Title: Mallarmé, Das Buch
Artist: Klaus Scherübel
Format: Set of 4 offset printed dust jackets, polystyrene, blister, 0 pages, each 24 x 16 x 3,6 cm
Accompanying essay: Anna-Sophie Springer, Volumes: The Book as Exhibition, C Magazine, Issue 116, 2012, 36-44.
ISBN: none
For more than thirty years French poet and philosopher Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) worked constantly on the concept of Le Livre. Although it was never published, he regarded Le Livre as the sum of all books, a Magnum Opus that was completely free of its author’s subjectivity. As a concept Le Livre was built up like a cosmic architecture by way of texts. The result was an extremely flexible structure that comprised nothing less than all existing relationships between everything that already exists. This pure book which Mallarmé wanted to publish in an edition of exactly 480,000 copies, was never realised and got no further than a conceptualisation and detailed analysis of the materials to be used and guidelines for its possible presentation.
Klaus Scherübel made a layered and in-depth study of Mallarmé’s utopian dream. The eponymous installation serves as a conceptual reading room, where Scherübel presents himself as the publisher and guardian of Mallarmé’s controversial and quasi forgotten 19th-century, nonexistent literary masterpiece. It is translated into photos, text material, video etc.
German, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese versions:
Mallarmé, Das Buch (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2001)
Mallarmé, The Book (Printed Matter, Inc, New York, 2004)
Mallarmé, Le Livre (Mudam and Optica, Luxembourg / Montreal, 2005)
Mallarmé, Het Boek (mfc-michele didier, Brussels, 2009)
Mallarmé, O Livro (São Paulo, Edições Tijuana, 2014)