The Endless Theory of Days. The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel

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-Carmel seeks to set forth the case for the special, multiple genius of a man who, 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 shadows that haunt and that, with now a strangeness that smiles, yet beckon toward ‘the very place, finally clarified and recognised, of pure evidence. // [The place,] that is, where beauty is named’. This place, Gérard Titus-Carmel may feel, lies no doubt impossibly beyond the strict locus of his art and his writing, but it is a place he has struggled with dignity and unceasingly deployed energy to bring to a semblance of incarnation in a vast plastic and poetical oeuvre that has stirred, and will continue to stir, the minds and hearts of all those – from Derrida and Bonnefoy, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Pascal Quignard to Jacques Dupin and Marie-Claire Bancquart, and countless others – who have witnessed its exquisitely solemn unfolding over, today, more than forty 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