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“Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation” 2 April 2021

Robert Bolick (www.books-on-books.com)

The year 2022 will be the 125th anniversary of the publication of Stéphane Mallarmé's poem Un
Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897): the poem that made the world modern and
then postmodern. It launched countless poems of free verse experimenting with typography and
the page. Visually and physically, the single pages and double-page spreads echo the drama,
images and delaying syntax that the poem plays out — a sinking ship, its struggling master, a
seabird over cresting waves, a hat’s plume transforming into a Siren’s tail, a whirlpool or abyss,
the North Star and its nearby constellation Ursa Minor. In doing so, it heralded the modern and
postmodern themes of a crisis of language and representation, pattern and meaning versus
chance and nothingness, and the never-ending tarantella of the material with the conceptual.

Page 425 in Cosmopolis version 1897 transformed into double-page spread in Gallimard/Nrf version 1914. Sources:
gallica.bnf.fr and Bodleian.

The poem also launched a host of homage in the form of livres d'artiste in numerous languages
as well as homage in film, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, theater, costume, music,
dance, programming, and book art. Even exhibitions. The exhibition best known from the 20th
century is perhaps Marcel Broodthaers' 1969 show. On the centenary of Mallarmé's death
(1898-1998), numerous conferences and exhibitions addressed his influence and incorporated
artworks such as Kathy Bruce’s and Alastair Noble’s Foldings that paid homage specifically to
Un Coup de Dés. It was the first two decades of the 21st century that delivered no less than five
exhibitions in homage to Un Coup de Dés. Together, they captured somewhat less than half the
relevant works that would have qualified. Entering the third decade, the number of those works
has only grown. May 2022, the 125th anniversary of the first publication of Un Coup de Dés
Jamais N'abolira le Hasard, offers the occasion to capture what was missed and take stock
again.
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With over two dozen works of homage on hand and over five dozen from exploration of
exhibition catalogues and online search, the Books On Books Collection is organizing an online
exhibition to celebrate this anniversary. Although not the same experience, such an exhibition’s
reach can exceed that of a bricks-and-mortar affair in some ways. A virtual exhibition is
updateable. It can offer more images as well as link the viewer to film/video works of homage as
well as to operatic, balletic and musical renditions. Its bibliographical references can be linked
wherever possible to permalinks, enabling the viewer to locate the nearest physical copy of the
work. Moreover, it provides accessible building blocks for future organizers, curators and
enthusiasts of book art and this unusual poem. Here below, a sneak preview.

1897--1959

Just five works in the first six decades 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 already
influenced by Mallarmé. The work has appeared only in facsimile and then not until 1981. In
those first sixty-three years after the publication of Mallarmé’s poem, Hella Guth’s 1952 livre
d’artiste may be the only homage in codex form. Negotiations to obtain images from the
Bibliothèque nationale de France are ongoing.

Foreshadowing a phenomenon that erupts in the 21st century, the remaining three hommageurs
chose other media: Picasso’s “un coup de thé” in a 1914 collage, Man Ray’s strange film Les
Mystères du Château de Dés (1929), with its stocking-masked characters and a mannequin
rolling dice, which can be easily found online, and Pierre Chenal’s apparently missing film
entitled Un Coup de Dés. Chenal is better known for films based on work by James M. Cain,
Luigi Pirandello and Richard Wright.

Christopher Brennan’s title page and still from Man Ray’s film. Photos: Books On Books Collection and YouTube.

1960-69
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This decade marks the "arrival" of the genre of book art and delivers five significant artworks in
homage to Un Coup de Dés. Perhaps the best known is Marcel Broodthaers' Image version
(1969) with its black strips blotting out the lines and words. Two other artists, however, beat
Broodthaers to teaching us to look at Un Coup de Dés not only read it: Ernest Fraenkel, Les
dessins trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé, à propos de la typographie de Un coup de dès
(1960) and Mario Diacono, a MeTrica n'ABOOlira (1968).

Fraenkel’s, Diacono’s and Broodthaers’ attention not only to the spaces between words but to
the entire space of the printed page followed Mallarmé’s explicit signal to the reader in his
preface when the poem first appeared: “Les ‘blancs’, en effet, assume l’importance, frappent
d’abord” [‘the “blanks” take on importance, and are what is the most immediately striking’].”
Broodthaers used his exhibition “Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé” at the Wide White
Space Gallery in Antwerp, December 1969 to launch his version, which was paired with wall
hangings of metal plate versions of the pages, engraved with black impressions, and with a
recording of Broodthaers’ reading the poem played in the background. André Masson’s livre
d’artiste (1961), which rather “filled in les blancs” rather than honor them, accounts for one of
the two remaining works.

