobayashi, Jen Kornder, Tom Sowden, Debra Riley Parr, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Augusto Mora, HR Buechler, Robert Gore, Deirdre Brollo, Ulises Carrión, Jim Prez, and others who cannot be identified. The centerfold–Karol Shewmaker and Brandon Graham at Blackie’s in Chicago–a happy moment despite the ongoing and disastrous corporate takeover of the USA and other bad stuff. This book was produced on the occasion of the exhibition curated by Jessica Cochran honoring the Center for Book and Paper in September, 2019 at the Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College Chicago.–Colophon
The film records dice being thrown against the open pages of Bennequin’s 2014 OMAGE (see above). Continuing with his technique of homage within homage, Bennequin’s Le Hasard N’Abolira Jamais Un Coup de Dés(Changes of Music): Film) reverses John Cage’s 1951 Music of Changes not only in its title but also in its recorded notes. The object in the Books on Books Collection fixes all these reversals on a USB drive. The reader can view and listen to it here and compare the recording with Cage’s original here.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Lericolais revisited his visual barrel-organ homage to create this version for the piano, which appeared as sheet music and a recording with Direct to Disk Éditions. Just as Broodthaers and other hommageurs signaled their homage by changing Mallarmé’s subtitle from Poème to Image, Sculpture, Musique, etc., Lericolais alters it to Piano, which also humorously pays homage to his own earlier work: Carton Perforé (2009). A performance can be heard here.
This solo installation/exhibition took place at the RocioSantaCruz Gallery in Barcelona and included several works in homage to the poem. In the middle of a gallery room, a large cube-shaped structure of wood and paper stands. Methacrylates in each side support the expanses of paper. As the visitor walks around it, the inside can be seen but not accessed, part of the metaphor of this non-accessible structure resembling a giant die. On its sides, in inverted order, is the partial phrase from Un Coup de Dés: “Le Hasard Jamais N’Abolira“, which Arza completes with the watermarked words “Le Patriarcat“. The inversion is reminiscent of that in Jérémie Bennequin’s two works — Le Hasard Jamais N’Abolira un Coup de Dés: Omage (2014) and Le Hasard Jamais N’Abolira un Coup de Dés (Changes of Music): Film (2020). Mar Arza’s completion of the sentence, however, makes this work more a social critique. In contrast to the large die structure are three small porcelain works also entitled with fragments of the poem. Besides the first of the die’s always yielding a three and the other two appearing to have been eroded by the sea, it is also interesting how Mar Arza has increased their sizes from 25 x 25 x 25 mm to 30 x 30 x 30 mm then to a distorted 45 x 45 x 50 mm. This increasing size is not apparent from these images, but the concept in juxtaposition with the large walk-in cube is clear.
Éditions Virgile LeGrand surprises with this homage in several ways — mostly by ignoring Mallarmé’s intended deluxe edition. It returns to the Cosmopolis edition for the layout of the poem. It intersperses artwork throughout. And for artist, it presents the colorful Hervé Di Rosa, part of the Figuration Libre movement of French painters. More on this work here.
Gwenn Froger, artistic director of the Association jamais le Hasard, has provided the video link to this spectacular homage to Mallarmé’s work. Starting at the 1:25:42 mark, Un Coup de Dés closes out the performance with a black-and-white silent film. Its opening will recall aspects of Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château de Dés (1929), but the film adheres to the poem’s central images as a live organist plays accompaniment to the words, phrases and lines of the poem appearing across the screen in their by-now familiar layout.
Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian (the strangely named duo behind Avant Kinema) were responding to an invitation from the AHRC-funded project Imprints of the New Modernist Editing in 2019, which would have resulted in an exhibition at Shandy Hall, home of the Laurence Sterne Trust, but the Covid-19 pandemic intervened. Their response consisted of “visual artworks, photography, poetry, fiction and Tarot style card designs featuring ‘twelve virgin symbols extracted from Un coup de dés‘” (Swan & Simian, “Introduction”). Combined, the works constituted an interdisciplinary approach to translating the poem. This booklet captures those works and concludes with a new translation of the poem.
Rémi Forte’s homage had its unpublished start in 2011. As a young student of typography, Forte was absorbed by the poem and its movement across the page. Along with his response — three white on black handmade images, with digital sensors — came a ghostly sentence: “A spectre is haunting poetry, the spectre of Stéphane Mallarmé”. When Derek Beaulieu — no stranger to the digital preceding the analogue (see above) — came across the images, he persuaded Forte to publish The Spectre of Mallarmé in black on white alongside his own homage Tattered Sails and that of Sam Sampson (further below). More here on Forte’s work here.
Since the first homage in this online essay/exhibition originated in Australia, it seems fitting that the last homage should also come from the Antipodes. Sam Sampson’s (((Sun-O))) first appeared as a pamphlet publication from Derek Beaulieu’s No Press in 2020. When the 125th anniversary came to Sampson’s attention, he undertook this special boxed edition. The work turns Mallarmé’s poem, specifically a friend’s signed copy of it, into a collage. In a nod to the “hommageurs by redaction”, Sampson replaces Mallarmé’s lines with bullet-pointed rules, each the same length as the line replaced, each weighted according to the weight of the original line’s face and each placed on the page where the original line is placed. Having turned Un Coup de Dés into a rich graphic, Sampson weaves into it his own verse.
Before the opening, the poem was chalked onto the floor of the main display room. Within minutes of the opening, the visitor traffic had erased most of it.
On the wall: Bibliophagia, 2016 and 2024. Hanging: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (SCULPTURE) 2016; Against the wall: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE) 2009 Michalis Pichler
Sophie Lanctôt, Mallarmé, Molinari: Mots croisés (2024)
Curators Gilles Daigneault and Monic Robillard mounted the “Crosswords” exhibition at Guido Molinari Foundation to present nine new paintings by Sophie Lanctôt dedicated to Mallarmé (with a series of five to Un Coup de Dés) and a rediscovered work by Guido Molinari, both joining “the long line of artists who have drawn inspiration from the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Marcel Broodthaers described as the precursor of modern art” (exhibition brochure). Molinari’s 1994 artist’s book, Continuum pour Mallarmé puts his later 2003 polyptych Équivalence (see above) in a new context and sheds light on the artist’s practice in the early 1990s. Lanctôt’s large-and moderate-scale paintings fuse the poem with text and images in her own original way and bring the exhibition to life.
On the left: Guido Molinari, Untitled (2003). This work belongs to Équivalence, a polyptych of 12 paintings created by Molinari based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’abolira le Hasard (1897). On the right: Sophie Lanctôt, Observation relative au poème (2024). Extract from Mallarmé’s preface to the first edition Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’abolira le Hasard (1897). Photo: Michael Patten.
Continuum pour Mallarmé (1994) Guido Molinari Displayed with permission of the Guido Molinari Foundation.
What is it about Un Coup de Dés that has attracted the works of art (especially book art) in this exhibition right up to the present day?
Perhaps it is the poem’s circular self-reflexivity — beginning and ending with the words un coup de dés. So much of book art is self-reflexive, saying and being what it does.
Perhaps it is the poem’s constellatory fireworks on the pages, across the pages. So much of book art revels in the tensions between the textual and the visual.
Perhaps it is the poem’s suggestion by layout and imagery of music and dance. So much of book art — like Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” — seeks to re-evoke on its own terms the sound and movement that Mallarmé achieves in his poem. A kind of inverse ekphrasis in which the material re-presents the aural and kinesthetic.
