Marcel Broodthaers

Review of “COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION)”

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Why should an obscure poem like Stéphane Mallarmé’s groundbreaking Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Poème (1897) have become the cornerstone of an art-industrial complex of literary, critical and artistic responses ranging from essays, books, edited collections, countless editions, and appropriations in the form of fine press livres d’artiste, book art and sculptures, films and theater, ballets and fado, musical compositions, digital programs and installations, and even pavement art? It was never even produced under Mallarmé’s hand in the form he intended. We have the poet’s manuscripts and proofs. We have his son-in-law’s efforts with the publisher Éditions de la Nouvelle Révue Française (NRF) in 1914 to present Un Coup de Dés in accordance with Mallarmé’s plans. In many ways, their liberty of including the preface from the 1897 Cosmopolis version so unsatisfactory to the poet paved the way for artistic/editorial interventions and art-industrial complex to come.

With this exhibition and edited catalogue COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) at the New York Center for Book Arts, Michalis Pichler does not so much ignore the question as answer it by extending the art-industrial complex. The exhibition and catalogue are more than a mere display and list of over 150 works. Taken together and with his own artistic practices, they represent a multi-faceted artwork in its own right. The core constituent of this artwork is Pichler’s extensive collection of editions of Un Coup de Dés, critical works and the numerous instances of the century-plus of appropriations, including his own, of the poem. In effect, Pichler has developed the activity of collecting, appropriating and publishing into an artistic practice. 

(COLLECTION) is the second and further developed instance of Pichler’s practice. The first occurred in Milan in 2016 with an invitation card appropriating the format and title of Marcel Broodthaers’ Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé at the Wide White Space in Antwerp in 1969. Pichler appropriated not only the title and card of Broodthaers’ exhibition, he appropriated its content, redisplaying Broodthaers’ landmark UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (IMAGE) and many of the editions of the poem that Broodthaers had included.

Top: Invitation to Marcel Broodthaers’ Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, December 1969; image courtesy of MACBA. Bottom: Invitation to Michalis Pichler’s Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé, Kunstverein Milano and Il Lazzaretto, 14 December 2016 – 28 January 2017.; with permission of Michalis Pichler.

With its introduction of his landmark (IMAGE), Broodthaers’ exhibition marked a transformative moment for the Mallarméan art-industrial complex. By blotting out the lines of Mallarmé’s poem with strips of black ink, Broodthaers elevated image over text. In its wake, we have had 

  • Jérémie Bennequin’s (OMAGE DÉ-COMPOSITION), (OMAGE) and (FILM)
  • Raffaella della Olga’s (CONSTELLATION), (PERMUTATION) and (TRAME)
  • Sammy Engramer’s (ONDE) or (WAVE)
  • Benjamin Lord’s (SEQUENCE)
  • Michael Maranda’s (LIVRE)
  • Richard Nash’s (ESPACE)
  • Aurélie Noury’s (RUBIK’S CUBE) and (POSTER)
  • Michalis Pichler’s (SCULPTURE) and (MUSIQUE)
  • Sam Sampson’s (((SUN-O)))
  • Klara Vith’s (DISCOURS I-III) 
  • Eric Zboya’s 2018 (VECTEUR) and (TRANSLATIONS)

Like Broodthaers’ (IMAGE), each of these appropriations remakes the poem (and sometimes a previous artist’s remaking) through its parenthetically indicated tag. For instance, Pichler’s (SCULPTURE) replaces Mallarmé’s pages with plexiglas sheets and Broodthaer’s blottings with abrasions. But Pichler’s parenthetical tag (COLLECTION) is omnivorous. It consumes again Broodthaers’ Exposition, eating Mallarmé’s poem in its several incarnations; devours all the parenthetical appropriators, including (SCULPTURE); swallows the many other appropriators lacking a parenthetical tag; and picks its teeth with works that merely allude to the poem’s title. 

The reverse of Pichler’s displayed print Bibliophagia (2024) reveals this cannibalistic metaphor as central to the artistic practice that yields (COLLECTION) as an artwork in its own right. Visitors may miss the import of the print’s reverse side until leaving the exhibition because that side is not displayed, although it can be found on the free copy offered onsite.

Pichler’s 2016 and 2024 exhibitions add another constituent practice to this project: that of performance art, but with the visitor as performer. Like a work of performance art, an exhibition has a venue and displays that serve as the stage setting. Performance art and exhibitions are both time-delimited, fixed within the period and hours of the venue’s availability. Where the length of a performance is constrained by the artist/performer’s stamina, this exhibition’s is constrained by the visitor’s stamina. Fortunately with Pichler’s performances, a less-than-indefatigable visitor has something other than a leaflet of performance notes as guide and souvenir: the volume COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé. This volume’s three essays and two book excerpts work together with the snapshots of the exhibition to put forward this premise that (COLLECTION) is intended as an artistic work in its own right. 

COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé (2024)
Michalis Pichler (ed.)
Perfect bound paperback. H240 x W170 mm. 280 pages. Acquired from AHA-Buch, 22 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In addition to recapitulating the Bibliophagia manifesto, Pichler’s introductory essay provides the background to the appearance and editioning of Un Coup de Dés and also explains the relevance of the two book-excerpts. Pichler’s translation with Misaki Kawabe from Ryōko Sekiguchi’s book”Nagori” is welcome apart from any role it plays in (COLLECTION). As a concept, nagori has popped up in book art with Victor Burgin’s 2020 essay “Nagori: Writing with Barthes” and with Nagori (2023), a sculptural artist’s book by Ximena Pérez Grobet and and Kati Riquelme. Depending on context, nagori can mean the ephemeral imprint of withdrawing waves, a late-season wistfulness for the taste of early-season fruit or tea, what remains after the passing of a person, an object, an event, or the atmosphere of something missing. Pichler ties this to the absence of an authoritative edition of the poem.

The sense of something missing also comes up in the second book excerpt: Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre’s Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (Polity, 2020). Pichler enlists them to establish what distinguishes a collection from a heap on the one hand and a stockpile on the other (pp.73-90), not merely accumulating items in a collection but curating according to governing principles, similarities, differences, and the feel for what is missing. (Recall the “missing” bird on both sides of Bibliophagia above?) In a sense, the act of collection or curation is a form of appropriation, and in that sense, Pichler’s governing principle of collection has been the appropriation of appropriations but always with a hungry eye for the next. To paraphrase Bibliophagia, Pichler has made many acquaintances and chosen but a few as his favorite meal.

Here, Annette Gilbert’s essay chimes in to assert that “curating has now ascended to a full-fledged artistic practice in its own right” where “literary curators are also increasingly succeeding in creating ‘a new artist-like identity’ for themselves and inscribing their ‘collections’ as autonomous works of their own right in their own oeuvre, of which Michalis Pichler’s COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) … is a striking example.” (p.52)

Tellingly, Gilbert’s assertion comes in the context of mapping the field of “appropriation literature”  as a manifestation of the pressures of an affluent society giving rise to “new strategies of artistic production and the creation of meaning” (p.29), echoing Felix Stalder’s observation: “in the digital condition, one of the methods (if not the most fundamental method) enabling humans to participate […] in the collective negotiation of meaning is the system of creating references.” (p.31) And what is Pichler’s collecting if not a systematic creation of references among the works in (COLLECTION)?