The other was the Aspen journal’s special Minimalism issue (1967), a box including pamphlet
contributions from Roland Barthes, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Susan Sontag among
others in pamphlet form and now difficult-to-access LPs and super 8 films. Beside the Brennan
pastiche, the Aspen issue brackets this long period as a foreshadowing of the future. Brennan’s
strange lengthy hyphenated title in 1897 would not be the last from poets influenced by Un
Coup de Dés. In the 1980s, the videopoet E. M. Melo e Castro acknowledges Mallarmé’s poem
for its “concept of poetry as ‘a verbal galaxy of signs’” by which “a verbi-voco-sound-visual-
color-movement complex and animated image is created calling for a total kinesthetic
perception”. (C.T. Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry, 2007, pp. 119-21). An apt echo of the
Aspen multimedia box as well as description of what would occur in the 1980s and after.

1970--1989

These twenty years boast only eleven works, most of them livres d’artiste by Jean Lecoultre
(1975), Guido Molinari (1981), Ian Tyson (1985), Jacques Vernière (1987), Honorine Tepfer
(1989) and Christiane Vielle (1989). Guido Molinari’s abstract Équivalence (1981) stands out as
the first double homage with its substitution of bright colors for Mallarmé’s “les blancs” and
Broodthaers’ black strips. In a video interview on the occasion of one such exhibition, Molinari
emphasizes the visual musicality in the poem to which his abstract interpretation draws
attention. Bernard Chiavelli’s cover cartoon salute makes the cut for amusement. Ian Wallace’s
installation Image/Text (1979) appears for its ongoing engagement with the poem as art material
(more later) and a shift from modernism to conceptualism and beyond to what Wallace calls “the
literature of images”. Claude Ballif’s Un coup de dés, d'après Mallarmé, Op. 53 (1980) may be
the first musical composition in homage to the poem. Geraldo de Barros' installation Jogos de
Dados (1986) is included for its fifty-five geometric sculptural forms bringing scale, abstraction
and plasticity together for the first time.
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Above all though, the 1980s stand out particularly for the acclaimed “édition mise en oeuvre”
(1980) by Mitsou Ronat and Tibor Papp, the first rendition of the poem to follow Mallarmé’s
intended layout if not his choice of font. Just as important as a harbinger of homage to come is
its inclusion of artistic and poetic (some parodic) works at which he would have balked.

Photos: Cover of Ronat & Papp edition (Books On Books Collection); de Barros exhibition, courtesy of Fabiana de
Barros.

1990--1999

The pace of new works begins to quicken, and a shift in forms and techniques occurs. Four of
twelve deliver livres d’artiste: Gary Young and D.J. Waldie (1990), Ellsworth Kelly (1992), Klaus
Detjen (1995) and Ofer Lellouche and Ido Agassi (1998). Eclecticism enters with Foldings
(1998), a work of performance art by Kathy Bruce and Alastair Noble, and with Barry Guy’s Un
Coup de Dés (1994), which takes the dual form of a graphical representation of a musical
composition for four voices. In a low-tech codex form, Jim Clinefelter’s parody almost snatches
Brennan’s claim to most absurd title with A Throw of the Snore Will Surge the Potatoes: John M.
Bennett Meets Stéphane Mallarmé (1998). Françoise Mairey (1999) pays tribute with typewriter
art, repeatedly typing each line of the poem into 3” x 2.5” blocks of words, one block to a sheet
of paper.
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Left to right: Bruce and Noble, Agassi and Guy. Courtesy of the artists..

Moving outside the codex form, we have Michael Graeve’s twelve canvas panels of Hexagram
12: Heaven and Earth Shall not Meet (1998), which seems to have been the first work since the
Aspen box to blend Mallarmé with musical compositions by Cage but to do so in a visual work.
Graeve’s work also seem to be the first to pay homage to multiple figures in one work. Here he
is on his process:

In homage to Cage, I consulted the I-Ching, hoping for guidance in the creation of the
series of paintings. The result was: "Hexagram 12. Obstruction. Earth Below, Heaven
Above. Heaven and Earth Do Not Commune." The concept of a lack of overlap between
elements became a starting point for an investigation into the nature of edges between
colours (hard edges, handheld edges, edges not meeting, edges just meeting, edges
just blurring), and spacing between colours. The ample white between colour areas was
of course also an appreciative nod towards both Cage's and Mallarmé's sense of
openness, scale and space.