Perhaps it is the game the poem plays with us. So much of book art is a playful invitation to a game. As Anna Sigrídur Arnar puts it: “For Mallarmé, the game concept provided a meaningful paradigm for the activities of reading and writing. … Replacing the … instructor, … priest, or … poet prophet is the savvy game player who challenges the reader by presenting compelling combinations of words. The next step in this game, therefore, is placed in the hands — or more appropriately, the mind — of the reader. / … Mallarmé challenges the reader to develop a different set of reading strategies. In place of the hypnotic “back-and-forth” rhythm of traditional reading, the reader must negotiate reading with looking — scanning the page as an entity yet also reading individual words and phrases. … Mallarmé has thus initiated the first step of the game by provoking the reader with a daring gesture. The text is written, composed, and presented with the reader in mind. Without a reader, the creative process is incomplete; the game is not worth playing. [Arnar,p. 168]
Now, as ever, after Broodthaers’ and Pichler’s exhibitions, Engramer’s sculptures, King’s opera, Bruce and Noble’s Foldings, Galván’s dancing, Zinny-Maidagan’s sidewalk, Franklin’s and Moore’s videos, and Sampson’s (((Sun-O))), the poem challenges us to negotiate reading not only with looking but also with hearing, touching, wearing, watching, moving and reflecting — all by which the dice are thrown once more.
Further Reading(and Viewing)
Les Abattoirs. 2016. Le Livre dans le Livre, Exposition présentée à la Médiathèque des Abattoirs du 15 octobre au 16 janvier 2016, FRAC. Accessed 12 April 2020.
Arnarsson, Ingólfur. 1984. Iceland: The Art Revealed: Bookworks, Performances and Graphic Art New York: Franklin Furnace. In his preface in the form of a letter to Arnarsson addressing what constitutes book art, Dieter Schwarz (former director of Kunstmuseum Winterthur) invokes Un Coup de Dés.
… his poem “Un coup de dés” … can be considered as the first poem to exist in book form only. … the annotated proof sheets of a projected book edition prove how meticulously he designed the particular position of each word on the page. The text is inseparable from its layout, not just on a single page, but in its specific position in the book as a whole. Mallarmé achieves a constellation of signifiers comparable to the constellations of the stars in the sky; they too can be read in various ways without offering a final, definitive quintessence. The pages of such a book reflect each other, build up a dense interaction of significations, and yet reject the claim of being an image of the world’s totality. …. (p. 6).
Bouhours, Jean-Michel, and Patrick de Haas. 1997. Man Ray: directeur du mauvais movies [sic]. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. The most extensive commentary on Man Ray and Mallarmé’s influence comes from Bouhours’ chapter “La légende du château du dé”. The volume can be found in the Internet Archives.
Cohn, Robert G. 1966. Mallarme’s Masterwork: New Findings. The Hague: Mouton. Contains the photographs that inspired Neil Crawford’s typographic translation.
Cohn, Robert Greer. 1965. Toward the poems of Mallarmé. Berkeley: University of California Press. See in particular for his analysis of the relationship between Un Coup de Dé and the sonnet À la Nue Accablante Tu (pp. 229-36).
Davenport, Philip. 27 March 2020. “‘France’, or… we are circles of cancelled stars’“, Synapse International: An international visual poetry gathering. Started by Karl Kempton and Davenport in February 2018, Synapse International quickly attracted online works of homage to Un Coup de Dés, including an early appearance in March 2018 of Zboya’s Translations and later a visually adapted essay by David W. Seaman and as well as an “ADVERTISEMENT” from Derek Beaulieu that links to his 3D rendering of Un Coup de Dés.
Drucker, Johanna. 1991. “Typographic Manipulation of the Poetic Text in the Early Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde” in The Artist’s Book: The Text and its Rivals, a special two-issue volume of Visible Language, Vol. 25, Nos. 2/3, edited by Renée Riese Hubert (Providence, RI: Rhode Island School of Design), pp. 234-36.
Florence, Penny. 2009. Mallarmé, Manet, and Redon: visual and aural signs and the generation of meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “They are a book with interchangeable pages, with varying directions and registers, with vertical and horizontal movements, with reversals and with shapes that are as important in signification as words. They challenge our notion of coherence and demand that we re-shape the relations between recorded and immediate experience.” (p.110) — which is also what happens in Dan Graham’s installation Present Continuous Past (1974)
Gábor, Képes. 2018. “Hommage à Tibor Papp“, The Past of the Future, Informatika Történeti Kiállítás. 13 August.
Givry, Christine ed. 1998. Les Échos de Mallarmé: Du Coup de Dés… à l’Informatique. Musées de Sens. Givry presents a variety of concrete poets influenced by Mallarmé, including Eugene Gomringer, Die Konstellationen(1963)Emmett Williams The Voy Age (1975); Jiri Kolár, “Mallarmé” Poèmes du Silence (1965); August de Campos, O Pulsar (1991) and Haroldo de Campos SI LEN CIO (1991).
Lloyd, Rosemary. 2000. “Mallarmé at the Millennium”, The Modern Language Review, vol. 95, no. 3, pp. 674–683. Accessed 14 June 2020. Lists the centenary conferences and exhibitions.
Massin, Robert, Caroline Hillier, and Vivienne Menke (trans). 1970. Letter and Image. London: Studio Vista. Insightful tracing of the poem’s influence, with numerous illustrated examples.
McDowall, John. 2016. “Regarding Word’s,” PAGES: Text Book Leeds: Wild Pansy Press. pp. 15-21.
Meirelles, Isabel. 2009. Topography/Typography (poster). Northeastern University Annual Research Expo. Accessed 24 May 2019. Reproduced with permission.
Michaud, Guy; Marie Collins and Bertha Jumez, trans. 1966. Mallarmé. London: Peter Owen. pp. 153-163. “1. Space around the poem is better dispersed ‘over the page according to the requirements of the thought or meaning’ (p. 155). 2. ‘As a result, poetry will become an art of time’ (p. 155). 3. ‘The unity in such a placement of words [‘a figuration of thought’, Mallarmé to Gide, One can sometimes see in it ‘a vessel listing from the top of one page to the bottom of another,’ sometimes a constellation taking on ‘the look of a constellation’] is no longer the line’ (p. 156). 4. ‘The poet is not content with playing with page makeup; he also plays with type faces, which give more or less importance to each idea by their form or significance. What he thus obtains is no longer a simple literary text, but a musical score, in which ‘the difference in type face between the preponderant, secondary, and subsidiary motifs dictates their importance for an oral reading’…” (p. 156).
Rancière, Jacques, and Steve Corcoran, trans. 2011. Mallarmé: the politics of the siren. London: Continuum. A “poetico-philosophical work” (as Corcoran calls it) that, among much else, shines light on how Mallarmé’s sonnet A la nue accablante tu (“Hushed to the crushing cloud”) works ( a balancing of the octave’s metaphorical hypothesis against the sextet’s) and serves as a summary of Un Coup de Dés.
Rasula, Jed. 2009. Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth. London: Palgrave. Accessed via Electronic Poetry Center, University of Pennsylvania, n.d. Accessed 14 June 2020. “Fraenkel’s sixty-eight seismographic and astral diagrams (or “stylizations”) practice a truly graphic mode of literary analysis. It was Fraenkel’s conviction that “a plastic text rests hidden in the extra-conscious layers of the poet, paralleling the verbal text of the poem” ….In their accentuation of the visual character of Un Coup de dés, Fraenkel’s designs are like watching a movie with the sound turned off, forced to rely on gesture rather than dialogue in order to follow the action.” That could describe Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château de Dés.
Rice, Robin. 30 April 1998. “Mallarmé Day“. My City Paper. Accessed 21 June 2021.
Robb, Graham. 1996. Unlocking Mallarmé. New Haven: Yale University Press. Like Rancière, Robb presents Mallarmé’s sonnet A la nue accablante tu (“Hushed to the crushing cloud”) as a useful précis to Un Coup de Dés.
