"The prestige to resist : A reading of "Un Coup de Dés" through the sculptural aesthetics of late modernism"

by Kostis Velonis

Textual materialism and un-expressiveness

One of the tactics of European "Modernité" is the emphasis on the unity of an "Author" though the crisis of representation as it happened in diverse movements. The artist's responsibility some years after Mallarmé's death corresponded almost always with the use of an intuitive, immediate or even automatic expressiveness that has characterised the first half of the 20th century. It is generally assumed that Mallarmé is one of the leaders of Modernism in the sense that his writings correspond to the requirements of the originality of his thought and his own style. But from an historical perspective, it is possible to comprehend that there is a parallel history in Modernism in which creativity is not in favour in its impressionistic and expressionistic terms and Mallarmé becomes one of the pioneers of this choice, because what it displays in terms of a condition of representation is the un-presentable, the non-figurative operation of an abstract thought. The poet introduces us in a process of un-expressiveness. More precisely, what he is trying to describe is not in a situation of mimesis of reality in a manner of the Aristotelian definition that we can discern the structure of a plot. At the "Un Coup de Dés" even if the poet makes use of a distant "confession", the subject of the poem is not that of a canonical self, the ego is in a situation of exploration, in such a way that the notion of anthropos in its ontological affirmation is in question. The "becoming" of the poet is synonymous with the absence of itself. At the poem the absence of the subject is invested on the formal characteristics at the same writing.

Word as an object per se

Minimalist aesthetics have been concerned with the principle of indistinguishable aspect between volume and inner dialogue of the volume. In other words, Minimalist artists have not being sympathised in the ideological frame of the "double" aspect of the art object. The material characteristics of their productions did not serve in order to explain or to narrate something. In this way, it is clear that is not the word that requires meaning as Carl Andre's bricks, or Donald Judd's boxes do not require iconographical witnesses. "The fact that it is achieved is not a result of the words themselves but of the position assigned to them in a selected system of arrangement.1" The Poetic space is filled with words that are displayed as structures. For the Author, poiesis is always in a condition of morpho-poiesis, to make and to formate the idea in a material spectre, to syntax a semantic materialism.

Mallarmé's poetry is here in order to (un)-express its purest stasis against a "universal reportage". Words figure the signifier in its isolation from the world. Word is an object per se. But is this autonomy of the word transparent to itself? Does it allows a "trans-", a passage, "metaphora" (in Greek signifying both the transport and the metaphor) to be manifested, a transparency of its own writing? And when we refer to this idea of the word as transparent medium , what kind of transparency we expect? That of the linguistic rapport of the word with its own signification or that of the analogous rapport between its shape and its description? But not even the poet achieved to approach these two transparencies. Or more precisely he completed to bring the dilemma to the extent the word corresponds to what it depicts, form or content.

Typography in favour of the minimal

In order to understand the alliance of the writing via the minimal aesthetics, it seems increasingly important to investigate the possibilities of the form in the word, discerning at the "constellations" of the poet a condition of imitation of the formal characteristics of the word in relation with typography. The relation of Mallarmé with the typographical variations help us to specify the strong relations of the poem with visual and tactilic references. The total sum of eleven different character styles could correspond to the particular dictionary of minimalist and geometrical expression 2. The word-equipment in Mallarmé's poem is not identified with pictures in the sense of painting but with words "scripturales" and "sculpturales". But if we wanted to analyse Mallarmé's "écriture" as an epiphany of signs, we should precise that has not only the significance of scribe (graphi), a text in its condition of matter-via the manifestation of the sculptural medium as a model- but more than this via design.

Here we must consider design not as a visual manifestation. There is not iconographical concept that cannot be applied to the pragmatism of industrial societies. In the poem, the notion to trace, it appears without including definitions such as that of engraving or carving the material. The poem's typographical variations are related with setting down the words as standard materials that have a minimal differentiation between them.

In this same condition Minimal Art as an historical determined term, from the first years of the sixties, has been identified with the use of industrial materials in a form of serialisation that has so much characterised the work of American artists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Mel Bochner, Sol Le Witt and others.

My intention is to point out that word can have the same significance with that of the volume. What they both display as such in the Mallarmean as in the Minimal discourse is in conflict with the sculptural aesthetics of early modernism , the simple manifestation of volume is not defined by what it excludes, that means a dialogue about outer and inner volume.Here, we could refer to two narrative points that each one could equally correspond to the intentions of the poem. To consider the non-penetrable aspect of the work (writing or sculpture) either as a symptom of the tragedy of modern id to produce meaning either as a symptom of liberation from the tyranny to use meaning.

