Klaus Scherübel
Mallarmé, Het Boek
October 9 – December 6, 2009
S.M.A.K.
Citadelpark
9000, Ghent
Belgium
museum.smak [at] gent.be
http://www.smak.be
Conference
Jean-François Chevrier
L’art moderne selon Mallarmé
Modern art according to Mallarmé
Introduction by Hans de Wolf
November 27, 2009 at 18:30
Conference
S.M.A.K. is pleased to announce a conference by Jean-François Chevrier on the occassion of Klaus Scherübel’s exhibition Mallarmé, Het Boek. Based on the considerations Jean-François Chevrier has developed in the context of his exhibitions Art and Utopia. Limited Action (MACBA, 2004 and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2005) in this lecture he will further his examination of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1842-1898) influence on the visual arts.
Exhibition
The conceptually generated practice of Klaus Scherübel’s (born 1968 in Austria, lives in Montreal) proposes a critical analysis of different forms of cultural production and reception issuing from the visual arts, art theory, literature, cinema and television. His realisations, which use various strategies and means, involve a systematic investigation of artistic activity and the role of the artist. The exhibition at S.M.A.K. features two projects in which he reflects—in the role of the editor—on two controversial literary works.
Mallarmé, Het Boek (Leeszaal) [Mallarmé, The Book (Reading Room)], 1999/2009, is a comprehensive presentation of Scherübel’s long-term project dedicated to Mallarmé’s utopian endeavour from the 19th century. For more than thirty years, the French poet was engaged with this highly ambitious project, that he called simply Le Livre (The Book). Freed from the subjectivity of its author and containing the sum of all books, the realisation of this work that he planned to publish in an edition of precisely 480 000 copies never progressed beyond its conception and a detailed analysis of structural and material questions relating to publication and presentation. Yet to Mallarmé, The Book, which was to be found the “true cult of modernity”, was by no means a failure. “It happens on its own”, he explained of The Book in one of his final statements.
100 years later, Scherübel started an in-depth study of Mallarmé’s invisible masterpiece. In a gesture that highlights The Book’s contradictory status as both impossible to realize (as a book) and fully realized (as a conceptual work), he edited a “cover” for The Book in the dimensions specified by Mallarmé. This specific publication, existing to date in four different languages, bears all the hallmarks of a standard dust jacket, including an ISBN and a back cover text. This dust jacket wraps around a block of styrofoam to form the “bookstore version,” distributed in bookshops and public libraries. The new Dutch edition has been published by mfc – michèle didier, Brussels.
The installation Mallarmé, Het Boek (Leeszaal)—taking the hybrid form of a large promotional display and information room—proposes to shed light on the conceptual foundations of Mallarmé’s enterprise while foregrounding the means and processes by which a standard book gains public existence.
The second installation—entitled Jack Torrance’s All Work and no Play (Catalog of the Book), 2006/2009—represents the most recent chapter within a multi-layered project devoted to the perception of the artistic output of fictional writer Jack Torrance. In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) Torrance is suffering from a writer’s block, a difficulty that will be at the origin of a highly unusual work. It consists in the seemingly endless repetition of the popular expression “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” whoses typographical variations run the gamut of textual forms, from journalistic columns to concrete poetry. This creation, which in the film is interpreted as the symptom of a psychological crises, in fact involves—if we consider a certain history of avant-garde strategies—the production of a remarkable work that occupies an ambivalent position on the border between Conceptual art and a very visual form of experimental writing. Taking the form of a digital slide-projection, consisting of hundreds of indivdual images, Jack Torrance’s All Work and No Play (Catalog of the Book), refers directly to the scene where Wendy Torrance experiences the infamous emotional kick while discovering her husband’s typescript. Instead of the dramatic atmosphere of the original, this new version offers a distanced view on the totality of Torrance’s pictorial text work that has been reproduced, completed and edited by Klaus Scherübel.
Publication
Klaus Scherübel: Mallarmé, Het Boek
Produced and published by mfc- – michèle didier, Brussels
Klaus Scherübel: Mallarmé, Le Livre (Compilation)
Produced and published by mfc- – michèle didier in collaboration with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König (Cologne), Printed Matter, Inc. (New York) and Optica (Montreal) together with Musée d’art moderne Grand Duc Jean (Luxembourg).