Roger, Thierry. 2009. “Sur le genre du Coup de dés“, Poétique Vol. 4, No. 160, pp. 443-70. Probably the best current article tracing the formal and thematic influences of Un Coup on other poets. Accessed 24 May 2019.
Roger, Thierry. 2010. L’Archive du Coup de Dés: Étude critique de la réception d’Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard de Stéphane Mallarmé (1897-2007). Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier. See, in particular, Rogier’s documentation on Picasso (pp. 716-21), Art et Action (pp. 775-82), Man Ray (pp. 751-59), Masson (pp. 712-16), Broodthaers (pp.), Straub (pp. 762-73). This monumental review of the poem’s critical reception between 1897 and 2007 also lists and comments on editions, facsimiles, translations, artistic interpretations (musical, dramatic and cinematographic).
Rosenblum, Robert. 1973. “Picasso and the typography of Cubism”. Picasso in Retrospect, eds.Roland Penrose, John Golding. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.New York: Praeger. 32-47.
Sackner, Martin and Ruth. 2015. The Art of Typewriting : 570+ Illustrations. 2015. London: Thames & Hudson. Includes entry on Françoise Mairey’s 22o-card homage to the Mallarmé’s poem.
Schraenen, Guy. 1997. Hommage an Stéphane Mallarmé’s Würfelwurf. Bremen: Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen. Focused in its first half on the 1960s-80s, and in its second half on concrete poetry.
Seaman, David W. 1981. Concrete poetry in France Ann Arbor, MI: UMI. Although pointing out Ernest Fraenkel’s application of his visual analysis to the Cosmopolis version of the poem, he graciously acknowledges Fraenkel’s insights into the ideogrammatic aspects of the poem regardless of edition.
Shaw, Mary Lewis. 1992. Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Shaw’s analysis of Herodiade, Igitur, Un Coup de Dés and Le Livre mentions the Man Ray film of 1929 but not Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice from 1977. Nevertheless, her analysis of the performative signals in Un Coup de Dés reads well onto the performances that have occurred from the 1990s on.
Trettien, Whitney Anne. 5 June 2010. “Computers, Cut-ups, and Combinatory Volvelles“. electronic book review. Accessed 5 February 2022. Useful in relation to Tayyib Yavuz; Karen ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato; Bill Seaman; Derek Beaulieu; Kathy Bruce, James Cook & Alastair Noble.
Walton Jude and Victoria University (Melbourne Vic). 2010. “By Hand and Eye : Dance in the Space of the Artist’s Book”. Dissertation. Victoria University. Useful insights that could be applied to Israel Galván, Pedro G. Romero and Filiep Tacq (above).
“It seems logical that computing begins with computers; or at least computing as we conceive it today. However, data processing is nothing new. The twentieth century did not discover the fact that information can be organized. Because literature is bound to the book as a concrete object, it belongs to a peculiar paradigm of information, and today the digital revolution allows us a better understanding of this paradigm. By contrast, the underlying implications of book culture become visible. This gives us a glimpse of media regime long-term changes. From Mallarmé’s poem-object to computer-based literature, the point of crossing a century of literary history will be to lay the foundation for a media archeology consisting in a computational view of literary creation, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginnings of computer distribution in every domain of society.”
“Footprints of a Collector: Reiner Speck – Mallarmé, Broodthaers et les Autres“. 2 May – 23 July 2022. Michael Werner Gallery, Gertrudenstraße 24 – 28 50667 Köln, Germany. Curated by Sabine Schiffer. For anyone interested in Broodthaers or Mallarmé, the catalogue for this exhibition is spectacular. Michael Werner Gallery and Reiner Speck are to be congratulated on both. The Gallery’s idea of hosting particularly focused and rich collections from time to time is brilliant as is the choice of Speck’s collection. Speck knew Broodthaers and, through that association, came to concentrate as well on “les Autres”, who were inspired by Mallarmé’s poem. The catalogue provides insight on Mario Diacono’s extremely rare work of homage (happily included in the Speck Collection) as well as works not mentioned above: Futurist Carlo Carrà’s homage (1945), Wolfram Erber’s pastels and drawings (1980), Fritz Balthaus’ Two to Toulouse! (1984), Roland Vachez’ homage from L’ Atelier (2013) and Olivier Foulon’s Untitled [3 Bücher – Vortrag in Bilbao #2] (2016).
Mis en pli(2016) Étienne Pressager Monotype, inked, folded in half lengthwise and unfolded. H840 xW570. Edition of 16, of which this is #12. Acquired from the artist, 22 April 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection, and courtesy of the artist. Displayed with permission of the artist.
The alphabet loves a mirror, and like many artists’ books that comment on themselves or the Book, Étienne Pressager’s monotype is self-regarding — in its process, its result and its title. A large sheet is folded lengthwise and unfolded. Ink is arranged just so in the center and to the right. The sheet is folded, pressed and unfolded to reveal the mirrored alphabet. Voilá, a single-fold book. Mis en pli or “Set in fold”.
Quelques îles en formation (2007)
Quelques îles en formation (2007) Étienne Pressager Handsewn booklet. H210 x W170 mm, 30 pages. Edition of 10, of which this is #9. Acquired from the artist, 8 March 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Quelques îles en formation consists of fifteen single-fold folios handsewn with black thread. The first and last folios serve for the front cover/title page and colophon/back cover, respectively. The thirteen folios between them constitute the îles/”islands” being formed by the encircling letters of the alphabet and the encircled masses laser-printed on the translucent paper. But why “some islands”/quelques îles and not just thirteen? As the reader/viewer moves through this work, it dawns that there are far more than thirteen ways of looking at these blackbirds.
Spine, showing the single-fold folios.
To talk about the folios (and since the pages are unnumbered), let’s name them “Island AB”, “Island CD” and so on. So the work’s second folio would be Island AB (below). If we go round the island clockwise from Z, we are reading the alphabet in reverse. This doesn’t seem right (although we are reading à droite/”to the right”). But to follow the Latin alphabet aright, we are forced into reading right to left. Once we reach letter C, the Western norm of left-to-right reading asserts itself — even if bumpily so — but with letter P, we are back to the Middle/Far East direction of reading. At least, in either direction, the dark gray body of land is clear enough. Or is it?
Folio “Island AB”: first, second and third pages displayed. The fourth page appears below.
When Island AB’s first page turns, the black letters separate from the body they define. They float in reverse on the second page (above) even more black. The dark gray body now becomes a separated mass of black on the third page (above). It looks like an abstract image or a skyline, but here and there, the island’s contour shows just enough parts of the absent island-forming letters to make out the Y, X, F, K and M. When the third page turns, Island AB’s “underside” appears on the fourth page of the folio (below). The reversed black letters on the second page lighten to gray as the translucent paper falls over them, but the black abstract or skyline or island printed on the third page shows through just as black as before.
Island AB’s fourth page; Island CD’s first, second and third pages.
In an installation setting, three of these bodies of black become the work Îles capitales, a standalone large-scale hanging made from industrial plywood covered with thin black melamine. In contrast, the book form layers the islands, adding yet another layer in the process of îles en formation. The islands beneath cast shadowy outcroppings upwards around the island covering them. Indeed, as pages turn, outcroppings disappear, replaced by others from islands further underneath. Look again at Islands AB and CD above.
Gallery view of Îles capitales (center) in “Bertrand Gadenne/Étienne Pressager: A,B,C,D, Etcaetera”, a joint exhibition at Lieu d’Art et Action Contemporaine (LAAC), Musée de France, Musée de la Ville de Dunkerque, 2007. Photo: Courtesy of Étienne Pressager.