I think that Mallarmé's "Un Coup de Dés" contains more complex requirements in the sense that these symptoms can be sometimes combined together or displayed separately each time, following a different destination.

Repeated blanc

These experimentations of the poet have been located always through the vibrant frame of a white paper. This time, the contribution of the blanc in not that of a transparent medium, the same that we could recognise at the traditional painting, as the intermediary role of the white canvas. In the Mallarméan screen the white intervenes, the unity of the poem encloses the possibilities and imposibilities of spacing and gapping between the words. Mallarmé's "writing takes place on a blanc page which is the "place of the writing of these whites" 3. The rising and falling movement of the words in these white pages is affected by the fold (pli) as a system of self-referentiality in such a way that white is folded between the words, "it folds up the text towards itself, and at each moment point out the place, the condition, the labour, the rhythm."4

The same concept-keyword of white is repeated by parallel readings, from the same matrix. A universe of similarities is then produced and reproduced by divers graduations of white that are found in the poem such, blanchi, blancheur, chenu, stellaire, Septentrion, etc. The thematic affinities of the extensional frame of white asserts a condition of repetition, in which the crossing with the parallel white gaps produce a catholic shape of a serial arrangement. The white gaps of the poem do not remain the same, there are transformed from page to page.

But the reaffirmation of whiteness is not permanent, it is rather used to express a rhythmic and constructive variation. White has not an eternal "dureté", instead of it, sustains a form of temporarily. "Un Coup de Dés" has a degree of expression in the sense that white is repeated in distinct different ways. But the expressiveness of white is located as a precise adventure of the gap, in which there is no space for a "dramaturgie" of the word. What is expressed is the "between" of the form.

We could assume that the poet needed words because he wanted to avoid them, in other terms, he needed the presence of words in order to play with the spatial motivations of white, to bring them in a position of the silent witnesses of the virtually condition of white.

Mallarmé has tried to achieve this stage of un-personalisation, rejection of the subject and in linguistic terms of the verb, as an agent of meaning. And if we had some reasons to insist on the writing, we would recognise that the reader is not invited to "solve the enigma as that he himself should enter into the enigmatic state where he feels solutions"5. There is not a certain and rigorous hermeneutic of the poem, on the contrary the reader is the performer of its own action as a reader that performs 6.

"Un Coup De Dés" and the model of rational modernity

Mallarmé has combined the textual and the textural at his poetry after the 1970's, and as an interdisciplinary maker, his work is evolved in possibilities of inclusion between seeing and reading. One of the general principles of modernism was the manifestation of a medium's purity. The hierarchy of languages that have been either established in all disciplines, permitted in the case of visual arts, the written language to act in a supportive way.

Conceptual art as one of the physical conclusions in the field of Minimal aesthetics has insisted in the production of works that are dependent on language in opposition with the priorities of a "visual-art-object-producer" 7. Conceptual artists gave an emphasis to linguistic messages, making exhibitions in which viewer was obliged to read instead of contemplating the visual content. Is it the Mallarmean project in activation concerning these activities? These statements based on a linguistic approach with their apathy to any visual procedure have excluded art as a system of knowledge through perception fitting better to a condition of "aesthetisation" of art-criticism. Do the programmatic declarations of artists such as Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner have anything common with the discourse of the poet? The economy of presentation, not this time in relation to the pragmatism of singular object as it happens in Minimal Art but with the significance of the absence of the object and its replacement by the text could also mean the definite manifestation of the work as statement that is not a Mallarmean case8.

Being aware about the pursuit of Mallarmé for the existence of Absolute -"existence de l'absolu" reading "Igitur"-facing the recent history of late modernism, it appears that we are very near to the Minimal aesthetics. We are talking about a catholic affirmation for the word, as it happens in Minimalists with the predominance of the objectity of the formal references. In the same manner that Minimalist sculpture emphasizes the uniformity of design, or the repetition of a simple geometrical formula, Mallarmean words become matters for construction.

