“The ‘blanks’ indeed assume importance,” wrote French poet Stéphane Mallarmé about his 1897 poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. “The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others.” More than seventy years later, Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers turned to Mallarmé’s poem, reprising its title in his artist’s book, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Image (1969). In it, Broodthaers obscured Mallarmé’s words with black bars while preserving their layout across the page. He printed these bars on translucent paper, bringing successive pages into view when stacked and bound—as if to fulfill, in his own way, Mallarmé’s call for “a simultaneous vision of the Page.”

This poem and artist’s book bracket one historical interval in which the page became a charged field of artistic and literary experimentation, collaboration, and exchange. The pairing of Mallarmé and Broodthaers represents only one history of the page, and current graduate students are encouraged to propose talks that bring others into view. Speakers are invited to explore how visual and literary practices were brought into relation on the surface, site, and space of the page between the 1890s and circa 1970. Interventions should probe how encounters between artworks and text on the page, a space long associated with literature, transformed the ways those works were seen, read, and written about. Of particular interest is how the page—even, and perhaps especially, its blank space—surfaced and structured social and political being.

Participants might consider, but need not limit themselves to, questions such as:

• What role did typographic and design elements play in shaping hierarchies between text and image, and in negotiating authorial and artistic agency?
• How did the materiality of the substrate—the texture and weight of the paper, for instance—complicate readings of unmarked space as neutral?
• How did artistic movements leverage the mobility of the page to cultivate and expand transnational networks, as in the case of the Gutai Art Association?
• In what ways did experiments on and between pages converge with, and diverge from, time-based media like film?
• How did little magazines, such as those of the Harlem Renaissance, contend with the racial politics of the black-and-white page?
• To what extent did experiments with transparency and superimposition destabilize the page as a discrete visual field?

Selected speakers will deliver 20-minute talks, followed by extended discussion, during this one-day semi-private symposium, held on Friday, April 9, 2027, at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The event will conclude with a public keynote delivered by Trevor Stark (Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Calgary, Canada).

The symposium is convened by Alana Frances Baer (Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art ’27) and the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute.

Current PhD, MFA, and MA students based in the United States in the fields of art history, studio art, and related disciplines such as comparative literature, English, and film and media studies are invited to submit an abstract of c. 200 words with CV to simultaneousvisionofthepage@gmail.com by November 20, 2026.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent in January. The Clark covers and arranges round-trip transportation to Williamstown, lodging, and hospitality during the convening.

For more details, visit: www.clarkart.edu/Research-Academic/RAP-Events/simultaneous-vision-of-the-page