Another element of the layering comes into play as pages turn. It comes just as a page is lifted. Below, on the left, the letters around Island GH lift away leaving a blurred outline of the island beneath; on the right, the island becomes more sharply defined as the page begins to turn. Calling further attention to the layering, each folio is folded offset, the first and second pages always being wider than the third and fourth, which facilitates turning the slippery translucent pages but highlights the work’s in-betweenness, its gradations of gray, black and white.
Island GH: with its first and third pages being turned.
Each island is shaped by the same 26 letters, but the contours of each island differ. An infinite number of varied archipelagoes could be derived from Pressager’s ourobouros-like alphabet, just as an infinite number of words can be generated from the alphabet, which in turn can be used to define, delineate and bridge domains or islands limited only by our imaginations. Confronted by such infinities, what can a finite human do but offer up quelques îles en formation?
L’Après-midi d’un Phonème(2019) Pierre di Sciullo Greyboard on drawn-on-solid paper wrapper. H240 x W150 mm, 256 pages. Special edition of 40, of which this is #40. Acquired from ~zeug, 25 March 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The pun on Mallarmé’s L’Après-Midi d’un Faune certainly captures Pierre de Sciullo and his endeavors. He plays with typography as a medium, delving into letter forms and phonemes — drawing, writing and piping them into posters, signs, building façades, apps, stage designs and this book. The book is an extended and illustrated interview with di Sciullo, as faun of design, conducted by its publisher’s founders Sandra Chamaret and Julien Gineste (~zeug). The colophon credits the book’s design to Grand Ensemble, the design studio managed by Chameret and Gineste. Simon Renaud, author of the introduction and previously a student of di Sciullo, is also credited with involvement in the typography.
Physically this work’s first gesture toward playfulness is di Sciullo’s design for the jacket, which unfolds to a poster in two-color printing on Hahnemühle Natural 120 gsm. Then comes the binding (see above): embossed and inked text on greyboard glued to a drawn-on-solid wrapper of Munken Pure 300 gsm to which the sewn folios are glued.
Dust cover unfolding to poster
The colors blue and gold play a unifying role across the structure of the book and the text of the interviews that took place from July 2016 through July 2019. The colors of the paper and type play off each other and draw together the shift of double and single columns of text and the mix of full-color bled-off photos, single- and multi-color illustrations placed in the inner and outer margins, and single- and multi-color half-tones appearing in a variety of positions, nevertheless balanced.
The interviews roughly follow the chronology of di Sciullo’s career and naturally refer throughout to his serial publication Qui? Résiste, now in its 14th number. The discussion and illustrations demonstrate how his talents apply across numerous media, but always in the service of type and an offbeat representation of sound. Most of his experimental typefaces are covered: Minimum (1986), made of vertical and horizontal lines only; Quantange (1989), the phonetic alphabet named after the question Qu’entends-je? (“What do I hear?”); followed by Épelle-moi/Spell me (1998), in which each letter’s pronunciation is spelled out; in turn followed by Kouije (2005), “a flexible tool to embody the voice in writing” — to name but a few.
The phonetic is by no means the only note that the faun of design plays. “Visually haptic” describes this book as well as his sculptural typography. The eye feels the Bing/Bong versions of Minimum’s letters dancing in the signage of the Centre national de la Danse. “Semantically haptic” may be the best way to describe Floating Words, where the signage interacts with its surroundings to convey the meaning of the sign (which may, in fact, only allude to the place to which it points).
The Afternoon of a Phoneme also provokes socially and politically. It airs di Sciullo’s reactions to Chernobyl, the first Iraq war and the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina — reactions expressed in his publications or typography: Qui? Résiste No. 7, Qui? Résiste No. 8 and Sintétik. Of the latter, he says in one interview, “So since the world tolerates ethnic cleansing, I am going to conceive of an alphabetic cleansing. I am going to shoot off a part of the letters, which will allow me to shoot away a part of the words …. It is a purification of the language, with abuse of the language at every level!” (p. 105). A less futile gesture (though not addressed at any length) are his typefaces based on the Tifinagh script of the Tuareg — Aligourane (1995) and Amanar (2003) providing access to printed matter and the screen.
And in the end, L’Après-midi d’un Phonème embodies di Sciullo’s typographic reaction to the world. In that same interview he says,”My aim is to create a writing style that is made to be read if one is very very patient, …” (p. 107). The reader/viewer/holder of this book might be reminded of that experience of learning to read — or perhaps the experience of tending to a child. What you have in your hands squirms, turns this way and that, makes you laugh and cry out, hurts your head and warms your heart.
Sciullo, Pierre di. 1 July 2016. TPTalks. Accessed 3 February 2022. In French, but easily followed visually. Go to the 50’02” mark to see Floating Words and hear his audience’s gasp of wonder.
XYZ (2002) Maria G. Pisano Housed in a paste paper wrapper, a miniature concertina book, case bound, each page individually sewn to the next in a light green cotton thread. The title is watermarked on the front cover. H72 x W65 mm closed, 26 lettered pages alternating in colors. Edition of 26, of which this is #17. Acquired from the artist, 22 July 2021. Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
This work finds its way into the Books On Books Collection on several counts. Many of the ABC books in the collection use the accordion, concertina or leporello structure, but none combine fine beaten abaca in two colors and the watermark technique to achieve their effect. The colored abaca resonates with the collection’s interest in “Strange Papers” as Fred Siegenthaler labelled them and in “painting” with the watermark as Siegenthaler, Gangolf Ulbricht, John Gerard and others have done (see below under Further Reading).
Besides fusing papermaking with printing, Pisano unifies XYZ by making the alternation of colored paper and printing by watermark extend outwards from the “text block” to the case and paste board housing. The photos below follow this from the outside in.
Usually a watermark is barely noticeable, a thin-lined monogram or insignia created by a wire fixed into the mesh or screen in the “deckle” (frame in which the mesh is stretched and into which paper pulp is poured). As the water drains from the pulp through the mesh, the papermaker shakes the deckle to mix the fibers evenly. The fibers thin against the mesh and watermark leaving impressions in the paper.
Each letter shape lies face down and runs head to tail along the “laid lines” (made by the closely spaced wires in the mesh) and perpendicular to the “chain lines” (made by the wider spaced wires in the mesh). One of the chain lines can be seen just under the upper stroke of the letter E below. When a sheet is pulled from the mesh, laid between layers of felt and subjected to pressure to squeeze out the remaining water, the rough side (the side previously face down on the mesh) becomes the right reading side. If your screen permits enlargement, the mirror reading side on the right below displays its smoothness.
Given the shaking of the deckle that goes on, those letter shapes had to have been secured to the mesh. Their points of attachment can just be detected; see the curves of the C and P.
“John Gerard“. Books On Books Collection. 13 August 2020. Another practitioner of watermarking art.
“Claire Van Vliet”. Books On Books Collection. 8 August 2019. See Tumbling Blocks for Pris and Bruce (1996) for a similarly small but perfectly formed ABC work of art.
Housed in acrylic tube, eight pages including letterpress printed colophon page, seven pages of USGS topographic maps inscribed with sumi ink by hand, bound with a small piece of Fabriano Tiziano green in Japanese side-stitch. H184 x W679.5 mm unfurled. Edition of approximately 65, of which this one is dated and initialed on 7 November 2012. Acquired from the artist, 25 March 2015. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
When as you continue first appeared, Jen Larson wrote of it in Multiple, Limited, Unique: Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Center for Book Arts (2011):
… this work serves as an elegant meditation and metaphor on the subject of life journeys — and orienting oneself in the midst of landscape or circumstance that can only be apprehended by survey and the will to move forward.
