Christophe Gallois
The Space of Words
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The Space of Words
Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam
December 3, 2008
As part of the Monte Verità cycle
This lecture will take a gesture as its point of departure - Marcel Broodthaers' appropriation of Stéphane Mallarmé's book Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard - in order to explore the relations between language and space in the work of a number of artists, including Ed Rucha, Ryan Gander, Aurélien Froment, Mario Garcia Torres, Dominique Petitgand and Harald Klingelhöller. In 1969, Broodthaers created a book and a series of plates based on the twelve spreads of Mallarmé's 1897 book, substituting the words, which were deliberately arranged across the page, with black bands. This displacement from word to image radicalizes the movement of spacialization inaugurated by Mallarmé, highlighting the ability of language to generate space. It approaches the surface of the page in what French philos-opher Jacques Rancière, in a book from which this lecture borrows its title, calls an “exchange surface"” the space of the shift between different mediums, in which “signs become forms and forms become acts.” Broodthaers’ gesture is also characterized by the neutralisation and the erasure of the words' meaning. By turning Mallarmé’s words into illegible forms, he magnifies the gap that exists between word and space, exploring the discrepancy between these two elements as a productive space. The lecture will be articulated around this twofold dynamic: the spacialization of words and the disappearance of meaning.
The lecture is based on the research Gallois has undertaken for an exhibition to be presented at Mudam
Luxembourg in February 2009, as well as the article “Words and objects”, published in Metropolis M, April – May 2008.
→ Booklet
→ Exhibition: The Space of Words
→ Article: ‘Words and Objects’