The decade’s eclecticism goes beyond Bruce’s transformation, Clinefelter’s democratic guffaw,
Mairey’s tap-art and Graeve’s multi-homage canvases. With Würfelwurf (1992), Reinhold
Nasshan introduces an apparent codex form that opens to pages that turn or spill out due to
complex folding, cutting and interlocking; several other works such as Un Coup (1992), Blancs I
& II (1993) and Homage to Mallarmé (1993) also exploit the codex form, the page’s surface and
bookmaking to deliver a new material form of homage to the poem, which herald book artists’
increasing attention to the architectural opportunities in the codex. Ian Wallace (1993)
appropriates an open copy of the 1914 edition of the poem in a work, very different to that of
1979. Joëlle Tuerlinckx adds to the variety of technique her installation of found objects in 3 Dés
‘j.t.’ (1994).

Left to right: Graeve, Wallace and Nasshan. Photos: Courtesy of the artist, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, and artist,
respectively.

Nasshan, Bruce, Wallace and Tuerlinckx represent a growing trend among hommageurs: near
obsession. The Belgian critic Frank Vande Veire detects in all of Tuerlinckx’s installations an
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echo of the poem’s abyss and its lines ''Rien n'aura eu lieu que Ie lieu" (''Nothing will have taken
place, except the place")

Tuerlinckx "constructs" nothing that does not immediately bend itself back to this
"nothingness" and that therefore contains no moment of destruction. Her constellations
of "little things," which literally never get off the ground, reflect a well-meant attempt to
create order yet simultaneously provide a vision of a landscape following a catastrophe.
It seems as if everything still has to begin, still has to find its place. At the same time,
everything is no more than a trace, a memory. (“Something about How a Tuerlinckx
Machine Traverses the Exhibition Machine” in Zegher, M. Catherine de. 1996. Inside the
visible: [exhibition catalogue] ; an elliptical traverse of 20th century art, in, of, and from
the feminine.

In the next two decades, the number of artists creating multiple works of homage to this one
poem doubles.

2000--2009

In these first two decades of the 21st century, the number of works also trebles. With them,
artists show a widespread willingness to challenge the codex as object and not only make high
end works of Mallarméan homage but do so with a gallery setting in mind and even make the
gallery part of the work.

In this first decade, though, two new limited edition restorations arrive from Michel Pierson &
Ptyx (2002) and Isabel Checcaglini & Ypsilon Éditeur (2007). The former establishes a website
for viewing its pages and reading historical background on the poem’s editions; the latter
provides a four-volume work, one of which places the restoration alongside the three
compositions by Odilon Redon that Mallarmé and Ambroise Vollard intended for a livre d’artiste
version of the poem and another which introduces an Arabic translation whose letters beautifully
complement the Redon compositions.

The artists engaged in imaginative and physical reworkings of the poem in codex form this
decade number nine: Albert Dupont (2000), Guido Molinari (2003), Didier Mutel (2003-05), Chris
Edwards (2005), Michael Maranda (2008), Cerith Wyn Evans (2008), Raffaella della Olga
(2009), Sammy Engramer (2009) and Michalis Pichler (2009). Two of the works contain
Mallarmé’s poem in its 1914 layout alongside their own creators’ poems in response to
Mallarmé’s work. A third is a rare instance of using Un Coup de Dés for political satire and, like
one of the other works, uses sonograms. The remaining six codex reworkings appropriate
Broodthaers’ 1969 appropriation in varying ways to pay their own homage to Un Coup de Dés.
Michalis Pichler’s Sculpture version of the poem reflects all of these codices’ tendency to play
with material, technique and concept to achieve their goals.

Challenges to the codex come in the form of Aurélie Noury’s Un coup de dés (rubik's cube)
(2005), a pochoir-printed Rubik’s Cube; Kathy Bruce’s Navigating the Abyss (2008) a worn,
closed book, sculpted, tied shut and embedded with UV filter disks; and Rainier Lericolais’
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Carton perforé (2009), a paper roll used to play a barrel organ’s paper roll perforated it à la
Pichler. Lericolais’s, Bruce’s and Noury’s works are objects well suited for observance in a
gallery exhibition.

Pichler Sculpture editions: paper, translucent and plexiglas. Photos: Books On Books Collection, permission to
display from the artist.