The year 2012 marked the centennial of composer and artist John Cage’s birth. An aficionado of “chance”, Robin Price revisited this work that had begun in December 2010 when she discovered on the Crown Point Press’ Magical-Secrets website the quotation by Cage. Cage had made this remark to Kathan Brown in 1989 after the Crown Point Press’ building was condemned following an earthquake. By chance, it now seemed fitting as a centenary birthday wish to this artistic master of “the purposeful use of chance and randomness”. Also by purposeful chance, Price turned to a technique that seemed entirely fitting for the work, its history and her personal perspective. Price writes:
… I took up the project anew and practiced writing on several different occasions, feeling dissatisfied with various trials. Eventually I found my way to writing with my left (non-dominant) hand as the most authentic expression I could bring to the content, as visualization of struggle, fear, and acceptance of imperfection.
Perfect bound. H305 x W229 mm. Acquired from the artist, 25 March 2015. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The very covers of the book were created by chance operations. Generated solely on press using three of the four process color printing plates from the book’s interior via “make-ready”, areas of image were built up on the paper by repeatedly passing the sheets through the press, and consistently rotating the sheets prior to their feeding through ensured variation among the covers within the edition.
In addition to the theme core to Price’s art, Counting on Chance embodies another aspect key to her work: choice and collaboration. Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center, the volume includes a brilliant essay by Betty Bright, interview by Suzy Taraba and a catalogue raisonné prepared by Rutherford Witthus. Like choosing the right colors, the right combination of fonts, the right layout, the right weight and opacity of paper, and the right structure, Price’s choice of collaborators (or their choice of her) in her work and publishing is an artistic practice itself.
Housed in a custom-made, engraved stainless steel box (H370 x W326 x D44 mm), concertina binding co-designed with Daniel E. Kelm and Joyce Cutler-Shaw, produced at The Wide Awake Garage; twelve signatures of handmade cotton text paper, the central ten signatures each made up of one sheet H356 x W514 mm and one sheet H356 x W500 mm glued to the 14 mm margin of the first sheet, for a total of 96 pages, each measuring H356 x W253 mm. Binding of leather covered boards (a hologram embedded in front cover) with an open spine, taped and sewn into a reinforcing concertina structure: H361 X W259 mm. The hologram, produced by DuPont Authentication Systems, features an early eighteenth-century brass lancet. Edition of 50, of which this is a binder’s copy. Acquired from the binder, Daniel E. Kelm, 15 October 2018.
Generating two double-page spreads, one for the Fasciculus Medicinae on the left and Cutler-Shaw on the right, the foldout pages extend to 1016 mm.
Responding to the 1993 Smithsonian challenge to book artists to create a work in response to a scientific or technical work in the Dibner Library, Joyce Cutler-Shaw approached Price for assistance in creating a unique book based on Shaw’s response to the Fasciculus Medicinae (1495), the first printed book with anatomical illustrations. A decade later, Price was convinced to issue this 50-copy edition. In Counting On Chance, Betty Bright recounts the story behind this brilliant collaboration. Detail and additional images about the work can be found here.
Bright, Betty. “Handwork and Hybrids: Contemporary Book Art,” in Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, edited by Maria Elena Buczek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Essay highlighting the work of Robin Price and Ken Campbell.
Cell Compendium (2008-2016) Diane Stemper The work began with a gallery installation of Cell: Descent and 25 petri dishes filled by gallery visitors with science facts, liquid and solid matter. The installation in 2016 included 75 dishes filled with small altered found text books, drawings, and specimen objects housed in petri dishes.
In the middle of a shelf in Diane Stemper’s Ohio home, Umberto Eco’s Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages sits bookended, on the left, by two books about Francis Bacon and, on the right, by a small monograph on Pierre Bonnard and another book Art and Culture of Japan. The books are not organized alphabetically or chronologically. When she pulls the book out, it feels perfect, not too thin or thick, its dimensions and weight ideal for carrying in a shoulder bag. It has a feeling of secrets and importance.
Since discovering Stemper’s work at the Center for Book Arts (New York, 2014), I have wanted to talk to her about the themes and material that drive that work. Art and science, paper and glass, the universal and the particular, ink and watercolor, the physical and the spiritual. We finally arranged it in medias res, and she agreed to this oblique approach to her mind and art.
BoB: As you open Art and Beauty to its mid-point, what do you hear, smell or see about it or around it?
DS: Well, not sure if you mean inside of the room I am in or the memory it conjures, so I will go with memory. The words “cathedral”, “Chartres”, “vestibule”, “allegory” take me from the immediate space of my front room to the interior of a European cathedral or even perhaps as a child to the pews of St. Paul Cathedral in Minnesota during midnight mass. There is the fragrance of incense, the dark light of an imposing building, chanting and mystery. There are also the many hands of craftsmen chipping away at stone, painting glass and the laborers who put it all together and probably were not treated all that well.
Then there is that word “parabolic” and Eco’s explanation of Aquinas’ description of the arts as being literal, that the poetic image and its meaning were in the mind of the “reader” and that this association was a “matter of habit” – this reminds me that I and my viewers have different habits of mind, from the museum visitors I once toured who loved Impressionism and were hostile to Rothko, to the viewers responding to my specimen series – “why are they dead, did you kill them, that’s icky”. Surface literalism can be a matter of what one is familiar with and fearful of what one does not understand, but it can also be a “way into a piece” if the viewer is willing.
BoB: At the end of his book, Eco sums up his explanation of how the medievals looked at art with this startling statement, “They saw the world with the eyes of God”. What of today’s viewers of art and, in particular, those who look at your art?
DS: When originally picking the book from the middle of the middle shelf and then opening it to the middle, that sentence you mentioned — “The association of an image with a certain meaning is a matter of habit” — leapt out. Eco was referring to the ability of people of the Medieval period to read an image as if it were a literary text, for example, knowing instantly which animals or colors represent which biblical figure or story. However, I am reading Eco’s words from my 21st century vantage point, where there isn’t necessarily a concrete set of universal meanings assigned to objects or colors that every person understands and knows.
He also writes that the medieval mind loved a puzzle, that it was part of public discourse to figure out symbols and the inherent meaning within images. That there was adventure in the act of discovery. And another phrase that struck me: “Grasping reality through sense knowledge.”
Universal Sample (2014) Diane Stemper Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
Today’s “matter of habit” is problematic when viewing art. For some of my pieces, in particular Universal Sample and my drawings and prints of specimens, the viewing can be rather cursory, a knowing, habitual glance that says, “oh I see what that is”. The glance sums up the object in very simplistic terms. In this case, for the viewer, the specimen represents death or some distasteful high school experience of dissecting a small creature, and nothing more. It is possible to look at visual art not just with visual sense but in partnership with other physical sensations conjured by the image. Looking at the work as if there is more than meets the eye, that there is an underlaying sensibility to the image that references another experience or feeling or bit of knowledge, a smell, a sound…or that of the animal or that of the instance in which the animal finds itself, or the moment that a curious person finds such an animal. Imagining that moment — “What was it like?”
So, I hope that people will approach my artwork with imagination and not as a matter of habit — to look at my work as if it is a bit of a puzzle, not a straightforward statement or concept but more of a string of thoughts, feelings and visual and sensate information to be arranged and rearranged to come to some sort of conclusion or idea about the meaning, however uncertain that may be.
BoB: Do you recall the circumstances of the book’s purchase? What were you doing when you decided to buy it?
DS: I absolutely remember. I was living in London with my spouse and family as part of a study abroad program my spouse was leading. Each day, after all were at school or otherwise occupied, I would head out in pursuit of art, medical museums, natural history oddities or any number of things and on one day I went to the British Library to see an exhibition, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination. This was an exhibition of the several collections representing centuries of books commissioned by kings and queens and to my delight there were books on medicine, science and nature. After spending a very long time in the exhibition, I went to the gift shop where I found the Eco book. The extraordinary detail of the manuscripts I had just seen and the enormity of the exhibition itself put me in the mood to purchase the book.
