Paul Valéry once insisted that a poem could not be summarised.1 In 1897, Stéphane Mallarmé came close to disproving this. ‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard’ (‘A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance’), sees Mallarmé break his poem apart. Syncopated over multiple pages, white space and wild alignments combine to create a visual rhythm and form far away from mere text. William Marx described it as, ‘The founding poem of poetic modernity … the culmination of poetry in all senses of the term’.2 The poem’s second life as an artistic composition influenced many. Marcel Broodthaers famously obstructed all the text for his 1969 recreation of Un Coup de Dés, leaving it hidden behind black boxes that dramatically direct our focus to the compositional structure and white space. Looking back now, it is difficult not to see an interesting early referent of redaction in Broodthaers’ take. Appropriately, in its original definition, redaction means ‘to make ready for publication’, to edit in preparation for print. Presently, it means something vastly different, to remove from public view; to censor but not destroy, to conceal.
Broodthaers declared Mallarmé and Un Coup de Dés as the ‘source of modern art’, that Mallarmé ‘unwittingly invented modern space’.3 Broodthaers’ response was undoubtedly a reflection on Un Coup de Dés’s daringness. At the same time it related what was lost in Mallarmé’s action—of the denial of language. Mallarmé printed his version of Un Coup de Dés on three different quality of paper stocks. Broodthaers printed his on transparent paper, standard paper and on aluminium—extending his version’s capacity to influence by diversifying its applications. For Marx it was appropriate that