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The white spaces indeed take on importance, are initially striking; ordinarily versification required them around like silence ... I do not transgress the measure, only disperse it. The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others.
Stephane Mallarme, " Preface”. Un coup de des.
Formulated from the late sixties onwards, the basis of the critique of the commodified or commodifiable object lay in the abandonment of the plastic for the abstract; traditional sculptural and pictorial materials were given looser, less specific reference and art befell linguistic definitions. There were myriad precedents to this . Guillaume Apollinaire, ushering in the calligram, a poem of description, spatially arranged to mimic the object it signified, declared, "And I, too, am a painter". Later, around 1964, the Belgian poet-cum-painter, Marcel Broodthaers echoed, "1, too, wondered if I couldn't sell something". Apollinaire's exclamation reached its utmost realisation with Broodthaers'.
In general the Ecole de Paris is characterised by romanticised sentiments of the bohemian and radical avant-garde, in which the social and political pertinence of written and depicted material was agonistically reformulated with the abandonment of genre boundaries and of poetic categories: the same elan no longer operates because of advertising's extraordinary proclivity to swallow and digest anything in its path. Broodthaers' recognition of the reifiable readiness of everything implies that he too could be a pop star and he too has fifteen minutes, seconds or just a moment.
The redeployment of modernist strategies by erasure, fragmentation, diffusion and aleatory error is an expression neither of their success nor of their periodic relevance. Instead, they perform under the rubric of whatever we now label 'postmodern'... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline