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Marcel Broodthaers Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) 1969
© Succession Marcel Broodthaers c/o Sabam Belgium / ARS, NY 2022
“Un coup de dés,” Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal visual poem from 1887, has inspired a plethora of homages by later poets and artists, including the influential Conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers. In Broodthaers’s adaptation, the typographic layout of “Un coup de dés” remains intact, but the words themselves are canceled out with black stripes. In this way, Broodthaers lays bare the poem’s visual structure. In addition to 300 copies printed on ordinary opaque paper, Broodthaers produced a shorter edition of 90 on translucent paper. The translucent version allows the observer to see the bars on multiple pages simultaneously, appearing as a black-to-gray tonal gradient. Each turn of the page generates a new abstract-geometric composition.
Identification
Title
Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance)
Production Date
1969
Object Number
2016.210
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, acquired from The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Gift of Ruth and Marvin A. Sackner and the Sackner Family Partnership
Copyright
© Succession Marcel Broodthaers c/o Sabam Belgium / ARS, NY 2022
https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/2016.210
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Softcover book with mechanographic printing on translucent paper
Dimensions
Closed: 12 3/4 x 19 1/2 x 1/8 inches
Visual Description
Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard by Marcel Broothaers is a softcover book with mechanographic printing on translucent paper from 1969. It measures twelve and three-quarters of an inch by nineteen and a half inches by an eighth of an inch.
This image is of the book open. White pages with dark grey and black bars cover entire words and sentences throughout the two pages. Both pages are filled with words from top to bottom. There is a large indent at the bottom and also wide indents on the side of the words which have been patterned in a gradient of black and gray. The horizontal lines formed by this blocking out of words gives the impression of bar graphs or oscillating waves made of rectangles. Through the translucent paper, it is possible to see other black bars with similar but unique variations that imply the book is filled with these blocked out words.