Craig Dworkin’s essay bizarrely and brilliantly connects Mallarmé with another system of creating references: Alphonse Bertillon’s identification system for the Parisian Préfecture de Police. Not only did the Bertillon system overlap with Mallarmé in the 19th century, it turns out that its principles map directly onto Mallarmé’s conception of Le Livre as stacks of unbound sheets filed in the cubbyholes of a filing cabinet and awaiting a theatrical performance of a séance leader’s withdrawing sheets to arrive at a poem (rather than the flic‘s pulling them to arrive at the identification of a suspect). Dworkin goes on to make convincing links to Klaus Scherübel’s styrofoam edition of Le Livre, to Dan Graham’s “Poem Schema”, to Ernest Fraenkel’s Les Dessins trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé, to Mario Diacono’s and Marcel Broodthaers’ blotted versions of the poem, to Derek Beaulieu’s tattered sails (after un coup de des), and to Rainier Lericolais’ and Michalis Pichler’s die-cut perforations, among others. All of which leads to Dworkin’s assured conclusion: “The editions and appropriations of UN COUP DE DÉS alone are substantial enough to have led to an exhibition, and a sense of the assembled collection, UN COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION), as an artistic work in its own right.” (p.67)

The “Catalog” section, which includes over 150 pages of images of book covers and spreads variously at 1:5, 1:2 and 1:1 scale against a black background, presents more items than are displayed in the exhibition. One of them is Pichler’s editorial intervention in that very first editorial intervention in the poem: the PRÉFACE required of Mallarmé in 1897 by Cosmopolis and reproduced by his son-in-law in the 1914 edition. Here Pichler’s annotations call out 10 key aspects of the poem and Mallarmé’s thoughts about it that would lead to the overlapping industry of artistic homage, appropriation, expropriation, transculturation, transvaloration and cannibal translation or bibliophagia as Pichler variously puts it.

This contribution from Pichler not only echoes many of Annette Gilbert’s points in mapping the field of appropriation literature but also confirms her assertion: “Pichler’s project … positions itself decidedly both as an independent artistic work and as artistic research, which demonstratively opens itself up to chance and serendipity through its collection policy – in resonance with a dice roll as the object of the collection ….” (p.39).

COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) — the bookwork — belongs in any library with an interest in Mallarmé, book art or the cutting edge of contemporary art. The exhibition at the Center for Book Arts closes on 1 May 2024. Copies of the catalogue for sale remain on hand as do free copies of the print Bibliophagia (2024) and the invitation from Pichler’s 2016 Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé.

As with the 2016 exhibition, the majority of items on display were accessible, making the exhibition a rare hands-on experience.

Courtesy of Center for Book Arts

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

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE) 2009
Michalis Pichler

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (RUBIK’S CUBE) 2005; UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (POSTER) 2008
Aurélie Noury

Paul Heimbach was perhaps the first after Marcel Broodthaers to use translucent paper in an artist’s book interpretation of Mallarmé’s poem. In würfelwürfe, for each roll of the dice, the results on the upper faces appear on a recto page, the results on the bottom faces appear on the verso.

Declaration of interest: COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé kindly cites Books On Books’ “‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation’ — An Online Exhibition“.

Books On Books Collection – Rainier Lericolais

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Carton Perforé: Piano (2020)

Carton Perforé: Piano (2020)
Rainier Lericolais
Single-fold card, single fold folio of sheet music. H270 x W210 mm, 4 unnumbered pages. © DTD Éditions. Paris, France. Acquired from the artist, 15 May 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

In 2009, Rainier Lericolais created one of the more unusual works of homage to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1914). In Carton Perforé, 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.

Carton Perforé © Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou. Photo: Lili Kim. Displayed with permission of Rainier Lericolais.

Carton Perforé © Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou. Photo: Lili Kim. Displayed with permission of Rainier Lericolais.

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.

In 2020, Lericolais revisited his visual barrel-organ homage to create a version that could be heard as well as seen. Under the Direct to Disk Éditions label, Lericolais published Carton Perforé as sheet music for piano along with a recording of it. Just as Broodthaers and other hommageurs signaled their homage by changing Mallarmé’s subtitle from Poème to Image, Sculpture, Musique, etc., Lericolais adds the subtitle Piano, paying homage to their tributes, Mallarmé’s poem and, humorously, his own earlier work. A performance of the piano version can be heard here.

Further Reading

“Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation”. 1 May 2022. Bookmarking Book Art.

Books On Books Collection – Daniela Deeg and Cynthia Lollis

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Ein Würfelwurf kann den Zufall nicht abschaffen
A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance (2011)

Ein Würfelwurf kann den Zufall nicht abschaffen
A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance (2011)
Daniela Deeg and Cynthia Lollis
Stab-bound book with added screwpost binding in a vinyl cover, housed in a greyboard box with title stamped on lid. H230 x W345 mm, 40 pages. Edition of 18, of which this is #7. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp, 31 March 2022.
Photos: Courtesy of ETC Press; Books On Books Collection. Video: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artists.

Removed from its greyboard box, this artists’ book by Daniela Deeg and Cynthia Lollis appears clouded by its overlapping layers of vinyl covers. As the top cover turns to the left and the next layer turns to the right, the shine of the covers’ slick side combines with the dull side to create an impression of wet fog, parting to reveal an equally cloudy translucent double-folded leaf of Cristalla paper on which is printed Übergang and transition in the typeface Sabon in roman font and gray. With the Übergang/transition page turned over rightwards, the inner double-page spread shows three words in blue italic: Fluß, flux and fleuve. If the whole Fluß/flux/fleuve spread is turned over leftwards, Übergang/transition reappears on the left along with stroom in blue italic in the center and transition and overgang in gray roman on the right. When the transition/overgang page turns rightwards, the words toeval and Zufall appear in blue italic.

What is going on? To be sure, an artist’s book entitled Ein Würfelwurf kann den Zufall nicht abschaffen / A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance implies an homage to Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard. The most famous homage to date comes from the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers, who replaced the lines of verse with black strips in an edition with translucent paper. Deeg and Lollis do include those redactive bars in their work. But what has that to do with all those gray and blue words?

The bilingual title suggests that questions of language are in play. Even if, however, the words are recognized as German, English, Dutch/Flemish and French — and understood as rough multilingual synonyms for “transition”, “river”, “flux” and “chance” — a few hints about the rules of the game would help. There is no colophon at the end of the book, but with all the turning over this way and that, one might think to turn the box over. And there it is.

So there is a lot going on. About the word list as a starting point, more later. Another starting point — not fully clear from the colophon — lies in the reference to the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. Collaboration at a distance and during joint travels over texts and visuals is part of the artists’ working process.

We often travel to other places to inspire our artists’ books, and we’ll select an author that we admire to act as our guide. Each of our books includes our native languages, English and German, plus the language that represents the place we visited. Ein Würfelwurf was a little different. We’d just completed a decade of making books together. Instead of going somewhere new, this book was to be a look back to places that we had traveled in those ten years. We were printing this book on a residency in Belgium, so this time we looked for a Belgian to lead us. Because our book would be focused on language, its poetic potential, and the translation of words, we chose an artist as our guide. Specifically, we chose one who translated printed words into visual form. Both of us admired Broodthaers’ conceptual work, and we thought that it was fitting to quote his Un Coup de Dés artwork. [Correspondence from Cynthia Lollis with Books On Books Collection, 4 April 2022]

Some of the photographs to which Lollis refers depict buildings from multiple locales, interiors, a desk with an open book, traffic lights, a landscape from on high, and other scenes difficult to recognize because all are rendered in screen prints as backgrounds to words or other photographs rendered as simplified outlines and silhouettes. Most of the outlines and silhouettes such as the ones of a cuckoo clock’s counterweights, a chandelier, mailboxes, crowd control stanchions, human figures, a park bench or buildings are easily recognizable even though they may be turned on their sides, split in two or enlarged. Two recurrent images that require some deciphering are of street lamps and signposts appearing as overlapping outlines and silhouettes from various perspectives and positioned at various angles. On the left below, the silhouette of a street sign topped with a wagon wheel of globe lamps is more easily detected if looked at from the side. On the right below, the silhouette of an ornate streetlamp seen from an angle below is transformed into a white outline, enlarged and turned on its side so that it seems to be a map. (The blue background is a screen printed photo of an interior with windows, tables and chandeliers.)

To return to the words scattered throughout, the images have detectible relationships to them — often with ease, sometimes only by pondering the synonyms. The outline of the street sign appears close to Übergang, which can mean “crossroads” as well as transition, which also appears on the same page, but on a double-page spread with the outline of the same street sign, the words Fluß/flux/fleuve appear. Making the connection here between image and words can be as challenging as deciphering Mallarmé’s metaphors, and that could well be the point. Also, there is something Mallarméan about the way the book requires the reader to hold a set of multilingual near-synonyms in suspension — like bated breath — while turning the pages. Sometimes a synonym appears for a set of words some pages later and in the context of other words. For example, stroom (Dutch for “flow”) appears only after the Fluß/flux/fleuve pages have been tucked away, and then it appears across from transition and Overgang.

