DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
(Étant donnés — being given, before the play begins.)
The Other (structuring itself as language)
The Other (condensing itself as language)
Prologue:
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard — a throw of dice will never abolish chance shouts Mallarmé’s (first name Stéphane, by chance but without the i) typographic poem published for the first time in 1897. It is a visual cacophony that does not obey conventional formal structures of the language in which it was written. It torments the reader, who drowns in a sea of inappropriate italics, eccentric capitalizations, and all sorts of oddities that seem arbitrary while at the same time suggesting the possibility of constructing meaning; an attempt to collapse the gap that separates the representation from what is represented. The dream of a “harmony of words and things,” where language and object merge, the past becomes present, for some can be understood as an intellectual defense mechanism against the suffering arising from the experience of grief; for another, as eucharist; both constituting a violent movement of retreat, refusal, or withdrawal from the embodied human condition.
Adrienne Rich, poet, now in 1973, in Diving into the Wreck, opens the poem already establishing in the first line that the shipwreck we experience — we as readers, she as poet — is very different from the shipwreck in which Mallarmé drowns us:
Having read the book of myths, / and loaded the camera, / and checked the edge of the knife, / I put on / the body-armor of black rubber / the absurd flippers / the grave and awkward mask. / I am having to do this / not like Cousteau with his / assiduous team / aboard the sun-flooded schooner / but here alone.
The “never abolished” chance in Mallarmé’s game is the result of loaded dice. Just as Cousteau in into the Wreck knows he can count on his team, Mallarmé, it seems to me, feels that the book of Myths, deep down (of the Sea?), and what he may find there, were written par hasard (et pas rasé, I say!) by and for him. Rich knows that she is heir (and fruit) of the same cultural inheritance — and of its wreckage — of which Mallarmé is part (and also legatee, excluding the spoils of the time that separates them). She dives deep to examine not only the extent of the damage but also the treasures that have prevailed, but above all, to recognize herself there, whether out of cowardice or courage, once again carrying a book of Myths where her name is not written. There is no possibility of drowning in Rich’s wreck because here language functions as a map, not as a manifest destiny. Her dream is that of a common language (The Dream of a Common Language), also born from the suffering of the experience of loss; not the fusion language-object, but plurality that condenses into language, similar to the idea of the “language of the dream.”
Well then.
PLAY, the exhibition of Stephanie (with an “i”) Lucchese, is the very mise-en-abîme, or the play within the play, the situating in the abyss, the game that reveals what is at stake. Her works, it is understood, bring the same characters to the stage. If at times they appear carefree in an idyllic garden where color and light, seductive and nuanced, the fruits or foods offered glowing in contrast with the falling evening work as amusegueule, making palatable such a difficult theme as the desire of the subject before the desire of the Other, here they stage a darker fantasy; the color palette is concise, but not for that reason little or less complex; the complexity is tonal — as if, having already read the book of Myths, we could now stage not the motifs but the leitmotiv. It does not matter who dreams what is being staged: whether it is us, the artist, or the very figures that appear there, but rather the fantasy to which desire points us. Fantasy of completeness, of harmony of symbols and things. No, the painting presents itself, stages, or represents, visible and open to be experienced, as a radical form of clash between language and object, as the very game of desire.
From where one cannot speak, silence is made.
ACT I
Anterior/exterior — Playground / stage / board / tableau. The board is a reverse mirror, not reflecting a jubilant fiction of completeness but revealing itself. The audience is expected — who is witness, actor, and director — to interrupt and change the course of action “NOT ONLY FOR PLEASURE.” Curtain.
À rebours.
By M. Brias, 2025