Michael BISHOP, The Endless Theory of Days. The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel, Amsterdam / New York (Chiasma), 2007, 164 p.
ISBN 978-90-420-2165-5
SUMMARY
The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmelseeks to set forth the case for the special, multiple genius of a manwho, despite the experience of a biting melancholy resulting from loss,despite an ‘indefectible feeling of estrangement from the world’,despite, too, the corrosive sense of art’s, of languages’s,deceptiveness, has never lost sight of a curious duty to the shadowsthat haunt and that, with now a strangeness that smiles, yet beckontoward ‘the very place, finally clarified and recognised, of pureevidence. // [The place,] that is, where beauty is named’. This place,Gérard Titus-Carmel may feel, lies no doubt impossibly beyond thestrict locus of his art and his writing, but it is a place he hasstruggled with dignity and unceasingly deployed energy to bring to asemblance of incarnation in a vast plastic and poetical oeuvre that hasstirred, and will continue to stir, the minds and hearts of all those –from Derrida and Bonnefoy, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Pascal Quignard toJacques Dupin and Marie-Claire Bancquart, and countless others – whohave witnessed its exquisitely solemn unfolding over, today, more thanforty years.
CONTENTS
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1: From Hot Dogs and Bananas to Deterioration and Alteration: Form, Idea, Being
Chapter 2: Joaquin’s Love Affair
Chapter 3: The Cryptic and the Necessary, Deambulation and Sticks
Chapter 4: From Coffins to Italiana and Riggings, Shop Curtains and Narwa
Chapter 5: Accompanying the Other: From Chardin, Goya and Caillebotte to Bonnard, Crane and Roud
Chapter 6: Falling and Flowing
Chapter 7: The Self Accompanied: From Robbe-Grillet, Rossi and Roche to Commère, Bancquart and Bonnefoy
Chapter 8: Excavation and Forgetting, Embankment and Abyss
Chapter 9: From Shadows, Interiors and Seasons to Cairns, Forests and Nielli
Chapter 10: Questions of Presence and Manners of Darkness
Chapter 11: Leafings, Jungles and Herbarium
Chapter 12: Today
Selected Bibliography