The objectives of Mallarmé's poetry seem strikingly similar with that of minimalists sculptors reaffirming an intense dialogue between art and architecture. The typo-logical and typo-graphical characteristics at the "Un Coup De Dés" deal with architecture, something that could be argued for the case of Minimalism and more especially corresponding to the modernist hermeneutic of architecture. In our era, we have understood that "L'oeuvre pure" appears as an axiom justifying an ideology of purity. Le Corbusier's gaze claiming the "purest witness of the physiology of perception"9 has placed the Greek temple as the unique model of a build whiteness, that otherwise is not an invention of the ratio of modernist architecture. But this time architects claim that narratives must be excluded, the historical context or ephemeral stories of the Greek temple must be overthrown. Parthenon has been identified with the absolute form of a reducing thought. As Corbusier has mentioned in his polemical writings in this building there is "no question of religious dogma enters in; no symbolical description, no naturalistic representation; there is nothing but pure forms in precise relationships" 10 .

Marcel Broodthaers version of the poem Let me now, include the reappropriation of Marcel Broodthaers at the "Un Coup de Dés" at 1969 . Broodthaers version of the poem appears in the form of a book replacing the whole text of Mallarmé with black bars that correspond exactly to the dimensions of the words 11. The rhythmically articulated blocks with their formal clarity according to the typographical and spatial syntaxis of the poem help us to perceive the affinity of the text with Minimal poetics. Here written language is interpreted as drawing, but not that that constitutes a discourse of expressiveness, but that of an industrial design. Within Broodthaers interpretation the words are now "black rectangular units" in which their solid component, repeated, remind us so much the predominance on the simplicity of the forms in Minimal practise. A singularity of the material that has no subject but itself. These underlined forms that have replaced Mallarmé's words function as abstract variations of the architectural language in which the pedagogical condition is based to the exploration of three-dimensional structures through the use of geometrical signs.

The codified units of the black lines are placed beyond the epistemological curiosities of the secret side of the unit -that obviously lead us to the discovering of a hidden word- justifying a system of disorientation of the architectural praxis, defining a visual testimony of the horizontal condition of a generally accepted vertical column. They could be even applied on the anthropomorphic columns of one of the most emblematic buildings in the history of the discipline, at Parthenon. They are elements of mathematical disorder in opposition with the mathematical order of Acropolis. In both the cases of Mallarmé and Broadthaers, order is the necessary frame in which they will expand their antithesis. Knowing that Mallarmé used squared paper in the writing of the poem and "was most anxious that the typography should comply exactly with his specifications", Broodthaers arrange its material in a analogical rationality with the exactly correspondence of the black units to the written word. We understand that the scenario of the disturbance of order sometimes is related with the same paranoia of order in its eschatological elaborating nature 12.

"Un Coup De Dés" is a de-constructive abstract of modernism 13. Broodthaers has enforced the dadaistic challenges on Mallarmé's text. And in face of certain strategies of conceptual art that have emphasised the systematic taxonomy of every day references through the numeral language, such as in the cases of On Kawara, Stanley Brown, or Sol LeWitt, he has positioned a "deliberated triviality" 13 in face at the pomposity of these conceptual references. In relation to his polemical view concerning the tendencies of that period could it be possible to cross at his option on Mallarmé's poem the possibility of both sides, first an expression of admiration (within the framework of his fascination with the nineteenth century) and secondly an negation of the same discipline of literature with the disappearance of the word and its replacement by the black unit 14.

It seems that is not fully possible to understand Mallarmé without taking account of this attitude against conventional writing. Broodthaers after his own "Un Coup de Dés" have approximated the possibilities of the word as image, seeing his later slide series as the case of "Projektion" and "Avis" at 1972. In these projections he has used a variety of sign systems that were combined together, words, abbreviations, symbols, commas, etc. The result is those signs in a form of isolation without completing any sentence, their linguistic context is empty, and for this reason "they appear as temporary indications on the wall or screen and no longer seem to refer to anything beyond themselves" 15. But Broodthaers has not only produced and published his reappropriation on the "Un Coup De Dés". He has also projected the original poem on the screen, clarifying the designed aura of the poem again. Addressing here the relationships between Broodthaers and Minimal Art , it helps us to bring back the Mallarmean project. During its whole life Broodthaers organized his material with the same elliptical and self-referential form as the minimal sculptors. But the European avant-gardist in opposition to American Minimalists reacted against the neutral aspect of this language by an "ironic affirmation" of its institutional character. Regarding the slide projection "Avis" we see words as a cube, sphere, or pyramid that are identified with the minimalist preferences for the simplest geometrical shapes. During the projection of these 20 slides we perceive the repetition of the word Figure or fig. as abbreviation that its application in the history of catalogues of exhibitions and the encyclopedic editions is determinant. It announces the presence of an image. This work functions against the "primary structures" of minimalist sculptors. In the series Projektion he includes 4 slides that contain details of the work "Il n'y a pas de structures primaires" 16. The title sounds as a reaction to one of the first presentations of American minimalists an exhibition which was called "Primary Structures". In Broodthaers case the rectangular manifestations of the matter are represented from the critical view of someone that remind us the fruitless character of American Avant-Garde.

