Après Un Coup de dés
—
2015
ARTIST’S BOOK
“What is it about? It’s an intervention, which makes the word and the author disappear into a musical score of spaces, which give rhythm to the page hollowed out of all words. […] Mallarmé considers Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard as a musical score. One is inside the book and outside of the book: music and carving. One could in fact hang the frame of the text on a wall. […] Michel Lorand is faithful to the score, to the rhythm and silences of it; he hollows out the words to make them an illegible mark. He makes the silence of the spaces into words once again and suggests at the same time another visibility. The book offers itself up to contemplation outside of all meaning and all commentary; it’s a physics of the book. Michel Lorand adopts a puerile approach in his hollowing-out technique and in the cutting of the paper. He works on the paper, chooses it, bends it, cuts it, puts it together. A true artisan-opérateur, he makes the copies by hand, one by one. He effaces and he constructs, assuming the double Mallarméan imperative of destruction and transfiguration. In this logic of abstraction, there is no longer either name or title on the cover (leaving only the red and black frame of the reference edition). Four large pages and a cover, all just printed and already hollowed out, leave the printer’s with their technical notations (crosses, numbering, trim marks). They are creased but will never be trimmed nor bound. These pages are given the freedom to harmonise in a mute score, which, by its infinite motions, will leave this Book permanently incomplete. ” Jacques Sojcher
Jacques Sojcher, WIELS, lecture:
https://vimeo.com/128078043
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMUpm4dYZiU
