Database

A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance

September 16 – November 11 2017, Start and end dates


The exhibition Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard/ A throw of the dice will never abolish chance is based upon the work by Marcel Broodthaers with the same title. In this work Broodthaers paid homage to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé who published a poem with this title in 1897. The poet spread the sentences of his poem in different fonts and sizes throughout the pages. Form and content thus unified, and even more importantly, the empty spaces between the words became significant elements of the poem, which caught Broodhaers’ particular attention. Broodthaers emphasized that Mallarmé invented “modern space” and thus stood at the origin of contemporary art. Broodthaers replaced the original text by black beams, thus transforming words into images. The work was first shown in 1969 in the legendary Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp. In the same year – not without hazard – Apollo II landed on the moon and allowed Neil Armstrong to be the first man to step on the moon. This first step of man outside the earth was an unprecedented cosmic achievement with a resetting of the concept of space. It was also an event with huge implications for the arts. The dominant directions of art at that time – conceptualism, minimalism, land art, and very specifically spatialism- expressed a fundamental interest in the concept of space. Richard Long, stanley brouwn, Yves Klein, Luciano Fontana, Donald Judd and many others gave their personal interpretation of new concept of space. Marcel Broodthaers’ work Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard/ A throw of the dice will never abolish chance is exemplary for this new interpretation of space and shows his fascination for immeasurable space. Similar to Broodthaers’ paying homage to Stéphane Mallarmé , the inaugural exhibition Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard/ A throw of the dice will never abolish chance pays homage to Broodthaers. With the exception of Ian Hamilton Finlay all artists in this exhibition are one our two generations younger than Broodthaers. They created their work in an era in which works can no longer be classified according to specific –isms: Nietzsche’s scraps on paper, a motor on a carpet, oister shells in a wooden goblet, words carved in concrete on a square of building blocks, or collections of objects seemingly brought from a flea market are not only very different in form but also in content. What unites them is the modern space as invented by Mallarmé and visualized by Broodthaers. These young artists in their turn interpret the concept of space in a totally new and fascinating manner. Artists: Marcel Broodthaers (B), István Csákány (HU), Ian Hamilton Finlay (UK), Thomas Grünfeld (D), Rodrigo Hernández (MEX), Sofia Hultén (EC), William Hunt (UK), Nicolás Lamas (PE), Rodrigo Matheus (BR), Benoît Maire (F), Christopher Orr (UK), Oscar Santillan ((EC).

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