The remains of a constellation

But if "there are not primary structures" what is the final sense that could remain in the production of such works? If the cultural object does not correspond to the phenomenological requirements of Minimalists, then, to what experiences could possibly inform us? Primary structures do not exist in the same way in which "Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance", the dice correspond to the ratio of the minimalist and conceptual discourse. The impossibility that we have with a throw of the dice to determine a precise number is the impossibility to determine human destiny. One of the crucial points of the "creation" of cultural productions is that it achieves to turn our gaze from what we face as failure, encourage us in a condition for which there is a justification for mankind.The poet introduces us to the chaotic reality of universe, informs us that only the human struggle remains as something that constitutes us the reality for us. The "MAITRE" as it appears very soon at the poem represents the "mankind's immemorial efforts to control chaos and its symbol the sea" 17. But from the same page, we note, that Master is mortal, unable to determine its own destiny. Mallarmé at the end of his life, writes that the maitre hesitates in this hour of death, "cadavre par le bras écarté du secret qu'il détient" 18. Following now Broodthaers reintepretation of the poem it cannot be denied that there is a common ground between the repetition of the solid components and the three-dimensional solids, that is the case of sculpture.

The poet in face of the white page discovers a "CONSTELLATION" 19. Because it is not so clear what is the precise identity for this constellation, scholars on Mallarmé's poetry have adapted completely different directions, sometimes the constellation is identified with the Great Bear, other times with the human intelligence and sensibitity 20. But in both cases the argument is within the limits of the human presence, from the perceptual and psychological moment that human is aware about otherness, an otherness that is related to himself. I would like to recognize at Broodthaers case the operation of Mallarmean project as a constellation in terms of the tactile principles of the object. The three-dimensional matter through the point of view of the language of sculpture could help us with the paradigm of the monolith as one of the components that articulate a sort of constellation, monoliths within the space, in the Mallarmean logic of the words within the white page. The sculptural volume as monolith means, like the Neolithic dolmens, that these material articulations have a persistent identity supporting the absolute manifestation of the intensification of matter. This refusal to the penetration of the sculptural volume is equivalent to the insistence of the surfacial aspect of the work in the way that Mallarmé's poem has an intense and rich formalism that reflects the importance of the word as matter and this matter within the frame of a physical resistance. Mallarmé and Broodthaers resist to the empty scene of the human praxis with the articulation of the constellation or at least with a hope to the spatial constellation of the sky. They resist because "Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés"21. So it becomes easier to understand that the preference at the epiphany of the matter in the case of sculpture and particular on the monolith is strictly similar to the concept of poetry in which, in opposition to literature, there is a relation with language from outside. According to Sartre, for the poet the word composes "a face of flesh which represents rather expresses meaning"22, which means that every word in poetic praxis is the equivalent of the monolith. Because of its physical hypostasis, monolith's non-transparency is similar to "the labour of writing (that) is no longer a transparent either" 23. A we understood the treatment of words at the "Un Coup De Dés" is that of objects. We can face that the poet was not interested to use words as vehicles of communication. In this manner we can distinguish an ethos of how to abolish the possibilities for communication, displaying more the failure to decide what is for whom. Mallarmé demonstrates clearly the "possibility of repeating the moment of truth" that is the experience of death 24.

Within this context it becomes easier to understand a certain self-monumentalisation of this gesture of despair towards disappearance. And as a reaction to that we can see the expansion of sculptural and typographical forms. In this sense the Author announces his desire to live confronting the reality of death. And in order to maintain life, he attempts to amplify the borders. "From the depths of a shipwreck ...in these waters of the ideal into which all reality dissolves" and "the unfathomable ocean… offers to one's inner vision the alternative interpretation of a sail casting its shadow over the depths…" 25 , here the words are considered by the reader as formal expansions of a literal confrontation. The modernism of Mallarmé is standing as a vehicle full of pathologies, characterizing at the same nature of writing, the experience of its own narrative of death.

