Henri Michaux : Emergences-Resurgences

by MICHAUX, HENRI

• ISBN13: 9788881188369
• ISBN10: 8881188368
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-02-01
• Publisher: Skira

Summary

This English language translation of Henri Michaux's celebrated book Emergences-Resurgences has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux organized by The Drawing Center in New York. Like all of Michaux's texts (be they visual or verbal), it is a profoundly provisional or occasional work, written on commission, tossed off (one imagines) at considerable speed -- as an Action Writer (and Painter), Michaux always wanted to work fast and, ever impatient, ever nomadic, rush on to the next thing at hand. Part essay, part poem -- by turns lyric, ekphrastic, didactic, gnomic, and comic -- Emergences-Resurgences is also one of Michaux's most sustained self-portraits (as he notes in these pages, the world often comes to him as sheer head or face). Its explicitly autobiographical elements are few, but telling: his childhood in Belgium, his initial foray into drawing in 1925, his first "alphabet" works of 1927, his travels to Asia during 1930-31...

These dates and events, however, merely provide the barest external framework for