The reason that some words are set in gray roman and others in blue italic goes back the work’s starting point and creative process. Not sure where it might lead, the artists began creating a list of English words in 2001. In 2011, with the aim of creating this book, Deeg and Lollis arrived at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium with design ideas and three lists in hand: the original set (5 words), another in English (5) and one in German (5). When they began the task of translation to create a final list of 30 (15 pairs), the realities of ambiguity and multiple meanings across and within languages arose. Undaunted, they handed over their lists to Belgian artist colleagues to see what clarification an injection of more perspectives, more languages (Dutch/Flemish and French) and therefore chance might bring. The 2001 list appears in gray roman, the 2011 in blue italic.

Another element of chance entered with the screen printing and folds of the translucent paper. The text and images seem to rise up through the folded pages and through each other to float on the surface. With all of these compositional, conceptual and material aspects, not only must this work be read and looked at carefully, it must be felt and listened to. Even as the book is lifted from its box, its Cristalla Transparent paper rustles inside the slippery covers, and every turn of page emits a symphony.

Additional images courtesy of the artists

Further Reading

“Meet Cynthia Lollis and Daniela Deeg“. 26 March 2019. Voyage ATL. Accessed 30 March 2022.

Annwn, David. 4 August 2020. “Solid Light: Ways Through Transparent Books“. Glasfryn Project: Junction Box. 13. Accessed 30 March 2022.

Chen, Julie. 2013. 500 handmade books Volume 2. New York, NY : Lark. Includes the Deeg and Lollis work.

College Book Art Association. N.D. “Daniela Deeg and Cynthia Delaney Lollis: Featured Artist“. Accessed 4 April 2022.

Paton, David M., and Jack M. Ginsberg. 2017. Booknesses: artists’ books from the Jack Ginsberg collection. Johannesburg, South Africa : University of Johannesburg Art Gallery. Includes the Deeg and Lollis work, which can be viewed in the online version.

Stark, Trevor. 2020. Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Books On Books Collection – Bernadette O’Toole

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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.

Variant Sail (2015); As If (2016)

Variant Sail (2015) and As If (2016)
Bernadette O’Toole
Presentation box. H240 x W172 mm. Acquired from the artist, 1 April 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Bernadette O’Toole’s two small booklets first appeared in Sharon Kivland’s MA Bibliothèque and are now out of print. The presentation case in which they arrived conveys her recurrent practice or technique of recontextualizing. A copy or copies from an edition may be re-presented so as to create a new work or works. Variant Sail and As If constitute a case in point.

Variant Sail (2015)

Variant Sail (2015)
Bernadette O’Toole
Booklet, two-staple saddle-stitch. H190 x W130 mm, 24 pages. Edition of 25, of which this is #6.
Photos: Courtesy of Bernadette O’Toole. Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of artist.

The booklet Variant Sail contains reproductions of twelve digital prints (H38 x W57 cm). The prints were created by scanning and digitally manipulating each of the double-page spreads of Un Coup de Dés in Photoshop, producing twelve variants with each one foregrounding the gutter in a different way. The manipulation has made Mallarmé’s text faintly detectable but indecipherable and rendered the double-page spreads as entire blancs — variants, as it were, of the white spaces (les blancs) to which Mallarmé refers in his poem’s preface.

[From the NRF/Gallimard 1914 edition]

The ‘blanks’ indeed take on importance, at first glance; the versification demands them, as a surrounding silence, to the extent that a fragment, lyrical or of a few beats, occupies, in its midst, a third of the space of paper: I do not transgress the measure, only disperse it. The paper intervenes each time as an image, of itself, ends or begins once more, accepting a succession of others, and, since, as ever, it does nothing, of regular sonorous lines or verse – rather prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear, and as long as they last, in some precise intellectual performance, that is in variable positions, nearer to or further from the implicit guiding thread, because of the verisimilitude the text imposes. 

[A.S. Kline, “Mallarmé’s Preface of 1897“]

From Mallarmé’s marked-up proofs for his planned deluxe edition, we know that he viewed the double-page spread, not the single page, as the poem’s primary structural unit. Each of O’Toole’s blank double-page spreads can be seen as a voile alternative (“variant sail”), a phrase appearing on the NRF/Gallimard edition’s second double-page spread. With a different foregrounding of the gutter in each of her double-page spreads, O’Toole underscores both the variance within her Variant Sail and the important constancy of the double-page spread in the poem to which she is paying homage.

A bit more esoterically, the double-page spread suggests the quantity 2, an allusion to the result of thrown dice, their two faces up. It may also allude to the poem’s revolutionary versification, challenging French poetry’s Alexandrine, the traditional measure of 12 syllables usually divided into two hemistichs. It seem no accident that O’Toole has chosen a pattern of two-word titles for her booklets.

As If (2016)

As If (2016)
Bernadette O’Toole Booklet, two-staple saddle stitch. H205 x W140 mm, 16 pages. Edition of 25, of which this is #6.
Photo: Courtesy of Bernadette O’Toole; Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of artist.

The prints for Variant Sail in turn inspired paintings (same dimensions) that are reproduced in the second booklet As If, which takes its two-word title from the poem’s central double-page spread, the one beginning and ending COMME SI (“as if”). Mallarmé’s words are no longer detectable. What is detectable instead is each brushstroke on the painted surfaces. It is as if the work As If appropriates the work Variant Sail, just as Variant Sail appropriates Un Coup de Dés.

“Appropriation” may not be the right characterization. Re-contextualizing, re-purposing or re-cycling perhaps. Consider where O’Toole goes next with these two other works not in the Books On Books Collection at the moment.

Variant Sail II (2016)

For Variant Sail (II), 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]

Variant Sail II has appropriated, re-cycled, re-purposed or re-contextualized the works Variant Sail and As If in several ways — by transforming the surface brushstroke into a three-dimensional object, by juxtaposing those two works (through the gesture) with the translation

A Rare State (2018)

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.

False Mansion~1 and Towards this Ultimate Conjunction with Probability~1 from A Rare State © Bernadette O’Toole. Images and permission to display, courtesy of Bernadette O’Toole.

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, or the 4 triangles constituting the face of a die across the double-page spread. This expansion is also an expansion of O’Toole’s technique of appropriation, re-cycling, re-purposing or re-contextualizing to create new artwork. It is as if her every thought emits a throw of the dice.

Variant Sail, Ex Libris Gallery, 2016. © Bernadette O’Toole. Image and permission to display, courtesy of Bernadette O’Toole.

Further Reading

“Jérémie Bennequin“. 15 December 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Kathy Bruce“. 23 December 2021. Books On Books Collection.

“Marine Hugonnier“. 8 April 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Jorge Méndez Blake“. 16 September 2020. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Michalis Pichler“. 19 August 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Raffaella della Olga“. 8 December 2020. Books On Books Collection.

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).

Davies, Gardner. 1992. Vers une Explication Rationelle du “Coup de Dés”. Paris: Corti.

Kline, A.S., trans. 2007. “Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance). Poetry in Translation. © Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved.

Meillassoux, Quentin, and Robin Mackay. 2012. The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Bookmarking Book Art – Richard Nash

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UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD — ESPACE (2012)

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD — ESPACE (2012)
Richard Nash
Hand-cut concertina with inkjet printed turn-in cover. Closed: H286 x W204 mm; Open: W 11.2m. Unique. Acquired from the artist for donation to the Bodleian Library, 2 April 2022. Photos: Courtesy of Richard Nash; Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from the artist.

Credit goes to Rafaella della Olga’s Constellation (2009) for being the first homage to Un Coup de Dés to remind us that constellations appear against the blackness of space, not the whiteness of paper. But the first to apply this reminder in 180gsm Jet Black Canford paper to a double homage to Mallarmé’s poem and Marcel Broodthaers‘ version is Richard Nash’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard — Espace (2012).

