Coup de dés (Collection)

Coup de dés (Collection): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé brings together a vast number of
editions of Mallarmé's chef d'oeuvre as well as many of its historical and contemporary editions
and appropriations by other authors. Mallarmé's arrangement of the poem on opposite pages
turned each side into a compositional entity. Constellations of words on a spread and the interplay
between the text fragments and the surrounding white-similar to the way a constellation of stars
interacts with the sky-was a metaphor explicitly used and introduced into literature by Mallarmé.
His notion of "constellation", for example, is connected to Ulises Carrión's vision of a "new" book.
"In the old art, to read the last page takes as much time as to read the first one./In the new art the
reading rhythm changes, quickens, speeds up," as he wrote in 1975. The richly illustrated book
contextualizes the perception and appropriations of Mallarmé's masterpiece through critical
essays written by the editor and leading scholars such as Annette Gilbert, Craig Dworkin, Luc
Boltanski/Arnaud Esquerre, and Ryoko Sekiguchi.
Michalis Pichler is a Berlin-based artist, primarily operating independently of the commercial
gallery system, and one of the founders and organizers of Miss Read and Conceptual Poetics Day.
Pichler's works often make use of found and pre-used material. He treats pages as canvases and
canvases as pages for works of art.