Stéphane Mallarmé: A celebration
Q: What does an origami squid have in common with a dead French poet ?
A: A sense of occasion.
Stephane Mallarme's (1842-1898) quest is also a 'contemporary' one-that of overcoming the distance between abstract thought and actuality, and sensation and object. Mallarme's solution was, in part, transcription of abstracts into form via the use of contingent variables, and an erasure of authority which resulted in the creation of a new order, a new method of recording the occasion; new formal solutions. The occasion under scrutiny here was a salute to the dead poet, a scholarly exhibition guest curated by Michael Graf at Monash University Gallery.
The exhibition was impressive in the range of ideas it presented through the works of twenty-two artists. It set out to achieve the curator's aim of expressing: 'the nature of living with Mallarme for the last hundred years'.1 While Graf did not attempt to gather a group of mallarmists, he did bring together works by artists which he felt addressed a Mallarmean sense or feeling of the arbitrary nature of meaning, or which contributed to a particular Mallarmean textuality.
Most of the chosen works did comply with this discourse in a pleasingly playful, non-intellectualised fashion. Mallarme's work stressed the idea, in its sensual rather than intellectual manifestations, through a self-supporting formal system. This stylistic and conceptual melding was presented in the exhibition through works like Susan Norrie's elegant sculptures which 'form themselves' from their embodied ideas, or Bea Maddock's rhythmic recordings of the passage of a specific time. It also was elegantly presented in the selection of etchings by Henri Matisse (commissioned in 1930), which illustrate certain images drawn from Mallarme 's