The preface

The opening pages

COMME SI … COMME SI spread

Additional photos courtesy of Richard Nash.

On the flyleaf, Nash has added his own verse entitled “Espace”, which set in Didot Regular is equally a typographic and poetic . Espace has a monumentality to it that encourages imagining it at a larger scale in different material; for example, a sculpture of cut steel painted black, installed along a seaside strand and backlit at night. In that evocative physical characteristic, Nash’s homage evokes the oracular and vatic tone of

RIEN / N’AURA EU LIEU / QUE LE LIEU / EXCEPTÉ / PEUT-ÊTRE / UNE CONSTELLATION (“Nothing will have taken place but the place except perhaps a constellation”)

and

Toute pensée émet un Coup de Dés (“All thought emits a throw of the dice”).

On Innards (2015)

On Innards (2015)
Amanda Couch, Mindy Lee, Andrew Hladky and Richard Nash
Limited edition publication individually stamped and numbered, digitally printed and cut, folded, bound and finished by hand. H260 x W205 mm, 200 pages of various intersecting formats and custom binding. Limited edition of 200, of which this is #74. Acquired from Richard Nash, 2 April 2022.
Photos: Courtesy of Richard Nash; Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from Richard Nash.

On Innards began as a multidisciplinary project to explore how the way we think of guts and digestion has changed, how that might drive the creative process, and how it affects our sense of self. Book art and the human body (interior and exterior) are no strangers. Carolee Schneemann’s Parts of a Body House Book (1972/2020), Ron King’s Turn Over Darling (1994) and Matisse’s Model (1996), Joyce Cutler Shaw’s The Anatomy Lesson: Unveiling the Fasciculus Medicinae (2004) and Casey Gardner’s Body of Inquiry: A Triptych Opening to a Corporeal Codex (2011) among others come to mind. On Innards introduces a very different level of intimacy though — one not for the squeamish or scatologically averse.

Artists Amanda Couch, Mindy Lee and Andrew Hladky initiated the the project and presented initial results in a panel held at the interdisciplinary conference “Body Horror” in Athens, in 2013. Subsequently, Richard Nash joined the project to curate an exhibition and event in 2014, which included text by Carlo Comanducci, Giskin Day, Dr. Simon Gabe, Nathaniel Storey, and Jamie Sutcliffe; performance by Kerry Gallagher; and illustration by Jenny Pengilly. Drawing together the output and record of the project, Nash created this hybrid research journal and artists’ book, launched at the Whitechapel London Art Book Fair in 2015.

Like Espace, this work displays Nash’s sculptural approach to text, graphics, ideas and the book as raw material for an artistic creation. The bookwork interweaves, concertinas, folds out, pops up, gate-folds, roll-folds and unwinds. Used to reveal reflections on the project, recalled events, artefacts, images, and stories from the conference, these various “book innards” become an embodiment of digestion. It also somewhat resembles an expandable file folder, its contents secured by a long looping slip-knotted red thread sewn through a heavy card spine pasted to red endpapers that are pasted to brown cover papers. Despite the resemblance to a landscape portfolio, the contents proceed in portrait codex fashion with the tabbed half-title “page” below. The half-title, however, is the first panel of a double-sided accordion that extends from that tabbed half-title page all the way to the last (also tabbed) page of the book (also below). When the half-title turns, it reveals a description of the contents (also below) printed on the double-sided accordion.

Landscape view of the spine and external thread binding.

Portfolio view of endpaper and half-title page. Note the glimpse in the center of the spine’s interior.

Left: The verso page or panel gives a description of the contents of the double-sided accordion.
Right: last panel of the double-sided accordion.

The valleys of the double-sided accordion hold the various other parts of the book, some of which are secured in their valleys by the red thread’s looping over and down their centers, and some of which are secured by being folded around or over the thread-secured parts. The dimensions of those parts vary, and other parts lie loose. This can lead to the guts of the book spilling out, surely not an accident! Nor is it necessarily a bad thing, for reading the other side of the accordion requires removing all of the contents from the binding.

The first interleaved artefacts and images come from Amanda Couch and Mindy Lee. Couch’s first item is a passe-partout construction displaying at the start “Organ-Offal Caecum Andouillette” (2015) and at the end “Organ-Offal Stomach-Tripe” (2015). The passe-partouts combine black-and-white photos of anatomical engravings with color photos of the gut (see above), and between them is a photo of an annotated recipe for beginner’s tripe or chitterlings. Her second item (see below) is a pamphlet entitled “Reflection on Digestion: The Mouth” (2013), recounting and illustrating a presentation/performance/tasting of a serving of tongue that Couch gave during the “Body Horror” conference.

Lee’s contributions appear (also below) on the larger pages embraced by and interleaved with Couch’s two items. The images display photographs of works entitled Better Out than In: Venus VI, IV & X (2012) and Splatter Platter (2009). In Better Out, Lee’s “canvasses” are paper plates, but the perspective from which Venus is perceived suggests the underside of a closed, soiled toilet seat.

Couch’s “Reflection on Digestion” pamphlet interleaved with photos of Lee’s Better Out than In series.

Detail from photo of Lee’s Splatter-Platter; enclosing page from Couch’s annotated and illustrated recipe for tripe.

Andrew Hladky’s contributions are prints of three-dimensional works made of oil and bamboo sticks on wood panels ranging from 3 inches to 10 inches in depth. To capture this, On Innards delivers the print of It ain’t us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals (2015) as a pop-up box (see below), and the prints of Well, This is Goodbye (2007-15) and The Clearing (2011-14) are cut and folded such that they spill out well beyond the trim size of the portfolio (also below).

Hladky’s It ain’t us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals (original work 12 x 18 x 10 inches). The other side of this box also bears a print of a detail view of the work.

Haldky’s Well, This is Goodbye (original work 8.5 x 10.5 x 3 inches)

Hladky’s The Clearing unfolded (original work 61.5 x 43.5 x 6.5 inches), with Giskin Day’s “End Notes” interleaved.

As mentioned, some works are loose inserts, but some of the loose inserts are folded over a panel of the core double-sided accordion. Nash uses that structural feature to emphasize one of the hallmarks of book art: self-reflexivity. Below, straddling a mountain fold in the core double-sided accordion is another double-sided accordion. On one side, there is a photo of Couch’s Entrail Troyen (2014), a three-dimensional tube knitted from leftover cured saucisson sec shredded into ribbon-like thread. The title is derived from the French sausage Andouillette de Troyes, which harks back to the pamphlet “Reflection on Digestion: The Mouth” (2013) and its andouillette and chitterlings.

In case the reader misses the connection to the earlier item, the other side of this double-sided accordion presents a condensed photo of Couch’s nine-meter long accordion book entitled Reflection on Digestion (2012), a continuous line of handwriting looping back and coiling like the villi of intestines (see the cover of On Innards), relief printed from photo polymer plates on 410 gsm white Somerset satin paper. Couch uses this work in her reading performances of the same name. (Did I mention self-reflexivity?)

Loose double-sided accordion fold item displaying Couch’s Entrail Troyen on one side and Reflection on Digestion on the other.

Continued commentary on and illustration of this addition to the Books On Books Collection would be to regurgitate the whole work, which is certainly the opposite direction the work takes and which would be unfair to the work’s artists and contributors. After all, On Innards is a limited edition, and as many copies as possible should be ingested by as many institutions possible that are intent on improving their clientele’s digestion of book art.

Signature page concluding the “bibliographical” brochure summarizing the project, sponsors, conference, Blyth Gallery event and the artists’ book in hand, providing its colophon and listing sources and works displayed; penultimate page of the core double-sided accordion.

The “fast food” version?

Further Reading

“Cerith Wyn Evans“. 16 April 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Michalis Pichler“. 19 August 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Michel Lorand“. 22 December 2021. Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Sam Sampson

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Derek Beaulieu (No Press) first published Sam Sampson’s homage to Un Coup de Dés as a handsewn pamphlet in 2020. To celebrate the 125th anniversary of Mallarmé’s initial publication of “the poem that made us modern”, Sampson enlisted Jacinda Torrance of Verso Visual Communications for design, the firm Centurion for printing, and Louise James of The Binding Studio for hand binding to produce this deluxe edition.

