Un Coup de Dés (Collection) is a book about books, a collection, a gathering of evidence, a critical investigation, and an anthology of artists books. The book catalogues all the books in its accompanying exhibition with meticulous bibliographic details, is richly illustrated, and is accompanied by critical essays written by leading scholars of the field such as Annette Gilbert, Craig Dworkin, Luc Boltanski/Arnauld Esquerre, Michalis Pichler and Ryoko Sekiguchi.

“Books and Ideas after Mallarmé” explores how Mallarmé’s Coup came about in the first place and how the absence of an authoritative edition contributed to keeping its exact status indeterminate, making it intertextual text par excellance. 

Also, it looks at the Coup which has become a reference piece that gets appropriated with increasing frequency by contemporary artists and authors, who often operate independently from the commercial gallery system, gather around the networks of art book fairs, and have contributed to a wide-ranging bibliographic discourse within a field that has been subsumed under the umbrella term publishing as artistic practice. The research and the represented books all question the notion of the publication as a neutral container for information, and argue for a consideration of the physical shape and structure of text, of publications and of their materialization.

The book is published on occasion of Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé at Center for Book Arts New York (1/18/2024 – 5/1/2024).

Coup de Dés (COLLECTION)