Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard (Broodthaers)

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) is an artist's book by Marcel Broodthaers published November 1969 in Antwerp. The work is a close copy of the first edition of the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé's poem of the same name, published in 1914, but with all the words removed, replaced by black stripes that correspond directly to the typographic layout used by Mallarmé to articulate the text.

Broodthaers reduces Un Coup de Dés to its structure - or to put it another way he elevates the structure of the work to a concept worthy of study in its own right, thus acknowledging Mallarmé's own fetishistic attention to this aspect of his work. Rendering the structure concrete, visible, almost tactile, Broodthaers offers a conceptual analysis of Mallarmé's poem across the distance of a nearly a century...It would be hard to imagine a more subtle treatment of Mallarmé's work, or one more capable of demonstrating its essential properties, than this reworked book by Broodthaers. — Johanna Drucker

Often included in exhibitions tracing the history of the artist's book, the work is seen as a seminal example of the European post-avant-garde. It is often referred to simply as Un Coup de Dés.

Broodthaers had lived in poverty as a poet in Brussels for twenty years before becoming an artist in 1964. His first exhibition, at the Galere Saint-Laurent, included two unsold parcels of his fourth book of poetry, Pense-Bête, encased in plaster. This was the first of many works that 'employed techniques associated with poetry but applied by him not only to words but to images and symbols.'Un Coup de Dés would become the most famous instance of Broodthaers' interest in setting up a contradiction between the written word and a visual image 'to the profit of the subject.'

Broodthaers had been given a copy of Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés in 1945 by the Belgian surrealist painter Réné Magritte as 'a way of explaining his art to a young admirer without explaining it literally.'

As for the idea of establishing a direct relationship between literature and the plastic arts, I'm afraid I have done so by taking as a subject A Throw Of The Dice, by Mallarmé !!! — Broodthaers

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