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (((SUN-O))) (2022)

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard ((( Sun-O ))) (2022)
Sam Sampson
Handsewn book, H300 x W225 mm, 28 unnumbered pages. Edition of 20 (10, each enclosed in a hinged-lid box with magnetic flap; 10 unboxed), of which this is boxed # 2. Acquired from the artist, 7 April 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

As with most creative works, (((Sun-O))) had multiple points of inception. One of them was an essay Sam Sampson read by Susan Howe and Cole Swensen. They quote Mallarmé’s preface to the poem (“nothing new except a certain distribution of space made within the reading” and speak of his aim to fuse sequential and simultaneous perception, to fully engage the eye and ear, as a result pushing poetry in two directions – toward visual art and toward musical performance. This resonated with a series of poems Sampson was writing and manifests itself in (((Sun-O))):

The physical design and analogy in my rendition is aligned with what I would call the ‘O Poems’. ‘O’ Zero, being the sound that runs through these poems, but I’ve also been interested in the numerical concept of zero: the beginning point, but also the point of departure, the ‘O’ as an ideogram, giving the text a pictorial as well as vocalised movement. [Correspondence with Books On Books Collection, 29 March 2022]

Another of the “O Poems” is Zeroth. Sampson reads it here:

© Sam Sampson. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Zeroth leads to another point of inception: a conversation with Roger Horrocks, a New Zealand poet, writer, film-maker, educator and cultural activist, to whom (((Sun-O))) is dedicated. After reading Zeroth, Horrocks told Sampson that it reminded him of his favorite Seattle experimental metal band at the time – Sunn O))). Sampson describes their sound as slow, heavy, blending diverse genres including “drone, black metal, dark ambient and noise rock”. Sampson’s mulling over the very sound of the band’s name led to free associations with the secondary meanings of drone (surveillance, panopticon). Mulling over the name’s compression of word and the letter O led to his hybridized subtitle (((Sun-O))) “with its parentheses radiating out but never closing”. A potent visual and textual image for a poem touching on, if not touching, the sun, the abyss and the human.

But, of course, the zero point of inception is Un Coup de Dés. On a visually material level, (((Sun-O))) has a scaffolding of bullet-pointed rules, whose lengths are based on measuring each of Mallarmé’s lines, whose weights approximate the variable font sizes, and whose placement matches that in Un Coup de Dés. This lattice serves as the physical structure for the collage of words and O’s that Sampson layers like paint or screenprint onto the page. Some words and lines are upside down like the detritus of a shipwreck. Some words curve and drape between the lines like torn sails. Appropriately, some come from the precisely corresponding pages in Mallarmé’s poem. Faint lines of the circumferences of O’s leap across and down between the lines almost like musical notations.

Within this tangle, Sampson’s own elusive and allusive text plays. Some of its phrases come from traditional song; some fix the geographical location (“blue carbon” places the speaker in a coastal community); some “un-fix” the location (“over the hills and far away”); some are struck through, alerting the reader to be ready to discard and start again; some set the technological time frame (the reference to operating systems like Suse, Symbian and, of course, Solaris). As in Un Coup de Dés, the text’s syntax and placement on the page encourage reading in fits and starts, back and forth. As Sampson puts it:

I wanted [my] poem to somehow capture, as Mallarmé had described it, “the invitation of the great white space”, and the successive, incessant, back-and-forth motions of our eyes travelling from one line to the next, and beginning all over again. [Correspondence with Books On Books Collection, 29 March 2022]

Indeed, before writing Un Coup de Dés, Mallarmé foreshadowed more expansively this phenomenon toward which Sampson strives:

Pourquoi — un jet de grandeur, de pensée ou d’émoi, considérable, phrase poursuivie, en gros caractère, une ligne par page à emplacement gradué, ne maintiendrait-il le lecteur en haleine, la durée du livre, avec appel à sa puissance d’enthousiasme: autour, menus, des groupes, secondairement d’après leur importance, explicatifs ou dérivés — un semis de fioritures. [Oeuvres Complètes, 2, 227]

“Why — couldn’t a considerable burst of greatness of thought or emotion, carried in a sentence in large typeface, gradually placed with one line per page, hold the reader’s bated breath throughout the entire book by appealing to his or her power of enthusiasm: around this [burst], smaller groups of secondary importance, explicating or deriving from the primary phrase — a scattering of flourishes.” [Arnar, 234]

Whereas in Mallarmé’s poem there is a primary sentence in large typeface (“UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD”) off which the secondary groups of phrases and sentences play, (((Sun-O)))‘s primary foil is the combination of two things: the collage made from shards of Mallarmé’s poem and that strange, enjambed subtitle (((Sun-O))). After all, the full title of Sampson’s work is UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (((SUN-O))).

The “Comme si … Comme si” center double-page spread.

Sampson calls Mallarmé’s poem a form of metaphysical gambling, reproducing the sensation of being both in and outside time. Being both in and outside of time — that could be the defining state of human consciousness. Unlike the abstract representation of humanity in Un Coup de Dés, however, (((Sun-O)))‘s representation is concretely personal. The traditional song “Over the Hills and Far Away“, which Sampson cites at the start of (((Sun-O))), can be read as a reference to Horrocks’ departure from New Zealand for the United States in the 1960s. At one point, the speaker addresses Horrocks directly: “Roger / what of these / parallels of blue / sea shanties / masquerading mind-sets / …”. Sampson takes the image of Roger Horrocks’ signature from Horrocks’ copy of an edition of Un Coup de Dés, fragments it and reproduces it on the pages of (((Sun-O))). Did Sampson have in mind the story of René Magritte’s loaning his copy of Un Coup de Dés to Marcel Broodthaers, which led to Broodthaers’ Image version of Mallarmé’s poem? (See Marine Hugonnier’s retelling of the tale here.) The scaffolding of bulleted-pointed lines certainly pays homage to Broodthaers and other “hommageurs by redaction” such as Michalis Pichler, Sammy Engramer and others. (((Sun-O))) is a work of many conversations on many levels across time and time zones.

One of the main topics in (((Sun-O))), however, naturally seems to defy the bridging of the personal and abstract: climate crisis. It is hard to miss the allusions to the global shipwreck that is the climate crisis, engendering rising ocean levels and spastic efforts towards zero carbon emissions based on a computational chaos of competing environmental models and competing economic and political systems. It is clearly of personal concern to the speaker, but that does not take the issue from the abstract to the concretely personal in the way that Horrocks’s signature in a copy of Un Coup de Dés does. Making the climate crisis personal could, of course, run the risk of descending into small talk about the weather.

The references to music and the poem’s demonstration of musicality throughout are also hard to miss, and given its zero point of inception, the poem would be seriously remiss without them. The aim for union of text, sound and graphic image is as central to Sampson’s poem as the manipulation of syntax and les blancs is to Mallarmé’s. The aim’s importance in Sampson’s poem even has the last note and oversized word in the poem:

... the Never / rolling / listing / pitch / & / fall / A solitary / THRUM

The frequency of achieved union may be what puts Sampson’s homage in the front rank.

The special edition of (((Sun-O))) enhances that union in material ways. The design and materials play off Sampson’s cutting into and out of, sticking on and sticking through Un Coup de Dés. Six circles foiled in white on the front cover of the box turn the subtitle into an emblem — a mark maker. On the box’s inside lining, a design of circles and broken circles echoing the collage of O’s in the poem (even hinting at musical notation) is used to designate the number of the copy in the edition of 10. For this copy (#2), straight lines cut through 2 of the circles.

Like the white circles, six die-cut circles on the book’s front cover correspond to the six parentheses of the subtitle and likewise one face of a die. They also recall the hemistich of French poetry’s twelve-syllable Alexandrine, which Un Coup de Dés shattered. An image peeks through the die cuts and, as the cover turns, reveals itself as a collage of the cut-up cover of Horrocks’ copy of the poem and pages of (((Sun-O))). On the back cover, a single large die-cut circle centers on a black-hole sun with a faint, almost invisible ((( Sun-O ))) disappearing into blank/blackness.

