Coup de Dés (Collection) Books and Ideas After Mallarmé

Coup de Dés (Collection) Books and Ideas After MallarméBy now the appropriation of Mallarm, and in particular of his Un Coup de Ds Jamais NAbolira le Hasard, constitutes a genre of its own. Coup de Ds (Collection) attempts to gather, present and contextualize the numerous editions, re editions, appropriations of Un Coup de Ds Jamais NAbolira le Hasard, including those attributed to Mallarm as well as those which claimed by artists as new works in their own right. Moreover, the collection comprises

By now the appropriation of Mallarmé, and in particular of his Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, constitutes a genre of its own. Coup de Dés (Collection) attempts to gather, present and contextualize the numerous editions, re-editions, appropriations of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, including those attributed to Mallarmé as well as those which claimed by artists as new works in their own right. Moreover, the collection comprises publications, of whatever genre, which feature the word-constellation “Coup de Dés” on their cover. Un Coup de Dés (Collection) is a book about books, a collection, a gathering of evidence, a critical investigation, and an anthology of artists books. The book will catalogue all the books in its accompanying exhibition with meticulous bibliographic details, will be richly illustrated, and will be accompanied by critical essays written by leading scholars of the field such as Annette Gilbert, Craig Dworkin, Luc Boltanski/Arnauld Esquerre, Michalis Pichler and Ryoko Sekiguchi. “Books and Ideas Mallarmé” explores how Mallarmé’s Coup came about in the first place and how the absence of an authoritative edition contributed to keeping its exact status indeterminate, making it intertextual text par excellance. Also, it looks at the Coup which has become a reference piece that gets appropriated with increasing frequency by contemporary artists and authors, who often operate independently from the commercial gallery system, gather around the networks of art book fairs, and have contributed to a wide-ranging bibliographic discourse within a field that has been subsumed under the umbrella term publishing as artistic practice. The research and the represented books all question the notion of the publication as a neutral container for information, and argue for a consideration of the physical shape and structure of text, of publications and of their materialization. Besides Stéphane Mallarmé, this anthology features books and bookworks by authors such as Derek Beaulieu, Jérémie Bennequin, Marcel Broodthaers4, burozoique, Bernard Chiavelli, Jim Clinefelter, Mario Diacono, Sammy Engramer, Cerith Wyn Evans, Ernest Fraenkel, Angela Grasser, Elsworth Kelly, La Bibliothèque Fantastique, Brian Larosche, Benjamin Lord, Michael Maranda, Guido Molinari, Monchas, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Aurélie Noury, Raffaella Dell’Olga, Michalis Pichler, Nicolas Richard, Sam Sampson6,7,8, Camille Soula, Klara Vith5,6, Eric Zboya, and many more. The book is published on occasion of Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé at Center for Book Arts  (1/18/2024 – 5/1/2024).

---