A surge in gallery exhibitions, performance and installations that pay homage to Un Coup de
Dés in this decade appears at its start with Bill Seaman's interactive installation Red Dice/Dés
Chiffrés (2000). Like Man Ray’s strange Château de Dés of the last century, Red Dice revels in
a new media, and surreality meets synaesthesia. With installations and exhibitions, many of
these artists are revealing -- and reveling in -- the theme-rich veins of Un Coup de Dés that
warrant their return to its inspiration. Returning to her 1994 version of 3 Dés ‘j.t.’ (1994), Joëlle
Tuerlinckx throws out the dotted raw egg, wooden cube and piece of paper to replace them with
three found cubes tossed into a puddle of tea contained in a glass tray. With Alasdair Noble,
Kathy Bruce returns to her wearable art form and unites the material and digital in Digital
Mallarmé (2008). Cerith Wyn Evans also returns with a distinctively different approach, his neon
light ‘… après Stéphane Mallarmé’ (2008).

Caption: Left to right: Bruce and Noble, Wyn Evans and della Olga. Photos: Courtesy of the artists.
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The most emblematic of the decade’s homage by installation though is film-maker Marine
Hugonnier's The Bedside Book (2006-07): three disassembled and differently altered codices, a
gallery installation and a performance. It pays homage to Un Coup de Dés through
Broodthaers’ Image but does so even more indirectly than the other works of double homage
above. 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. MACBA

From here, Hugonnier's cinematic imagination takes hold. The imaginary mise-en-scène places
copies of Un Coup de Dés on the bedside tables of Odilon Redon, Kurt Schwitters and Richard
Hamilton. Hugonnier creeps into their rooms, steals each copy and, by altering each one,
creates La forme du mystère (Odilon Redon), Altération (Kurt Schwitters) and L’espace social
(Richard Hamilton). Each manipulation is thus a triple-homage (Broodthaers via the anecdote,
Mallarmé via the copy of Un Coup de Dés, and each of the other artists via the alteration of his
bedside copy). The double-page spreads of the altered books are framed and hung in the
gallery.

Hugonnier's The Bedside Book: Gallery attendant with Redon pages, spider, Schwitter's pages and Hamilton's.
Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

2010-19

The increasingly intensive, intentional materiality of 2000-09 also marks this decade, and the
number of forms of art multiplies. The exhibition as an art form kicks off the decade with Sammy
Engramer’s JAMAIS, expanding his Wave (2009) from the two-dimensional to the
three-dimensional as well as adding an animation. With his codex work, its expansion into
sculptural PVC renderings and the addition of multimedia in an installation setting, Engramer
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amplifies this chord of transformative appropriation that reverberates through the decade and
culminates in Michalis Pichler's 2017 exhibition.

Pichler's 2017 exhibition more than double-downs on his previous appropriations. Not only does
Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé include his Sculpture versions of Broodthaers' Image
version of Un Coup de Dés and Pichler’s own 2016 Musique version (a perforated piano roll
installed in a pianola), it appropriates the very title of Broodthaers' exhibition that introduced the
Image version. Even further, it includes appropriations of Mallarmé’s poem and Broodthaers’
Image by a dozen or so other artists, including Engramer and another artist of serial homage —
Jérémie Bennequin.

Engramer’s and Pichler’s recurring returns to Un Coup de Dés echo the chord of fascination
with Un Coup de Dés struck in the previous decades by Reinhold Nasshan, Kathy Bruce,
Raffaella della Olga, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Ian Wallace and Cerith Wyn Evans as well as by other
artists included in the Pichler exhibition. In his serial hommagerie, Jérémie Bennequin explores
performative and digital as well as typographic, videotronic and musical paths to highlight the
Mallarméan entanglements of language, chance, indeterminacy, ephemerality and nothingness.

For Dé-composition (2009-13), he and a colleague in two different locations linked by computer
conducted eighteen performances of decomposing Mallarmé's poem by repeatedly rolling a die
then locating, vocalising and erasing the syllable corresponding to the number rolled. Each
booklet after Booklet 1.0 (the whole poem) represents the state of the poem at the end of the
performance. By the last performance, very little -- but something -- of Un Coup de Dés was left.
As Bennequin 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”). That last sentence then becomes the title
of his next “Omage” (2014) in which he pursues this reversibility in pages which lets Mallarmé’s
text emerge (albeit reversed) from Broodthaers’ black strips. In that omission of the letter H from
homage, Bennequin alludes to own other works of manual decomposition (by erasing all of
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. And finally, just as Marine Hugonnier multiplied her
homage, Bennequin does the same with Changes of Music (2020), combines a video of dice
being thrown on the pages Le Hasard accompanied by the reversed track of John Cage’s Music
of Changes (1951).

