AFTER MALLARMÉ PART TWO

Large Glass, London
16 May – 15 June 2024 

Toby Christian, Susan Morris, Hendl Helen Mirra, Peter Downsbrough, Joëlle Tuerlinckx  

LARGE GLASS

 

After Mallarmé

Part 1
the page…the place…
Part 2
...contingency, the operator…
Part 3
…perhaps...a constellation
 

Three rolling exhibitions will trace aspects of the legacy of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé in contemporary art, drawing on his poem 'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance' and his posthumously published notes towards a 'book performance'. Mallarmé has had a great influence on visual art, ranging from text and newspaper collage in Cubism, through Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, to Marcel Broodthaers. Rather than direct influence, these exhibitions will 'read' the work of certain contemporary artists through Mallarmé.


The exhibitions will open with an exploration of the page as a place and the place, including the gallery, as a page, on which and in which the work of art becomes an event and a journey. Could these 'pages' form a book, and what, then, would be the relation between book and world.

Contingency is a state of potential, where things could turn out otherwise. Chance may be the outcome of a procedure, like throwing dice. The work of art becomes an 'operation'. During Mallarmé's speculative book performance, an 'operator' was to place pages at random on the shelves of a lacquer cabinet. Might the art work achieve a condition of necessity without abolishing chance?'

A throw of the dice' moves from shipwreck in a stormy sea to a constellation where the stars in the night sky are reflected by the letters on the page. The reading of the constellation follows catastrophe, the experience of nothingness and the abyss. It asks the question of how we find meaning in the face of disaster, of the past, and to come. As in Mallarmé's book performance, art takes place as the 'entr'acte' between world and cosmos.

After Mallarmé is curated by Michael Newman, Professor of Art Writing in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary artists as well as thematic essays on the wound, the horizon, contingency, memory, drawing, and nonsense.

The three-part exhibition runs from April 12th – July 19th 2024.

EXTRACT: CURATOR’S NOTES, AFTER MALLARMÉ

Michael Newman, 2025

With the Plumb Line Drawings Susan Morris becomes the ‘operator’, in Mallarmé’s sense, of her work. They are made by plucking a builder’s plumb-line saturated in vine ash (rather than the usual chalk) against a wall of paper, leaving the trace of the string's hit onto the surface. The string is nailed to the top of the paper - a line of holes can be seen with the marks made from pulling out the nail with the claw hammer, and the marks where the body has pressed or leaned on the paper are left. The plumb line is the kind that coils into a container holding the pigment powder. It can be coiled and reused several times, the amount of pigment diminishing. We can see the lines fading, then strengthening as the ash is renewed. The string becomes frayed, which shows in the lines of the paper, creating horizontal patterns across the lines that aspire towards verticality while being subject to an entropic downward pull. The top and bottom limits are irregular. The work is made by gravity causing the string to hit a limit, the paper-as-wall having its potential-to-stop.

 Each hit could thus be said to be a ‘stoppage’, to borrow a word from Marcel Duchamp's 3 stoppages étalon (3 Standard Stoppages) 1913-14, where the artist dropped three threads and created a ruler from each, rendering the ‘standard’ itself contingent. He also constructed a box to house the work in imitation of that which held the standard meter in Paris. The date of the work includes the year when Un coup de dés was first published according to Mallarmé’s precise instructions for its layout. According to Brian Massumi, ‘form is a certain kind of stoppage’. Form that is not an idea in the mind but the production of an operation at the edge of the formless.

 The drawing is an indirect trace of an activity of the body. We could also say this of the Mallarméan ‘operation’. Even if different from the traditional ways of making poetry or art, the operation involves an activity that indexes a moment in the history of the body, of social relations, and of technology. The 'operator' in ‘Le Livre’ is an office worker engaged in an activity of filing that is disrupted by being paradoxically random, releasing a potential that is alien to the prescribed order. We might remember that this is also the moment of Herman Melville's ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ with his response to any instruction ‘I would prefer not to’, ending in a withdrawal from activity which has been read by Giorgio Agamben as a condition of potential. Withdrawal is replaced by futility in Morris’s drawings, as brilliantly described by Ed Krčma. The several activities - hammering a nail, filling and shaking the plumb-line cartridge, drawing out the ash-saturated string, suspending it from the nail, plucking it by pulling it away from the vertically-hung paper and letting go so that it snaps back leaving its trace of ash - are repeated over and over again, until the requisite area is filled. Nothing is constructed using this gauge, a pure verticality approximated but never achieved - this is not even fail, but fail better. The line goes nowhere.

