Every Thought Generates a Throw of the Dice (2021)

Every Thought Generates a Throw of the Dice: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Translating Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés (2021)
Avant Kinema (Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian)
Booklet self-covered, full-color glossy stock, saddlestitched with staples. H210 x W148 mm. 58 pages, including inside front and back covers. Acquired from Avant Kinema, 17 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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”). This booklet captures those works and concludes with a new translation of the poem.

The subtitle characterizes the works as an interdisciplinary approach to translating the poem, but Dick Higgins’ term “intermedial” might be a more apt description.

Swan’s substitution of feathers and shells for Mallarmé’s words, Broodthaers’ redactions and Pichler’s excisions brings a new form of materiality to Un Coup de Dés. It recalls the similar playfulness of other artists such as Clotilde Olyff with the alphabet.

From an image sequence by Swan, the artists pull together a set of Tarot-like cards to introduce a new angle on the poem’s invocation of chance.

Avant Kinema’s homage is a collage or assemblage of different media distilled in this booklet. The preempted installation might have echoed that of Marine Hugonnier’s The Bedside Book Project (2006-07).

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Clotilde Olyff

Books On Books Collection – Avant Kinema

Every Thought Generates a Throw of the Dice (2021)

Further Reading