Another artist fascinated with repeatedly materializing the themes of Un Coup de Dés in a
gallery setting is Mexico’s Jorge Mendez Blake. His Biblioteca Mallarmé/Mallarmé Library
(2011), Du fond d’un naufrage (2011) and Shipwreck (2011) all appeared at Travesía Cuatro in
Madrid in 2012 and the series of drawings Toute Pensée Émet un Coup de Dés (2013)
appeared at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013.

The number of homage in codex form this decade is only overshadowed by the number of
differing techniques used with it. The livre d’artiste continues to find its adherents in Daniela
Deeg and Cynthia Lollis (2011), Robert Bononno and Jeff Clark (2015) and Nicolas Guyot
(2019). In his article preceding the book Shipwreck with Olivia Laing, David Dernie (2016) pays
his homage by juxtaposing Max Ernst-like collage with Mallarmé’s text. Derek Beaulieu’s
Tattered Sails (2018) reorients Broodthaer’s black strips to convey the poem’s images and
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themes. Rodney Graham (2011), Brian Larosche (2012) and Johanna Drucker (2012) stick to
typography and text to achieve their effects. Richard Nash (2012) astonishes with an
accordion-style cutout version of in black paper, placing the shipwreck at night under the poem’s
constellation.

This decade is the first to see works driven by programs or applications. Some are still delivered
in codex form, others result primarily in online delivery. Eric Zboya’s Translations (2018) and
Benjamin Lord’s The Abolition of Chance (2019) achieve two very different computer-driven
effects — in part due to their different points of departure. 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 has been
“translated” into a graphic, nonlinear entity. The first spread of Lord’s book copies the last
spread of Marcel Broodthaer's book. A mathematical formula known as the “Game of Life”
generates each spread thereafter. Similar to Bennequin’s process in Dé-composition, each
spread in The Abolition of Chance generates the next.

From her work with psychologists tracking eye movements, Ruth Loos (2011) exhibits an
animation to show captured eye-movements evoked by the features of the fourth page of the
poem. Moving into more multimedia work delivered online, William Franklin (2014) combines
video manipulation and musical accompaniment in his “video reverie” of dice being tossed onto
an undulating surface, whereas Giulio Maffei (2016) morphs the 1914 edition and Broodthaers’
Image back and forth to promote the stock available at the Maffei rare books store in Torino,
Italy. Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato (2015) turn to an entirely algorithmically
random-driven animation of Mallarmé’s poem, and Tayyibb Yavuz (2015) turns to the Unity3D
game engine. These works use of Mallarmé’s poem challenge our grasp of the materiality of our
online experience and raise the perplexing question of art created by artificial intelligence.

Performances of Un Coup de Dés -- not merely reading performances such as the film in 1997
Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice -- also characterize this decade. Of the four that appear
-- John King’s opera Dice Thrown (2010), Jean-Jacques Birgé’s vocal musical setting Un Coup
de Dés à l’Atelier du Plateau (2014), Sylvain Moore’s instrumental setting Troisième Coup de
Dés (2019) -- Filiep Tacq’s Una tirada de dados (2016) is the most astounding. It is a three-way,
two-part conversation among artist and curator Pedro G. Romero, art book designer Filiep Tacq
and flamenco bailaor Israel Galván on Mallarmé and his impact on the flamenco genre. As
Romero and Tacq exchange their views verbally, Galván expresses his in dance, bringing this
decade in the exhibition to a close with a firm stamp of the dancer’s foot.
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Left to right: Engramer, Bennequin and King. Photos: Courtesy of the artist, Books On Books Collection, and
composer, respectively.

2020-

The exhibition will conclude with the most recent homage discovered, including new additions to
the Books On Books Collection by Jérémie Bennequin, Changes of Music (2020) and New
Zealander Sam Sampson, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: ((Sun-O))) (2020).

Left to right: Bennequin, Sampson. Photos: Books On Books Collection, permission to display from the artists.

Conclusion
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Just from the number of works inspired by this strange poem, the importance of Un Coup de
Dés for the arts (especially book art) is obvious. Why it is important demands more than
counting though. Much of book art engages in inverse ekphrasis, that phenomenon where
instead of the visual or plastic work of art inspiring the poem, the poem or text inspires the work
of book art. So it is not surprising that a poem so clearly engaged in playing with space and type
to effect meaning would attract book artists and other artists fascinated with “the literature of
images”. Perhaps in its inherent (or at least more than occasional) self-reflexiveness and
recursiveness, book art finds its own image in this poem that begins and ends with the same
words: un coup de dés. Perhaps the poem’s rich ambiguity serves up a blank canvas, a heap of
clay, a block of stone, an empty stage or screen or digital space that invites the artist to make.