 Here it is hard to distinguish between determination and compulsion. The paper that stops the string’s trajectory is rendered opaque and material, a form of confinement, as if the artist is banging herself against it again and again. Yet the ash traces, in their elusiveness, on an edge between being and nothing, neither one nor the other, create a strange, shallow yet infinite opening. Because of the hairs of the string, the surface of the paper gives the impression of an absorbent softness. If there is an identification of the body with the string, then the ash might stand for its remains, its vanishing traces, its dust. All things fall.

 But there is something else. Gravity is a force, the draw of the planet, and the Plumb Line Drawing is a conjunction of forces, including the muscular energy of bodily life. Morris made the eleventh in a motion capture studio, wearing the costume with dots used to track and abstract the body’s movements filmed by cameras in a voluntary act of surveillance and direct form of ‘cinematic drawing’ which perhaps reveals the ‘choreo-graphic’ dimension of any gesture of drawing, even one as attenuated as plucking a string. In Morris’s practice the agency is expanded through limitation. Creation is no longer ‘hylomorphic’, a forming of matter by the artist. The ‘elocutionary disappearance of the author’, as Mallarmé put it, implies a different genesis, whether the work of language or the contingencies of materials and forces. These manifest themselves as such precisely in the withdrawal from use, the futility of the activity.

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EXTRACT FROM REVIEW, ART MONTHLY No. 479, September 2024

After Mallarme: Part Two ... contingency, the operator

Andrew Chesher.

Composed at the end of the 19th century, Stephane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de desjamais n'abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) was a significant precedent for modernist developments in art the following century, its influence extending from Cubism to Conceptual Art, but what relevance does Mallarmé, who did not live to see the 20th century, have in the 21st? The evidence of ‘After Mallarme’, a three-part exhibition at Large Glass curated by Michael Newman (Reviews A.M 477), demonstrates that his half-life is proving to be a long one.

During the show’s first and second iterations, the gallery’s front room was lined with black paper. Removed for the last iteration, the sheets of Joelle Tuerlinckx’s Atlas Room LARGE GLASS Front room (+ vitrine), 2024, were folded, cut and bound as the pages of Atlas of Walls LARGE GLASS SPACE VOLUME #1, on which notation of this process augmented the inscriptions added to the sheets when in situ. Tuerlinckx’s Atlas is, in effect, the doubling of a

three-dimensional volume in a bibliographic one, where the geography of the walls, the sequence of sheets that lined them, and their transformation into a book, are all documented alongside one another. It might aptly be described using the French word ‘doublure’, since not only did it double the room like a lining does a coat (one of the word's meanings), as the book’s pages it also stood in for the room (an actor’s stand-in or stunt double being another). In its two states Tuerlinckx's piece formed, then, eloquent bookends to this Mallarmean show, echoing Un coup de des’s famous integration of its legible text with the spatial dimen­sion of the page.

Of the works included in the exhibition’s second iteration, perhaps the most directly pertinent to its specific focus on contingency were Susan Morris’s Plumbline Drawing No.11, 2009, and Toby Christian’s Stringer Study (Un coup de des), 2024. Like Mallarme, both artists yoke form with chance: they steer towards contingency to achieve what would appear to be its opposite, a motivated form. To produce her work, Morris suspended an ash-coated plumbline in front of a sheet of paper, the vibration of which when plucked imprinted an irregular vertical line on the page. Repeating this procedure at regular intervals across the surface gave rise to a drilling pattern of subtle lateral bands. Although similarly ghostly, the genesis of Christian’s image - a series of delicate, looping and loosely knotted lines - was more complex. First the artist used an AI schooled on a database of hand-drawn letters, which produced from Un coup de des’s text a ‘string sculpture’ in digital space. Then, choosing one image of this computer-generated model, he copied it by hand through sheets of carbon paper onto the work's linen support. Moving from hand to AI and back again, Christian's work echoed the imbrication of chance and form that was at the heart of Mallarme’s poetics.

Andrew Chesher is senior lecturer in fine art at Chelsea College of Arts, London.

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