"Un Coup de Dés" will become then a prophecy for a decadent para-dice, a modernised sublime in which the idyllic moment is synonymous with the "nouveautés" of language. As the result is the increase of the white space in the text, we are witnesses of the gradual decline of the figure and its replacement by a hazardous landscape that is asserted by the descent of a diagonal trajectory of reading from around 500 to 300 26.

If human consciousness is suspended between life's experience and the gnosis of death, the poet has attempted to show this suspension, choosing the double page instead of the single. The spatial presentation with the formation of words corresponds to the process of discontinuity of time. Time must be suspended because life must be continued. In this case of identification between artwork and self, we understand the reasons why art as a practise is not concerned with the objective of communication but with that of resistance. Mallarmé at the "Un Coup De Dés" refers to the whiteness as the only reality, that of the empty and meaningless background that shadows the life of each of us.

This whiteness of Mallarmé being misunderstood, could be related to the prestige of someone who is thinking grandiose ideas as that of the absolute in an absorbed manner, negating any contact with reality. But how is it possible to claim for a senselessly self-centredness in the discourse of the poet when we know that its own stasis was traced by the very reality of disappearance? We could agree more easily for any judgement, if we didn't know that at each of us is inevitably called to be confronted alone with the un-visible knowledge of death. And there is not prestige is such cases…

Notes

1 See the text of Hans Rudolf Zeller, "Mallarmé and Serialist thought" In Die Reihe, vol.6. 1960, p.7.

2 "In the printing of "Un Coup de Dés", Mallarmé opted for the use of eight different typefaces, three of which appear both as Romans and Italics, constittuting thus different characters, the remaining five being either Roman(three)or Italic(two), offering a total of eleven different character styles" see David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, Poetry and the visual Arts in Nineteenth Century France, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p.139. The same poet discuss the divers types see, Oeuvres Complètes; Henri Mondor et G. Jean-Aubry, (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade, 1970).p.1400-1401. At this last writing of Mallarmé, we perceive also an unstable and continuous linear inclination. This inclination is being repeated as the metre begins and ends in a diagramatic mode from up to down.

3 Jacques Derrida, Acts of literature, ed. by Derek Attridge, (New York, London: Routledge, 1992), p.115. 4 Ibid., p.115

5 Zeller, p.14

6 We can easily comprehend the way that this poem has so hugely influenced music performances. Words are understood in the musical sense, knowing however that the "space" of music following the metres of the poem is outside of the classified categories. It is noteworthy to remark that serialist composers such a Boulez admire Mallarmé's metre seeing in him a predecessor of Serialism.

7 A quite rigorous dictionary for the visual artist of 70's. See the introduction in Art-Language, vol.1, number 1, may 1969, reproduced by Art and Language, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1980), p.19-26.

8 Through the agenda of conceptual art tottaly different artists have been presented in the past as having a common identity. It is obvious that my argument does not apply to the wider field of conceptual strategies of artists.

9 Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, trans.by Frederick Etchells, (London :The Architectural Press, 1927), p.204.

10 Ibid., p.204.

11 For a brief commentary on the Marcel Broodthaers work see the introductory essay of Anna Hakens on the catalogue for Marcel Broodthaers:Projections, (Eindhoven:Stedelijk Van Abbenmuseum,1994), p.13.

12 A.R Chisholm, Mallarmé's Grand Oeuvre, ( Manchester : Manchester University Press,1962), p.92

13 See Benjamin Buchloh, Lettres ouvertes, poèmes industriels at Broodthaers, at the Conferences and colloques, (Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1992) p.37

14 The controversial feelings of Broodthaers can be showed in a letter that has been published with the occasion of the exhibition titled exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé. The artist writes "Pourquoi? Sans doute, Magritte rencontré. Il y a longtemps, m'invite à méditer ce poème. Donc, j'oubliai, je meditai,…aujourd'hui, je fais cette image. Je dis Adieu. Longue période vécue. Adieu à tous. Hommes de lettres décédés. Artists morts. Nouveau ! Nouveau ? Peut-etre. Excepté. Une Constellation" . Open letter, Anvers, 2 dec. 1969. Magritte he has introduced at Broodthaers the "Un Coup de Dés" during 40's.