BoB: As an artist whose work has an intimate relationship to “the book,” could you describe the effect this has on you when you are reading books in general or when revisiting the Eco book in particular?
DS: In general, when I am reading a book versus the screen of a device, I enjoy the structure of the book and understanding the manner in which it is assembled. The type of binding, the quality of paper, the action of the pages, do they lay flat or do they fight. I find the term “perfect binding” ironic as I am reading a book where the pages are falling out. I typically notice the condition of a book, faded covers, mildew or wear on the edges. Books with these qualities I feel a bit sorry for as I wonder where their next home will be, probably not my local library or the used book store, since here in Ohio, we haven’t many of those. Maybe they will live a short while at the Goodwill Thrift Store and from there, the recycle bin. Books are a bit like an endangered species and I am at times concerned that the youth (I have one at home) are only relating to books as they are required to do so at school and not as a place of refuge, ideas and travel. It is hard for books to compete with the ever-present screen and digital speed of information and interaction.
The Eco book in particular is a pathway back to London, to other centuries, to a time when art was the screen of the day and to the Royal manuscript exhibition. The books in the exhibition survived over centuries; the hours and hours of skill, artistry and dedication it took to not only create the books but to also preserve them gives me pause. The Eco book itself is not a great work of craftsmanship as an object, it is, after all, bound as a “perfect binding”. Still, it has not fallen apart yet, so the binders must have used a better-quality glue. Instead, the Eco book is a vessel of ideas and murmurs of what it meant to have art and beauty in one’s life hundreds of years ago. What are my intentions when opening a book? To be lifted away from the present, to enter another time period or another person’s circumstance or to be visually transported.
BoB: Turning the question on its head, when the act of creating a work rather than the act of reading is in flight, how do books feed your working process?
DS: For my series on Darwin, all seemed to fall into a flawless moment. I happened upon dozens of petri dishes and had already been thinking about Darwin’s 200th birthday. It is an instance of form and content playing together without much conflict or negotiation. From that came many books that really seemed to define themselves both in structure and content.
Cell Book #37 (2014) Diane Stemper
My books built into petri dishes are a different viewing experience for people because the dish itself is so familiar and suddenly the viewer finds the dish in an unusual circumstance, that of being a book. People pause, take notice and naturally ask questions, they seem unleashed from any customary reaction or habit and are open to an idea. The dish is an entry to figuring out a puzzle and not a barrier, such as an image of a dead bird or a dissected lizard might be.
The first books (Cell: Compendium) were in direct response to various nearby communities that were pushing for “creationism” to be taught in the public schools. The petri dish is a universal item repositioned and viewers find it humorous, unique or “creative” and while some stop there, most people are prompted to go further. The recognition of the petri dish spurs and opens the door to more meaningful connections and interpretations.
Compendium of Fact #1 (2009) Diane Stemper
Mostly however, when making my art work, initially the book structure is secondary, a simple vehicle for the content. Imagery, content, text and the oblique narrative story are primary and the development of the images and content are the key portions of my studio work. I use other books in my work, discarded textbooks and spines, for instance, that I take apart and rework. I also use books as reference, looking for a word or phrase, a bit of information to jumpstart a narrative about a topic I am interested in. I borrow science imagery to create and integrate with my own images. I am an observational artist and that includes observing via books as well as nature.
Discovery Plat 21 – Numbers (2001) Diane Stemper A unique artist book. One of four unique books exploring the life of insects as observed on, in, around an Ohio porch. Book 2 (Migration), Book 3 (Pause) & Book 4 (Flight) in the special collections of the Cincinnati Public Library, Hamilton County, Ohio.
Ohio Specimen Cardinal (2016) Diane Stemper
Once the content and images are in motion, the book structure comes into play and that is when the many possibilities of the structure interact with the content and it is really the most significant challenge of creating an artist book. I do not like to use book forms for the simple novelty of the structure or for the entertainment factor (for instance a pop-up or tunnel book) unless of course it really fits the topic. I want viewers to focus on the images and feeling or message of the work, so the book structure becomes, is, or should be a thoughtful object that houses an idea or an experience, it is in service to the artist, to the viewer, it invites the viewer in and then steps aside.
BoB: Let’s turn to Universal Sample in some more detail. I’d like to ask you to comment on the intersection between the words in Universal Sample (“universal” and “sample”, “chance” and “order”, “moment” and “decay”) as well as the intersection of the words with the prints, their color, the paper you used, and the star structure.
Universal Sample (2014) Diane Stemper Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
DS: First, let me say the entire book, the six images and the text, is meant to present obliquely a life cycle of early life forms. The images are inspired by my own source material comprised of many drawings of specimens that I did at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
The title, Universal Sample, is singular and expansive. A sample is one bit of something larger that is collected and taken from a whole and isolated, universal represents a larger inclusive whole. In this case “Sample” is not numbered or identified. It is in relationship to all else, is composed of and is evidence for all else.
Dispersal – Begins the book and alludes to creation.
Universal Sample (2014) Diane Stemper Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
Vestigial – Ends it and alludes to remains.
Universal Sample (2014) Diane Stemper Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
Chance – In part I feel the world is a chaotic place where the intentional can be overcome by chance and luck, circumstance and happenstance.
Order – This is about human systems (religious, scientific) within a chaotic world and about the molecular combining and recombining relative to evolution over millions of years which bring about reasonable order within an ever-changing environment.
Universal Sample (2014) Diane Stemper Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
When I place the words “chance” and “order” together, I am referencing religion as a human system attempting to bring order to chaos, to explain the inexplicable. The images progress from an unidentified plasma or bubbly life form to a life form that appears to be lizard like, one of the early animal forms on earth. One print shows three lizards, a trinity of sorts, impaled perhaps, especially as specimens might be. Floating, they represent the substance, atom, molecules, electrons, neutrons that I know exist versus the Trinity as espoused by Christianity that I am not so certain about. In this way, I am harking back to the root of an entire body of work that I have made that draws upon Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Moment and Decay are read together with the image of a frog, a frog that is decomposing, reordering and redistributing its cells. I want the text to key viewers into the idea of a space, gap, a line or moment when decay begins. The last print is of an imaginary cellular structure of a life form as it is releasing and redistributing entirely into another space whether that is air, dirt or water or the space beyond our stratosphere.
The book structure, font and print size and paper choices are all subject to various constraints, such as paper and press bed size, size of copper, or availability of type face at the printmakers cooperative where I do my printing. For this book, I worked the structure of the book, image and text placement and layout simultaneously with content development and made at least a few small mock-ups to help me see the possibilities, resolve problems and keep me on track. I like book structures that are straightforward and that are an entry to the images and content. Sometimes, as with the Cell books, the structure is integral to the content of the work. For Universal Sample, what was going to be a simple accordion changed as I saw that the images and text could offer different ways in which to view and read the book. The star structure which consists of a series of three-page short accordions sewn into a concertina spine is elegant, seems like a standard book, a good frame for the images and when opened it can go beyond being a standard book and be manipulated and reconsidered.
Universal Sample (2014) Diane Stemper Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
BoB: Where next with your art?
DS: I like anything that can be described as a collection, the more personal and odd, the better, and I find opportunities to visit natural history or medical museums when I can. Currently, I am finishing a book object that incorporates several of my drawings of backyard specimen finds. This work includes test tubes and refers to the challenge of birds to avoid hazards and remain undetected. I am also thinking about a series of artist books that somehow reveal the dozens, hundreds, thousands of birds that are housed in the drawers of collecting institutions.
BoB: With thanks to Diane Stemper for her time and reflection. To enjoy more of her work, see her site and also:
Diane Stemper received her B.F.A. in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and a M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University. Her work is included in the Artists’ Book Collections of: DAAP Library, University of Cincinnati, Ohio; Main Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Cincinnati, Ohio; Special Collections, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio; and the Lucille Little Fine Arts Library, University of Kentucky.
Ruston’s art celebrates the natural world and human spirit, inviting viewers “to follow, to unravel secrets, and to pay close attention to the world around them”.
Chris Ruston She Returns (2011) 23.5cm x 18.5cm, Edition of 2
Part of a series called Ocean Blue, the book She Returns uses a double concertina fold and ink on Fabriano watercolor paper to invite us to follow the image of a leatherback turtle making its way through the deep, which fluctuates between the depth of blue-black and the shallows of blue-white. The text reads
SheReturns BLACK and GLEAMING
in the Moonlight
her Primordial needs Roaming WaveWashedDreams.
Originating from the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-908) in China as the Orihon, the concertina fold is also called the accordion fold and sometimes the leporello*. For “She Returns”, Ruston employs a variant of the binding approach in Figure 9. It is
from Hedi Kyle, “Orihon’s Triumph: Origin and Adaptations of the Concertina Fold”, The Ampersand, Vol. 3, No. 2, December 1982.
essentially two pages folded together into a concertina fold, but in origami terms, the “mountain” fold of one page is inverted to a “valley” fold, which creates “small boxes” between the pages when the concertina is opened as seen below. The single signature of transparent paper with text is sewn into the centre page. It is bound by a simple stitch top and bottom of each fold.
Painted board covers were then attached.”The stitches at the top and bottom of the page work well as it allows some small movement of the two concertina folds. As I saturate it with water and ink it needs to be a bit more robust but this means it can be bulky when put together.”
Binding detail of She Returns
Binding detail of She Returns
Binding detail of She Returns
The Holuhraun lava field, on 4 September 2014, during the 2014 eruption
The Bárðarbunga volcano in Holuhraun, Iceland, is active. From August 2014 to February 2015, it erupted for 181 days.
Lava fountains of the fissure eruption in Holuhraun on 13th September 2014 around 21:20.
Ruston responded to that natural event with the work Holuhraun, 2014-2015.
Ruston’s Holuhraun reflects that duality of nature’s destructive creation and creative destruction. The sides of the box falling away mimic the volcano’s production of new land. But the work is more subtle than that; it implicates the viewers in that duality. In taking apart the closed object, we “create” or, at least, reveal another object of art.
Ice is the countervailing passion in Ruston’s art.
What a sight to wake up to on a cold winter’s morning – a blanket of thick frost over everything. Armed with camera, and a thick warm coat, I couldn’t resist taking a detour on my way to the studio. The air was still, the grasses and branches coated with ice crystals, all bathed in a soft gentle light. I spent a pleasant hour surrounded by the gentle rustle of ice crystals softly falling to the ground. (12/12/2012)
In response to her natural surroundings, as well as powerful films such as James Balog’s Chasing Ice (PBS, Nova, 2102) and installations like Olafur Eliasson’s Your Waste of Time (MoMA, New York, 2013), Ruston created Are We Listening?, a work of small pieces of handmade paper into which random text is incorporated and overlaid with transparent paper. Human time and earth time, destruction and creation, recurrently emerge as central themes in Ruston’s art whether touched by fire or ice.
Chris Ruston Are We Listening? (2013) Handmade paper, ink, transparent paper 15cm x 10cm
In capturing these themes, The Great Gathering (2015) may be Ruston’s masterpiece — so far — in making visible how the world touches us, and how we touch the world. In this work, she has drawn her inspiration from ammonite fossils on display in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge, and the Colchester Natural History Museum. The Great Gathering first appeared as an installation at the Colchester Natural History Museum, which is housed fittingly — especially for this work — in a deconsecrated church.
The Great Gathering, Seven books, seven moments in time (2015) Natural History Museum, Colchester, Essex, England Photo credit: Chris Ruston
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering, Seven books, seven moments in time (2015) On display at Turn the Page, Norwich, England, May 2016 Photo credit: Chris Ruston
Ruston writes:
Using the ammonites spiral shape as a starting point, these books represent the unfolding story of evolution. The humble ammonite is an abundant index fossil, easily recognised, and a regular feature in museum collections. Often associated with journeys, symbolically these particular fossils are believed to have absorbed the knowledge of the Universe from across the centuries.
Science and art are the presiding geniuses over many works of book art.
In The sciences of the artificial (1969), Herbert Simon emphasized: “The natural sciences are concerned with the way things are” and engineering, with the way things ought to be to attain goals. Like the scientist, the artist, too, is concerned with the way things are. They are the raw material with which the artist works or to which he or she responds. But like the engineer or the designer, the artist is concerned with the way things ought to be to make visible “the way things are”:
The Great Gathering (2016) Chris Ruston Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how a solander box ought to be constructed to operate with the work and, in enclosing it, be “the work”;
The Great Gathering (2016) Chris Ruston Photo credit: Chris Matthews
what materials (photos from the Hubble telescope) ought to be used to reflect a moment in time;
The Great Gathering (2016) Chris Ruston Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how thread, tape and stitch ought to be to hold together a spine that will flex and spiral into the shape of a fossil;
The Great Gathering (2016) Chris Ruston Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how the color of the material ought to be juxtaposed with the material’s altered shape to carry meaning;
The Great Gathering (2016) Chris Ruston Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how the shift from content to blankness ought to be juxtaposed with the material’s altered shape to carry meaning;
The Great Gathering (2016) Chris Ruston Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how the selection and alteration of text ought to be made to show the fixity and flux of knowledge and ourselves;
The Great Gathering (2016) Chris Ruston Photo credit: Chris Matthews
and how our reflection in the mirror in Volume VII under the maker’s tools and the made thing ought to implicate us — a theme echoed above by Holuhraun, 2014-2015 — in an ongoing process of making and remaking.
For her next invitation to the viewer to follow, unravel secrets and attend closely, Ruston is returning to the ocean.
Inspired by Philip Hoare’s Leviathan and his fascination with Melville’s Moby Dick, Ruston recently began research into whales and whaling logs for her next work. Like evolution, here is a subject of grandeur, expanse and time, even fire and ice. The sketchbook pages below tantalize. How will the artist, this time, make visible how the world touches us?
*In Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the main character’s manservant is Leporello, who, when singing the Catalogue Aria, produces a book that endlessly unfolds the list of Don Giovanni’s conquests.
When Andrew Hayes told me it was e.e. cummings’ 100 poems he had found in the middle of the stacks of books awaiting a bookshelf he planned to build, I winced. Cummings has always been hard for me to figure. I was hoping for a more accessible book as a pretext to kick off our interview.
If you have not encountered one of these interviews on Books On Books, I should explain. The idea is that the book artist selects a book from the middle of the home or studio bookshelf, opens it to the middle, and tells me the author, title and page number. After tracking down the book, I send off some questions and so the interview begins.
Stalagmites of books in the home of Andrew Hayes, book artist
It turned out that cummings was hard to access for Andrew as well. He wrote:
As I took the book from its place in the middle I had to take care, as you can see this is not the most efficient way to retrieve a book. I was able to carefully remove the book with out the top half toppling down, this time…
Just like extracting the meaning from the poem that just happened to be bookmarked in the middle of the cummings volume. The poem begins:
kind)
YM&WC
(of sort of)
A soursweet bedtime
and ends:
iSt
ep
into the not
merely immeasurable into
the mightily alive the
dear beautiful eternal night
Until Andrew carefully pulled out this volume bookmarked by his partner Kreh Mellick, he had not read it. “To be honest, I do not read as much as I would like, ….” Still, I wonder if, as his eyes moved through the broken-up layers of syntax and the juxtaposition of the “soursweet bedtime” story with “the mightily alive the/ dear beautiful eternal night”, he recognized something of his own?