By chance or by sly humor, the typeface used is DTL Elzevir. (((Sun-O))) is obviously not in the hunt for absolute fidelity to the edition planned by Mallarmé and Ambroise Vollard in 1896-97, which collapsed with the poet’s death. When Mallarmé’s son-in-law Dr. Edmond Bonniot issued an edition with Gallimard/NRF in 1914, the typeface was Elzevir, allegedly a face that Mallarmé detested. With this special edition of (((Sun-O))), Sampson is in the hunt on his own terms for his own more personal Mallarméan prism, constellation or radiant (((Sun-O))) that syntactically, auditorily, visually and physically scatters and focuses his response to the human condition.

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (((SUN-O))) (2020)

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’abolira le Hasard: (((Sun-O))) (2020)
Sam Sampson
Handsewn pamphlet. H255 x W190 mm, 24 pages. Edition of 60. Acquired from No Press, 4 January 2021.
Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

[Mallarmé’s] work is a constellation and trying to unpack and explicate what went into my response hopefully doesn’t remove the joy of just jumping in. I like what John Ashbery said about his own work: “my work is accessible, if you take the time to access it.” [Sampson in correspondence with Books On Books Collection, 29 March 2022]

Further Reading & Listening

“Derek Beaulieu“. 19 June 2020. Books On Books Collection.

Arnar, Anna Sgrídur. 2011. The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book and the Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bloch, R. Howard. 2017. One toss of the dice: the incredible story of how a poem made us modern. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company.

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 Eric 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.

Howe, S., & Swensen, C. 2000. “A Dialogue“. Conjunctions, 35, 374–387.

Marchal, Bertrand. March 2015. “Petite Histoire du Coup de Dés“. Transversalités: Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris, 134, 109-113.

Sampson, Sam. 1 July 2015. “Six Pack Sound: Sam Sampson“. New Zealand Electronic Poetry Center. Accessed 8 April 2022.

Stark, Trevor. 2020. Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Additional photos of the 2022 edition
Credit: Sam Hartnett.
Courtesy and permission to display: Sam Sampson

Bookmarking Book Art – Marine Hugonnier

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The Bedside Book Project (2006-07)

The Bedside Book Project is a quintuple homage — Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976), Odilon Redon (1840-1916), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) and Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) — and approaches its subjects in cinematic fashion. 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:

Redon’s bedside book has been stolen and its pages have been folded to extend the space and time of the poem’s interlude bringing his dreams to a deeper sleep. ... The mise-en-scène is composed of a white space with an open window, a spider and a man dressed in a tuxedo who will change a solitary frame, containing a folded page of the poem, on the wall every hour. On the 12th hour, the room will be left empty.

The Bedside Book Project: La forme du mystère (Odilon Redon). Source: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, displayed with permission of the artist.

Staging a performance in which the pages of Redon’s bedside book are parceled out over 12 hours is ambitious. As she introduces Schwitters and Hamilton into The Bedside Book Project, Hugonnier creates an even more ambitious immersion for the reader/viewer in different times, spaces and influence. Further temporal instability is involved as well: the pages on Redon’s 19th century bedside table come from a 2006 Gallimard edition of the poem.

Time travelling from Redon’s bedside table to that of Kurt Schwitters, Hugonnier also introduces a bit of temporal and linguistic instability: Schwitters’ bedside copy comes from the Tiber Press edition of Daisy Aldan’s translation into English, published in 1956 eight years after Schwitters’ death. Colored paper cut-outs conceal words, disrupt the gaps of the poem and alter its reading.

The Bedside Book Project: Altération (Kurt Schwitters). Source: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, displayed with permission of the artist.

With Richard Hamilton, Hugonnier gives him the same edition as Redon — the Gallimard 2006 — and fills its interstices with images as a way to change its reading.

The Bedside Book Project: L’espace social No.2 (Richard Hamilton). Source: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, displayed with permission of the artist.

As ghostly film director and actress in the film, Hugonnier wonders how these altered bedside books might have affected the way those three artists perceived art and practiced it in their times. As Hugonnier’s audience, we must surely wonder how she has altered the way we perceive Un Coup de Dés and its influence and very possibly how we perceive time, space and art.

Further Reading

“Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’abolira le Hasard – L’Espace Social N2, 2007“. MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. Fundación Repsol Collection. Acquired 2009.

Bookmarking Book Art – Mario Diacono

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a METRICA n’aboolira (1968)

a METRICA n’aboolira (1968)
Mario Diacono
Papercover, stapled. H x W mm, unnumbered pages.
Photos: Arengario, displayed with permission of the artist.

Besides being first out of the gate with an “homage by redaction” of Un Coup de Dés, Mario Diacono is perhaps the first hommageur to give a sociopolitical cast to the effort. In an interview in Ursula, Diacono comments

1968 was a year in which many things were abolished, or felt tempted to be abolished. Language was one of them, at least the traditional language of poetry, but also the language of ‘bourgeois/capitalist’ society. Berkeley is also present in the book through the reproduction of three frames from a cartoon in a local magazine, which functions as a kind of preface. 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.

Later in the 1970s, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub would pick up the thread of social critique by staging and filming a choral reading of the poem on the lawn of the Père Lachaise cemetery,

where there are the great memorials of the concentration camps: Ravensbrück, Auschwitz… it is in the corner of the cemetery where you can guess something about the city. Under this hill are buried the last members of the Paris Commune, who were shot in that same place. – Jean-Marie Straub

© BELVA Film. Image and permission to display, courtesy of Jean-Marie Straub et Danièlle Huillet: des films et leurs sites.

And then just after the turn of the next century, Didier Mutel extended the critique with his three-volume Four Speeches by George Walker Bush [together with] Four Speeches by Tony Blair [together with] Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard.

These three connected volumes explore graphic transpositioning from oral speeches to a visual representation. Though a new way to read/experience the speeches–to visualize their patterns–you can [still] not tell the truth from fiction. You can not tell what you are reading. “In the 3-part, 4 Speeches/Coup de Des, the images of audio waves are the same—but one purports to be a group of speeches by Bush 43 ; another, a group by Tony Blair; and the last—the real thing—is an unidentified man reading Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard”, that modern masterwork that launched a thousand artists’ books. The concept is trenchantly funny; the books are beautifully executed. [from the preface to Didier’s Manifesto by Tim Young]

© Didier Mutel. Photos: Books On Books, taken at the KB|nationale bibliotheek van Nederland, The Hague. Displayed with permission of Didier Mutel.

Like Huillet, Straub and Mutel, Diacono is trying to balance his socio-political drive with the visual and historical homage to Un Coup de Dés. Huillet/Straub’s performative vocalization delivers its message only through the visual of its location. Mutel delivers his message by muting the poem with its sonographic visualization and sleight-of-hand substitution for political speeches. a METRICA n’aboolira delivers its message by balancing the textual and the visual, reminding us that Mallarmé wanted Un Coup de Dés to be looked at as well as read.

The entire work has been digitized here.

Further Reading

“Derek Beaulieu“. Books On Books Collection. 19 June 2020.

“Jorge Méndez Blake“. 16 September 2020.

“Sammy Engramer“. Books On Books Collection. 1 June 2020.

“Ernest Fraenkel”. Books On Books Collection. 30 October 2021.

“Alexandra Leykauf“. Books On Books Collection. 1 October 2020.

“Michel Lorand“. Books On Books Collection. 19 June 2020.

“Benjamin Lord“. Books On Books Collection. 19 June 2020.

“Guido Molinari“. Books On Books Collection. 13 April 2020.

“Michalis Pichler“. Books On Books Collection. 19 August 2020.

“Cerith Wyn Evans“. Books On Books Collection. 16 April 2020.

“Eric Zboya“. Books On Books Collection. 1 June 2020.

Boglione, Riccardo. 22 September 2010. “Dadi illeggibili. il Mallarme cancellato di Mario Diacono e Marcel Broodthaers“. The Free Library. Accessed 1 May 2020.

Getty Research Institute. n.d. “Manuscript of A metrica n’aboolira“. ArchiveGrid. Accessed 15 April 2018.

