Artists' Books

Sculpture : un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard by Michalis Pichler. by Charisma Christal

Artist Michalis Pichler meticulously creates a sculptural book entitled Sculpture : un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard after Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1914 edition poem by the same name.

Stéphane Mallarmé was a 19th Century French Symbolist poet who was recognized as one of France’s four significant poets alongside Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. He was known for his complex poetic language that was thought to be “difficult to understand because of its tortuous syntax, ambiguous expressions, and obscure imagery.” (poetryfoundation.com). One poem, in particular, brought him great recognition near the end of his life, that is, un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) which was originally published in Cosmopolis in May 1897. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard was thought to be of extreme originality because of its complex typographical layout. The Poetry Foundation explains the poem structure as follows:

“The words and sentences are sparingly and unevenly distributed across the double-page, which Mallarmé uses as his “frame” instead of the single page, so that the lines of print, sometimes trailing across the paper like a drawing of the wake of a ship, sometimes grouped together like black dots on white dice (a wake is white; a drawing of it is black), and sometimes more widely scattered like black stars in a white sky, reinforce the three kinds of imagery that dominate Un coup de dés” (poetryfoundation.org)

excerpts of un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard.

Photo Credit: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.php

 excerpts of un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard.

Photo Credit: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.php

It is through this influential work that Michalis Pichler creates this sculpture. Pichler, who is a trained sculptor and has an education in architecture, creates a book that follows the structure of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard's layout while replacing the spaces where the words would be with laser cuts. This leaves precisely cut out windows that reveal the pages and, subsequently, the window cutouts in them through it. This approach further builds upon Mallarmé’s note in his preface, where he writes:

 “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.” (poetryintranslation.com)

- Translated from French by A. S. Kline

Mallarme’s use of the blank paper to create visual imagery that supplements that of his words alludes to the idea of meaning also existing in the spaces between. The poem goes beyond its words and also finds meaning in the words left unsaid and the volumes that those blank spaces convey. Pichler’s work only further adds to these ideas through those cut out windows and the subsequent shadows it creates. Each turn of the page becomes a performance in of itself, where light and space are the lead actors. The relationship between the poem and the sculptural pages takes the viewer on a transportative journey where meaning is ephemeral and yours to decide. 

Works Cited

“Michalis Pichler - Myriangos.” chiosmusicfestival.gr, 2019, https://chiosmusicfestival.gr/en/portfolio-item/michalis-pichler-myriangos-2/.

Pichler, Michalis, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Sculpture : Un Coup de Dés Jamais n’abolira Le Hasard. Berlin, “Greatest Hits,” 2008.

“Stéphane Mallarmé.” PoetryFoundation, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephane-mallarme.

“Stéphane Mallarmé - Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.” PoetryinTranslation, 2007, https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.php.

This Breathing House ∞ Bharti Kher. by Rebecca Wang

This Breathing House was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name by British-Indian artist Bharti Kher at the Freud Museum, Sigmund Freud’s final home in London, in 2016. In this book, Chief Curator of Hayward Gallery, UK, Stephanie Rosenthal introduces Kher’s exhibiting artworks throughout the house alongwith the history of the Freud Museum, featuring quotes from the artist herself, as well as Sigmund and Anna Freud, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Didi-Huberman and Maggie Nelson among others.

The front and back cover of This Breathing House is a panorama view of Freud’s study, with Mother (2016) and Father (2016), casts of Kher’s parents, installed in it. Without prior knowledge of the house or the artwork, one can barely tell that the life sized plaster casts were not part of the house. They blend in the ambience of the room seamlessly — Mother sitting next to one end of the original psychoanalytic couch, eyes tightly shut, both hands on her thighs; Father, with the same posture, situated between the desk and the book shelf, but with a large hole through his body at the heart. Both casts are naked, as if they were ready to have their minds read by the renowned founder of psychoanalysis.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

Kher named the exhibition This Breathing House because she sees the house as a living, breathing organism with a rich history of studying and interpreting the mind and the unconscious. The exhibition is an intimate dialogue with Kher's own subjectivity, memories and psychoanalytic ideas developed by Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud. The one piece that occupies the most space and is visible from the outside of the house day or night is Bloodline (2000). It is a standing thin red cylinder, made of LED lights and traditional Indian women’s bangles, going through the two-story house. Acting like the main artery of the architecture, Bloodline ties in all the exhibiting pieces with the whole house, and invites the viewer to explore and contemplate on the space and the artworks as one entity.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

The Intermediaries (2016) is a series of clay figurines of part secular and part deity made in the south of India. These peculiar small sculptures are to be taken out and prayed to once a year during festival time. However some of them are damaged from shipping, and Kher sees and displays them as “the broken idols.” According to Freud, the formation of meaning of language and dreams undergoes a “secondary revision” in the unconscious, when forces like social norms, religion and morality repress thoughts and impulses stemming from sexual desire, and find a way to logically integrate the transformed version of such desire into one’s subjectivity through the process of dramatization. Whether The Intermediaries is a representation of the process of “secondary revision,” or religious awareness, the fact that they are damaged and incomplete suggests a more unfiltered mental state, and/or less disguised desire.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

Next to Anna Freud’s study is Links in a Chain (2016), a series of paper collages made from found children’s book Sally, Dick and Jane. Besides paying tribute to Anna Freud’s remarkable contribution to child psychology, Links in a Chain shares the quality of pictorial scripts or visual puzzles with Surrealist paintings in the 1920s. Automatic drawing was one of the techniques employed by Surrealist artists at the time in hoping the unconscious would slip through during the unrefined process. This series is visibly emotionally charged through the buildups of repetitive shapes and words, blocked out children’s faces and crossed off and altered texts. Kher reveals that the frustrating and frenetic energy here is partly in relation to her own childhood. In a way this series also serves as an interrogation of the patriarchal ideology behind psychoanalysis, and the complete absence of (young) females’ accounts in regard to the Oedipus complex by Sigmund Freud.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

This Breathing House is Kher’s inquiry into her own subjectivity, memories and unconscious mind in a unique setting that itself becomes part of the work. Through subverting and eradicating the conscious, Kher presents her methodology of tapping into the unconscious in the house once lived the founder of psychoanalysis.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

Works Cited

Edwards, Steve, and Paul Wood. Art of the Avant-Gardes. Yale University         Press in association with The Open University, 2004.

Foster, Hal, et al. Art Since 1900, vol.2. 3rd ed., Thames & Hudson, 2016.

Freud Museum London. This Breathing House ∞ Bharti Kher. Hauser & Wirth         Publishers, 2016.

Moorcroft, William H. Understanding Sleep and Dreaming. Kluwer Academic/       Plenum Publishers, 2003.

This Breathing House by Bharti Kher; Freud Museum (London, England) Staff (Contribution by)

Call Number: 1896

ISBN: 3952446157

Publication Date: 2017-07-25