15 In both these cases it could be argued a certain resemblance between the topo-graphic utopias of Mallarmé and Broodthaers. Looking at the uncompleted "book" of the first, it remind us the issue of the total work of art in the form of synopsis not only in knowledge but also in space, a compressed space in which everything possible is written as in the case of the personal "Musée d'art Moderne, Département des Aigles" of the Belgian artist .

16 See the open letter of Broodthaers, dated, Lignano, 27Aug.68, reproduced by the exhibition catalogue of Lignano Biennale I, Lignano, August-October,1968.

17 A.R Chisholm, Mallarmé's Grand Oeuvre, ( Manchester : Manchester University Press,1962), p.94

18 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres Complètes, pp.462-463.

19 Ibid., pp.476-477

20 The reference of the constellation is deliberately open to many different interpretations which I shall not go into discussion here. For other approaches to the same topic see Jean Piere Richard L'univers Imaginaire de Mallarmé, (Paris:Le Seuil,1961), Gardner Davies, Vers une explication rationnelle du Coup de Dés, (Paris :Corti,1953), Robert Greer Cohn, Mallarmé's Coup de Dés, (Yale :Yale French Studies, 1949)

21 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres Complètes, p.477

22 Jean Paul Sartre What is Literature? Trasl. by Bernard Frechtnan, (Northampton:Methuen and Co, 1967), p.6-7. Here , it is noteworthy to try to contextualise David Smith's "Cubis", the last series of works of the most influential American figure in modernist sculpture. Rosalind E. Krauss analyzing the last series positioning two different directions in which criticism has followed. The particular series of David Smith is an emblematic model of two different directions. In the first case Cubis are interpreted as abstract gestures that have an anti-materialist character in the way that these volumes create "an energy that is purely optical" as has been defined by Hilton Cramer. See Hilton Cramer, David Smith (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County museum of art, 1996). In the second case the importance of the "Cubis" is associated with their colossal supremacy, expressing in its full terms their weight and material density. This second position has been argued by Donald Judd from which is evident that there is an absolute reflection with his own material, within the proto-minimal aesthetics of thingness of every iconic and material aspect. Donald Judd appreciates the presence of massive boxes of Smith's "Cubis" as trasnscriptions of the discourse of drawing into the three-dimensional world. "Un Coup De Dés" has been traditionally opened in issues that are related with a visual interpretation, mostly pictorial, seing the work of Mallarmé guided by a drawing quality. This drawing has been traditionally interpreted via the world of optical imagery, see the position of Cramer, that without knowing, reaffirms the Renaissance model of the illusory space of the "pittura". In the same chapter Rosalind E. Krauss concludes that Cubis are monolithic using as an example the definition of Jean Paul Sartre demonstrates the transformation of the words into objects, See Terminal Iron Works, The sculpture of David Smith, (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1971), p.175.

23 Jacques Derrida, Acts of literature, Ed.by Derek Attridge, (New York, London: Routledge, 1992), p.114.

24 Paul de Man, Mallarmé, Yeats and the post-romantic predicament, doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1960, p.20. More information and a critisicm of Paul de Man writings in relation with Mallarmé see the text of Rei Terada "De Man and Mallarmé, Between the Two Deaths" in Michael Temple (ed) Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture, (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, Devon, 1998).

25 See the translation of Charles Chadwick (ed), The meaning of Mallarmé, Poesies and Un Coup De Dés, (Aberdeen:Scottish Cultural Press,1996).

26 See David Scott, p.143.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, trans. by Frederick Etchells, (London :The Architectural Press, 1927)

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PERIODICALS

M.Bochner, "Serial art, Systems, Solipsism", Arts Magazine, sum., 1967

Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood", Art Forum, Vol.V,1967.

Claude Gintz, "Architecture et postminimalisme", Revue d'esthétique, no 29, 1996.

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Alex Maller, "Signs, Systems, Structures, Space in Basic Architectural Design", Leonardo, Vol.19, no.1, 1986.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS Avis Projection of 20 slides of blank film 1972

MARCEL BROODTHAERS Mallarmé, Un Coup de Dés, 14 slides of the poem 1969

MARCEL BROODTHAERS Fragments from "Un coup de dés jamais m'abolira le hasard, image", Galerie Wide White Space Antwerpen first and last page 1969

Kostis Velonis is an artist and is currently attending an MPHIL in Humanities and Cultural Studies, London Consortium (Birkbeck College, ICA, Tate Gallery, AA)

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