Nickas, Bob. 2019. “Bibliotheca Hermetica: Mario Diacono and the arts of alchemy“. Ursula, Winter No. 5.

Books On Books Collection – Michel Lorand

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Après Un Coup de Dés (2015)

Après Un Coup de Dés (2015)
Michel Lorand
Cover and gatherings, untrimmed and unbound, in glassine envelope. Cover: H362 x W260; gatherings: H362 x W256 mm; 32 unnumbered pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #19. Acquired from the artist, 22 October 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.


Since the 1960s when Ernest Fraenkel, Mario Diacono and Marcel Broodthaers blotted out the text of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897) to create their works of homage, numerous others have expanded on the technique: substituting images of sonograms (Sammy Engramer, 2009) or algorithmically generated abstractions (Eric Zboya, 2018, and Benjamin Lord, 2019), or excising the text (Michalis Pichler, 2008, and Cerith Wyn Evans, 2008) or algorithmically erasing it (Jérémie Bennequin, 2009) — just to name a few.

In Après Un Coup de Dés (2015), the only printed marks are the cover’s traditional black and red borders and the printer’s registration and gathering marks on the sheets. Wherever else Mallarmé’s text would have been printed has been excised. In reply to a question about the process involved, Lorand explains that he had asked the designer Filiep Tacq to create a layout that would cover in black exactly the blocks of text as it appears in the current Gallimard book edition of Mallarmé’s poem, including the front and back covers (correspondence with the artist, 1 November 2021). Lorand took a scalpel to the offset printed sheets, removed the blackened blocks, folded the sheets by hand into the four gatherings, assembled them in the correct order and laid them untrimmed and loose inside the cover. Each of fifty copies was placed inside its own handmade glassine envelope along with a flyer including introductory text by Jacques Sojcher (emeritus professor, University of Brussels) and the colophon for the work. It is a book that is not-yet a book.

Lorand’s and all of these other works of homage give us inverse ekphrasis. They are the visual, tactile and conceptual works of art that come after Mallarmé’s text. We are more used to ekphrasis where the object, painting or sculpture comes before the text — like Achilles’ shield before Homer’s description, or the Grecian urn before Keats’ ode, or Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus before Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts. Homer, Keats and Auden vie with the art of the crafted object to put that object (and more) in front of us with words. With the inverse, the crafted objects vie without the words to put Mallarmé’s poem (and more — and sometimes less!) in front of us.

Many of the hommageurs hint at the “and more” with a subtitle to Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard. With Broodthaers, it is Image; with Pichler, Sculpture; with Engramer, Onde (Wave as in soundwave); and with Bennequin, Omage (as in hommage with the “h” and “m” missing). With Lorand, there is no subtitle. Instead, we have the word après prefacing the truncated title of the poem. But, “after” Mallarmé’s poem, what is Lorand proposing? An homage in the form of something that restates, reproduces the poem but without the words? An homage in the form of something else presented in the manner of Un Coup de Dés but without the words? Or something else that simply occurs after the poem’s roll of the dice? As it turns out, all that and more.

Paul Valèry was probably the first of Mallarmé’s circle to see and hear Un Coup de Dés. His reaction picks out one of the themes that make up Lorand’s “and more”:

It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in a finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. Expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. With my own eye I could see silences that had assumed bodily shapes. Inappreciable instants became clearly visible: the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries — at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded with a palpable emptiness…. there in the same void with them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems or masses or trailing lines, coexisted the Word! — Paul Valéry, Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 8: Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé (1972).

Lorand writes:

My <<Après un Coup de Dés>> introduces a corpus of approaches to what might be “the movement” that constitutes speech: “A language that speaks” as Martin Heidegger calls it (Unterwegs zur Sprache, Verlag Günther Jeske, Pfullingen, FRG, 1959).

How can we think, how can we imagine this movement within language itself? What path to take to allow us to experience this movement, the one that constitutes the word itself. This word is sound. The object of all my work is the identification of what could be the image of this movement, of this word. This exploration attempts to approach the nature of this movement: a word beyond language when the latter is silent. (Correspondence with the artist, 1 November 2021.)

Like his others, Heidegger’s On the Way to Language is a dense book; more than the others, it is poetical, an invitation to experience language. In it is a series of lectures entitled “The Nature of Language” in which Heidegger uses two poems, one by Stefan George and one by Gottfried Benn, to question language about its nature. Although George’s poem is the one that Heidegger deeply explicates, Benn’s is the one that, echoing Valèry, sheds the most light on Lorand’s Après Un Coup de Dés — especially with its last two lines.

A Word

A word, a phrase –: from cyphers rise
Life recognized, a sudden sense,
The sun stands still, mute are the skies,
And compacts it, stark and dense.

A word — a gleam, a light, a spark,
A thrust of flames, a stellar trace —
And then again — immense — the dark
Round world and I in empty space.

Après Un Coup de Dés seems to be a wordless invitation to experience language. But in a sense, Mallarmé’s words have not disappeared, not entirely. Their shapes — embodied in the voids — move silently and rhythmically across the unfolded sheets; in the gatherings, they cascade over one another much as they do syntactically and typographically in print. And even though the text is not before (in front of) us, Lorand’s artwork delivers a wordless experience of a key paradox of language with which Mallarmé sought to imbue his poem: the language of the void or abyss — the void or abyss of language. One of the ways in which the poem presents this self-enveloping paradox is that it begins and ends with the words un coup de dés, the act that can never abolish chance and the act that all thought emits. Similarly, Après un Coup de Dés displays the presence of language by displaying the absence of language, or les blancs defined by and defining empty space.

Mallarmé’s invitation in Un Coup de Dés, however, beckons us to a slightly different concept of language than that articulated by Heidegger. For Mallarmé, chance plays a prominent role in what Heidegger would call the “neighborhood of poetry and thought”. But chance, hazard or a roll of the dice plays a much less prominent role for Heidegger, and in Lorand’s work of art, with its registration and gathering marks and glassine enclosure, there seems little allusion to it — perhaps naturally so since Lorand’s work comes after the dice have been rolled.

Even though it comes after Mallarmé’s completed poem and after the Gallimard book edition, 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 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.

Après also comes after the efforts of Broodthaers and Pichler, both of whom organized exhibitions for their works of homage. In fact, Pichler paid homage to Broodthaers by naming his exhibition “Pichler: Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé” (Milan, December 2016) after “Broodthaers: Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé” (Antwerp, December 1969). Pichler’s exhibition was also daring in its exposure of the works to the visitors.

In the 2018 display of Après Un Coup de Dés, the previously gathered but now unfolded sheets and cover lie side by side under glass. Often this is cause for complaint about the distanced display of artist books. In the case of Après Un Coup de Dés, the distance effectively draws point-blank attention to what the privileged reader gradually discovers in handling the work. The unprivileged reader may have to imagine the making, unmaking and remaking of the book but, confronted with the gestalt of the undone gatherings and their registration marks, that reader immediately sees/witnesses the void defined by a void.

Après Un Coup de Dés in the group exhibition Reading Hand Writing Bodies at Les Abattoirs de Bomel, Centre d’art de Namur, Belgium, 8 February – 11 March 2018. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

In relation to Broodthaer’s Image and Pichler’s Sculpture, Après comes both before and after. The positioning of the words après, image and sculpture vis à vis the poem’s title has been noted already. Of all three visual, tactile and conceptual works, Lorand’s stands as the chronologically “after” yet unfinished “before” to Broodthaers’ and Pichler’s finished works. In yet another “afterness” to Mallarmé’s poem, Lorand likens Après to a silent score of music or a piano roll (correspondence with the artist, 1 November 2021). This echoes — if that is not too perverse a verb — Mallarmé’s reference to “score” in his preface to Un Coup de Dés. In premonitory, if not coincidental, irony, Lorand’s piano-roll-like 2015 work precedes a work that Michalis Pichler created for his 2016 Milan exhibition: a piano roll playable on a foot-pumped pianola and entitled Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Musique (see video above).

The interplay of its philosophical roots with its mechanically produced print and its manual cuts makes Lorand’s Après Un Coup de Dés one of the more challenging works of homage to Mallarmé’s poem. To “hear” it side by side with the others in the Books On Books Collection (see below) is rewarding.