Hade, 2013 Steel, book pages, and copper 16” x 6” x 3” Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
The title of this piece is Hade. “Hade” is a geological term, like Placer and Lode (titles of these other striking sculptures).
Placer, 2013 Steel, book pages, and brass 10” x 7” x 9” Reproduced with permission of the artist Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
Lode, 2013 Steel and book pages 16” x 7” x 2.5” Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
Hade refers to “the angle of inclination from the vertical of a vein (geology), fault, or lode”. In Hade the yellowed pages slip between the parenthesis of steel plates like the sense lode through the fractured syntax of e.e. cummings’ poem. This is book art for the sensualist, much as most of cummings’ better poems are words for the sensualist. It exudes appreciation and care for the material of which it is made. That comes through clearly in Andrew’s response to my question “As an artist whose work has an intimate relationship to ‘the book’, could you describe the effect this has on you when you are reading books in general?”:
… as I read a book I love watching it wear and change as I pass through the pages. I’m sure this happens with everyone’s books, but I love this transformation. I find it happens best in shoes and books. I have a hard time keeping my hands clean so my books take a beating, I almost don’t need a book marker because I can just turn to the first clean page. It is funny I don’t like to dog ear pages I feel like that is almost disrespectful in a way, but I just like seeing what happens to the book as it serves its function. … for me finding a book that has been seasoned is like finding two stories. I like figuring out who read the book before and reading the notes and things I find in the books I end up using for sculpture.
An e.e. cummings poem can amuse like a Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson contraption, but always with a sting at the end. Andrew clearly has a love of contraptions, words and paradox as well.
Balastae, 2013 Steel and book pages 16” x 8” x 3” Reproduced with permission of the artist Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
“Balastae” is an ancient variant on “ballistae”– the oversized Roman crossbow, comparable to a catapult or trebuchet. Its kinetic energy is captured here in the potential energy of the pages of words poised to fly over the steel. The contrast and tension between the kinetic and potential, between noun/verb and tool/rest, between paper and metal, characterize many of Andrew’s titles and works, for example, Kedge and Plow.
Kedge, 2013 Steel, book pages, and brass 9.5” x 18” x 9” Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
My favorite works are Shift, Waver, Swarm and Kedge. The latter, in particular, captures the paradoxes in Andrew’s works; the word is noun and verb (transitive and intransitive) all in one: a nautical term for a light anchor, also the term for the act of warping a vessel and the term for moving a vessel by pulling on the anchor. Shift and Waver capture the kinetic energy of his works and beg to be circled and viewed from every angle like any of the dynamic figures of Giambologna.
Shift, 2013 Steel, book pages, and brass 11” x 5” x 2” Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
Waver, 2013 Steel, book pages, and brass, 16” x 9” x 9” Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
And Swarm – ah, yes – like swarming bees, words have gathered across the splayed edges of the pages, whirling up framed by brass-riveted metal. Swarm is one of the biologically allusive pieces along with Divaricate, reflecting how Andrew’s imagination ranges over the words, objects and concepts in so many domains: the architectural (Prohedria, Mullion),
Swarm, 2013 Steel, book pages, and brass 13” x 14” x 3” Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
nautical (Helm, Kedge), agricultural (Harrow, Plow) and military (Sentry, Citadel) as well as others ripe for verbal and visual puns. Witty as well as sensual, there is almost something of the Metaphysical poets about his work. One such work of metaphysical visual and verbal punning is Wry. Definitions of the word invariably include “twisted”, “distorted”, “lopsided” and apply it to facial features such as “a wry grin” or “wry mouth”. Now take a look at Wry:
Wry, 2013 Steel, book pages, and brass 7” x 8” x 3” Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo credit: Steve Mann, Black Box Photography
Book art can easily fall off into mere craftwork. On the one hand, the book artist requires the freight that the book’s content and form carry, requires it somewhat analogously to the way Eric Gill required Hopton-Wood Stone for his sculpture. But the degree to which the freight weighs down the treatment, or the handling does not take the material beyond itself, that is the degree by which the work is closer to handicraft than to art. From the way that Andrew writes of his perspective on the freight that his found material carries with it, you can understand why each of his works — solid and dense as they are — translates the raw material beyond itself:
When making work I take my love for the used book and search for pages that I can use in my sculpture. The book pages are a loaded found material. Other materials I use like steel that I find at the scrap yard come with built in history as well but it may not be as universal as the book pages. The books I am drawn to are usually worn or rich with color or deckled edges, but that is just the beginning. It is always a surprise when I cut the pages from their binding. This is when I try to find a way that I can compose the pages into a new shape in combination with steel.
To find a union of metal and the printed page as rich and tactile as that created by Andrew, we would have to hark back to the days of hot metal typesetting or farther still to the chained library. But, while the titles of Andrew’s works may evoke the historical or archaeological, the works themselves do not assume the printed book’s demise; they emphasize and celebrate the material of the book.
It is strange how these objects – books and scraps of metal that have their own individual logic and structural coherence, both material and semantic – become an object of art. In each – book or scrap steel – raw material has been amassed and wrought (words, paper, ink and cloth; or iron, carbon, manganese and nickel) to make a finished thing whose physicality inheres and obtrudes. The ways in which those raw materials are amassed and wrought into objects such as dictionaries or kitchen sinks create meaning and accumulate meanings by use and context. Then along comes Andrew Hayes. Drawing on his experience as a welder, his work as a student with fabricated steel and his time as a Fellow at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, Andrew takes these found objects with their own logic and transforms them into this realm we call art.
Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies”, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 20 September 2011, accessed 11 January 2014:http://www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu/articles/yonan.html#. Yonan notes the discomfort of art historians in addressing art as I have addressed Andrew Hayes’ work: ‘… fore- grounding the idea exalts art history into a philosophical endeavor, whereas emphasizing matter renders the discipline subject to what could be called “the fear of the tchotchke.” … the trinketization of art.’
Drawing to its close, does 2014 have any more treats or presents to bestow beyond the return of the Mystery Book Artist of Edinburgh and the debut of “The Bookbinder” from New Zealand’s Trick of the Light Theatre?
The MBAE has donated a new sculpture — a fantastical paper replica of the 16th century merchant’s house known as Riddles Court set behind the Royal Mile — in support of its renovation as home to the Patrick Geddes Centre for Learning and Conservation. The name of the building and that of the center could not be more appropriate. This is the 12th gift to Edinburgh’s literary establishment from the artist whose identity remains a mystery. As well, Geddes featured in the MBAE’s very first gift in 2011 to the Scottish Poetry Library, whose slogan “By leaves we live” originated with Geddes:
read the source poem here). A regular but still anonymous frequenter of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the MBAE posted this video
of the Riddles Court sculpture in progress, echoing serendipitously “The Bookbinder”, a performance piece on the other side and bottom half of the globe by Trick of the Light Theatre this year.
The Bookbinder Copyright 2014 Trick of the Light Theatre
Written and performed by Ralph McCubbin Howell, directed by Hannah Smith, with music by Tane Upjohn Beatson, “The Bookbinder” incorporates book sculpture as pop-up book theater and was first performed at Arty Bees Bookshop during the New Zealand Fringe Festival 2014.
What a pleasure and gift that would be to find the MBAE and “The Bookbinder” in a common festival. If holiday wish lists are allowed, let’s add to it Moonbot Studios, home of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.
DS: I absolutely remember. I was living in London with my spouse and family as part of a study abroad program my spouse was leading. Each day, after all were at school or otherwise occupied, I would head out in pursuit of art, medical museums, natural history oddities or any number of things and on one day I went to the British Library to see an exhibition, 
She Returns
Books On Books 