DELAY
Evans Cerith Wyn, DELAY (Antwerp: Desingel & Walther König, 2009).
Cerith Wyn Evans
DELAY
Antwerp: deSingel, Cologne: Walther König, 2009
254 x 333 mm, 32 pp.
die-cut pages, Softcover
ed. 500 copies

"In his new artist s book, Cerith Wyn Evans references two publications from the 20th century in both design and scope. Firstly, the 1914 edition of Un coup de dés jamais n abolira le hasard-poême (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) by Stéphane Mallarmé, which is considered to be the fi rst hypertext in the history of language, and secondly the 1969 replica of the same name by Marcel Broodthaers, in which he blacked-out all the lines of text in a dandyish gesture and subtitled it "image". This laboriously designed homage by Cerith Wyn Evans contains just one text, spread over 32 pages, whose letters are laser perforated: "Permit yourself to drift from what you are reading at this very moment into another situation... Imagine a situation that, in all likelihood, you ve never been in." Cerith Wyn Evans is a master of the coded handling of image, language and quotation. In doing so he references not only Mallarmé and Broodthaers, but indirectly Josef Albers, Guy Debord and his very own oeuvre."