Further Reading

“Derek Beaulieu“. Books On Books Collection. 19 June 2020.

“Jérémie Bennequin“. Books On Books Collection. 15 December 2020.

“Christopher Brennan“. Books On Books Collection. 28 February 2021.

“Kathy Bruce“. Books On Books Collection. NYP.

“Jeff Clark and Robert Bononno“. Books On Books Collection. 26 October 2020.

“Jim Clinefelter“. Books On Books Collection. 17 July 2020.

“David Dernie & Olivia Lang“. Books On Books Collection. 02 November 2020.

“Klaus Detjen“. Books On Books Collection. 09 September 2020.

“Chris Edwards“. Books On Books Collection. 28 February 2021.

“Sammy Engramer“. Books On Books Collection. 01 June 2020.

“Ernest Fraenkel“. Books On Books Collection. 30 October 2021.

“Rodney Graham“. Books On Books Collection. 3 July 2020.

“Nicolas Guyot“. Books On Books Collection. 20 May 2020.

“Brian Larosche“. Books On Books Collection. 3 July 2020.

“Benjamin Lord“. Books On Books Collection. 19 June 2020.

“Michael Maranda“. Books On Books Collection. 22 August 2020.

“André Masson“. Books On Books Collection. NYP.

“Guido Molinari“. Books On Books Collection. 13 April 2020.

“Reinhold Nasshan“. Books On Books Collection. 23 September 2021.

“Aurélie Noury“. Books On Books Collection. 09 November 2020.

“Michalis Pichler“. Books On Books Collection. 19 August 2020.

“Mitsou Ronat & Tibor Papp“. Books On Books Collection. 16 November 2020.

“Sam Sampson“. Books On Books Collection. NYP.

“Ian Tyson and Neil Crawford“. Books On Books Collection. NYP.

“Jacques Vernière“. Books On Books Collection. NYP.

“Cerith Wyn Evans“. Books On Books Collection. 16 April 2020.

“Eric Zboya“. Books On Books Collection. 01 June 2020.

Heidegger, Martin, and Peter D. Hertz, trans. 1959/2009. On the Way to Language. San Francisco: HarperOne. Reprint. “No matter how we put our questions to language about its nature, first of all it is needful that language vouchsafe itself to us. If it does, the nature of language becomes the grant of its essential being, that is, the being of language becomes the language of being” (p. 72).

Polt, Richard. 1999. Heidegger: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.

Books On Books Collection – Ernest Fraenkel

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Les Dessins Trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé
à propos de la Typographie de Un Coup de Dés (1960)

Les Dessins Trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé, à propos de la Typographie de Un Coup de Dés (1960)
Ernest Fraenkel
Paperback, stapled to fold-in sleeve. , 44 pages bound with 68 pages on 8.5 uncut folded and gathered sheets. Acquired from À la Page, 12 October 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Ernest Fraenkel should have left it at visually mapping Un Coup de Dés and offered it up as simply an artistic response to the poem. Even if it is a mapping of the condensed single-paged Cosmopolis (1897) version of the poem, think of the various renderings in handset chapbook form printed on letterpress or as lithographs, or etchings on glass, or even sculptures. It could have been the “Prometheus bound” to the “Prometheus unbound” of those who paid homage by appropriating the more expansive double-page spread book version (1914) that Mallarmé intended. Instead, it lies tucked away with 44 pages de l’explication. Professor David W. Seaman (Georgia Southern University), who has engaged with Fraenkel’s analysis, puts it well:

It must be said in [Fraenkel’s] defense that the idea is tempting: to make wordless patterns of the pages of the poem in order to see the ideogrammatic shapes more clearly. In addition, Fraenkel has contributed some worthwhile insights into the use of space and text in the poem, … However, there are three major objections to his project. First, he used, for most of his research, the text of the Cosmopolis edition of the poem, an edition which nearly everyone agrees is far from the author’s intentions, especially insofar as the ideograms are concerned; the preface to that edition gives ample warning of this. … / The second objection is that Fraenkel strays too far from the text, preferring to keep in mind a general idea of the meaning of the poem, and then go off according to the feelings the designs give him. … In fact,  sometimes Fraenkel recommends turning the design on its side or upside-down to see what image may present itself! / The third objection is that these designs are then used more or less like Rohrschach ink blots. (Seaman, pp. 142-43)

In his nine sets of single-sided uncut sheets, Fraenkel offers seven different diagrammatic approaches to the poem as it appeared in Cosmopolis, whose editors could not allow the poem’s lines to cross over the gutter to the next page as Mallarmé imagined the layout. The opening pages of Fraenkel’s seven approaches are laid out below in sunlight and paired with the textual opening page.

Seven different diagrammatic renderings. The one at the lower right shows Fraenkel’s sideways view.

The first rendering (above, upper left) is closest to what Mario Diacono and Marcel Broodthaers would create later in the decade.

Left: a METRICA n’aboolira (1968) by Mario Diacono (1968). Right: Image: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1969) by Marcel Broodthaers (1969).

Fraenkel’s nine sets of sheets break down into eight of 8 pages and one of 4 pages. Below is the first set opened out.

The first set of eight pages

Compared with Diacono’s, Broodthaers’ and all the other works of homage to date, Fraenkel’s renderings retain a distinction and suggest other new directions not yet taken physically or digitally. Given the sculptural interpretations by Geraldo de Barros, Jorge Méndez Blake and Kathy Bruce, doesn’t Fraenkel’s first rendering call for a three-dimensional cantilevered homage constructed of slabs of blackened flotsam connected with brushed steel rods?

From the series Jogos de Dados (1986)
Geraldo de Barros
Photo: Julia Parpulov. Permission from Fabiana de Barros.

Biblioteca Mallarmé/Mallarmé Library (2011)
Jorge Méndez Blake
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Navigating the Abyss (2014)
Kathy Bruce
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Given the video created by Giulio Maffei transforming the 1914 book version into Broodthaers’ and the digital legerdemain of Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato and Tayyib Yavuz, why not an animated digital transformation of the Cosmopolis version into the 1914 book version?

Le Vite dei Libri 26 – Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (2016)
Giulio Maffei
Permission from the artist.


“Mallarmé’s Self-replicating Machine: A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” (2018)
Karen ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato
Permission from the artists.

Experiment Book: “Un Coup de Dés”
Tayyib Yavuz
Permission from the artist.

And Professor Jed Rasula (University of Georgia), who has also explored Fraenkel’s work, suggests yet another medium:

“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” (9). … 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.”

Except for the sound part, that could describe Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château de Dés (1929).

Further Reading

“Derek Beaulieu“. Books On Books Collection. 19 June 2020.

“Raffaella della Olga“. Books On Books Collection. 8 December 2020.

“Klaus Detjen“. Books On Books Collection. 9 September 2020.

“Sammy Engramer“. Books On Books Collection. 1 June 2020.

“Michalis Pichler“. Books On Books Collection. 19 August 2020.

“Cerith Wyn Evans“. Books On Books Collection. 16 April 2020.

“Eric Zboya“. Books On Books Collection. 1 June 2020.

Donnachie, Karen Ann, and Andy Siminiato. “Mallarmé’s Self-replicating Machine: A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”. MATLIT: Materialities of Literature, [S.l.], v. 6, n. 1, p. 37-49, Aug. 2018. Date accessed: 23 March 2019.

Fraenkel, Ernest. 1998. Die Unsichtbaren Zeichnungen Stéphane Mallarmé. Lana: Edition per Procura. German facsimile, also in the Books On Books Collection.

Rasula, Jed. Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (London: Palgrave, 2009). Accessed via Electronic Poetry Center, University of Pennsylvania, n.d. Accessed 14 June 2020.

Samson, Anna, and Serge Chamchinov. 2022. “Les Dessins trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé par Ernest Fraenkel : une méthode originale“. Continent Manuscrits. No. 18. Accessed 10 June 2022. A superb analysis of Fraenkel’s book and method.

Seaman, David W.  Concrete poetry in France (Ann Arbor: Umi Research Press, 1981).