Rober Racine

Le Terrain du dictionnaire A/Z, 1980

Artist
Rober Racine
Title
Le Terrain du dictionnaire A/Z
Dimensions and medium
Styrofoam, wooden sticks, cardboard, and paper, 16 × 853.4 × 731.5 cm
Artwork description
In 1979, Rober Racine created a large installation where viewers could perceive, all at once, the 60,000 words contained in the French dictionary. His objective was to “decentralize” the French language and to offer a new way of reading it based on the experience, rather than through normal discourse. From this project, a whole series of interrelated works followed, including Pages-miroirs, on which the artist worked from 1980 to 1994. Produced in 1980, Le Terrain du dictionnaire A/Z constitutes a kind of maquette for a “park” of the written word as imagined by the artist. The 60,000 words, individually cut and glued onto small pieces of blue cardboard mounted on black sticks, are set in rows over a wide, low, white platform measuring about 670 square feet. The first 5,000 words, from “A” to “Bouillotte” are arranged in alphabetical rows, while the remaining 55,000 others are grouped in a tight, illegible configuration in the centre of the platform.

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