Mallarmé’s Library (2011)

Biblioteca Mallarmé (2011)

Jorge Méndez Blake

Metal, wood, mirror, resin, plexiglass + drawing. 95x180x150 cm (table) 50×70 cm (drawing). Photos: Courtesy of Estudio Jorge Méndez Blake.

Silvia Ortiz, founder of the gallery Travesía Cuatro in Madrid, writes

In this exhibition entitled Biblioteca Mallarmé, the artist establishes once again the link between his artwork, literature and architecture. On this occasion Jorge Méndez Blake reformulates the concept of library, this time to a library-shipwreck, a library stranded on the coast, as a wreck. 4 November 2011 – 1is 6 February 2012. Accessed 4 September 2020.

Photo: Courtesy of Estudio Jorge Méndez Blake.

Photo: Courtesy of Estudio Jorge Méndez Blake.

All of the works making up the exhibition pay homage to Un Coup de Dés. In keeping with the sub-genre of the homage to an homage, though, this work eponymous with the exhibition draws on Marcel Broodthaers’ homage to the same poem. With its colorfulness, it might also be drawing on Mario Diacono’s JCT 1, a MeTrica n’ABOOlira (1968), Ian Wallace’s Image/Text (1979) or Klaus Detjen’s Ein Würfelwurf niemals tilgt den Zufall (1995). With its three-dimensionality, also perhaps on Geraldo de Barros’s Jogos de Dados (1980s), Albert Dupont’s Désir-Hasard-Dés (2000), or Kathy Bruce’s Navigating the Abyss (2008). Probably not, but this gathering of artists attests to how much Mallarmé’s poem has permeated the genre of book art and its permutations.

Méndez Blake’s originality here arrives in the juxtaposition of the poem’s shipwreck in the form of resinous burnt detritus on the table and flotsam in the print on the wall with the mixed-media blocks on the table recalling books on library display as well as Broodthaers’ rectangular black redactions in his homage or appropriation. Appropriation is very much a theme in this work and the exhibition.

Exhibition view, Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain.

Du fond d’un naufrage (2011)

Du fond d’un naufrage (2011)

Jorge Méndez Blake

Bricks and book. 1.61×1.20×1.06 cm. Photo: Courtesy of Estudio Jorge Méndez Blake.

Another work in the exhibition, Du fond d’un naufrage (2011), differs in material and shape from any previous homage to the poem. The work’s title (“from the bottom of a shipwreck”) comes from a line in Mallarmé’s poem, and cheekily, the volume at the bottom of the gap between the bricks is Mallarmé’s Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford University Press).

Toute Pensée Émet un Coup de Dés (2012-2019)

Toute Pensée Émet un Coup de Dés (2012-2019)

Jorge Méndez Blake

Photo: Courtesy of Estudio Jorge Méndez Blake.

Not in the exhibition but continuing the association with Un Coup de Dés and the theme of appropriation, Toute Pensée Émet un Coup de Dés (2012-2019) is a series of nine drawings that

reproduces classic shipwreck paintings using colored pencil. Classic painters used often the strategy of bending the mast, as a way to show the instability of the ship in the storm. These drawings go through an editing process, in which an image of the original painting is cropped and rotated X degrees to achieve the mast verticality and to make the scene look as if the ships were avoiding the fatal destiny. But by “fixing” the mast, the whole landscape loses its horizontality. Correspondence, Estudio Jorge Méndez Blake, 4 August 2020.

Further Reading

“Large-Scale Installations (Updated 3 August 2020)”, Bookmarking Book Art, 3 August 2020.

Peden, Georgia. “Denver’s MCA exhibits adapted literary illustrations”, DU Clarion 9 October 2017. Accessed 23 August 2020.