Jérôme Game
(France, 1971)   
 
 
 
Jérôme Game

Born in Paris, Jérôme Game now travels between this city and New York. It is (in) this movement that his poetry operates: The fluidity of the real – of bodies, cities, languages, images, events, collective or individual – via that of signs, and vice versa. Since 2000 he has published fifteen books, and given numerous performances of his work, in France and abroad (Europe, North Africa, Asia, Americas).

He has been described as “a writer at once inside and outside of literature: tooling up with textual cameras and microphones to compose open-ended narratives. His poetry escapes any easy definition: to listen to it is to watch a film being edited. To read it is to visit an art installation undermining rigid frontiers. Jérôme Game seeks literary forms where language is remodeled by close encounters with other practices – from visual to performative arts. Radiophonic writer, verbal videast, sound performer: whatever the terminology, so long as there will be becomings” (Flora Moricet).

Jérôme Game is undoubtedly one of the most important amongst a recent generation of French writers whose literary creativity escapes traditional formats, and established prescriptions by way of dynamic and fertile inter-artistic dialogues. In numerous books, CDs, DVDs, and performances, Game elaborates hybrid creations where poetry – often (de-)structured in complex syntaxes made of fragmentation, heterogeneous montage, and elliptic figures – fuses with images and sounds.

Famous for its effects of stuttering and voice bloquage, his poetry creates rich effects of hindrance and interruption in écrire à même les choses, ou (2004) and ça tire (2008); breaking up the verse as well as the utterance into irreducible syncope, thus opening up meaning and expanding it. The videopoems he has produced in collaboration with Naby Avcioglu and Valérie Kempeneers for Ceci n’est pas une légende ipe pe ce, a DVD released in 2007, are innovative in their radical redefinition of expressive/perceptive frontiers.

Equally at work in Game’s theoretical texts is an intensive search for new aesthetic effects. Ce que l’art contemporain fait à la littérature (2012) is itself a textual performance of such incidence, all the while being a theoretical reflection on the incidence art may have on literary creation.

Jérôme Game’s poetic work is based through and through on the assumption that any work of art (including art made of words) that doesn’t confront other practices will be its own hostage, locked up in its format. Opposed to this, a work able to enter into a dialogue with other aesthetic modalities, ready to submit itself to their disintegrating impact, and opening up to their dissonant languages, will recompose into many lines of flight and possibilities. Game’s is such a type of work. In it culminates what could be called an ‘aesthetics of becoming’.

© Sérgio Guimaraes de Sousa (Translated by N. Onel), Fabula.org, November 2012

Selected bibliography

DQ/HK (book + 2 CDs), L’Attente, 2013
La Fille du Far West, MAC/VAL, 2012
Sous influence. Ce que l’art contemporain fait à la littérature (essay), MAC/VAL, 2012
Poetic Becomings (essay), Peter Lang, 2011
Images des corps / Corps des images au cinéma (essay), ENS Editions, 2010
ça tire suivi de Ceci n’est pas une liste (book + CD), Al Dante, 2008
Ceci n’est pas une légende ipe pe ce (DVD of videopoems, with Nebahat Avcioglu and Valérie Kempeneers), Incidences, 2007
Flip-Book (book + CD), L’Attente, 2007
Sans palmes et sans tuba, Contrat maint, 2007
Porous Boundaries (essay), Peter Lang, 2007
Ceci n’est pas une liste, Little Single, 2005
écrire à même les choses, ou, Inventaire/Invention, 2004
Tout un travail, Fidel Anthelme X, 2003
Corpse&Cinéma, CCCP Press, 2002   [in English]
Polyèdre suivi de La Tête bande, Voix, 2001
Tension, Fischbacher, 2000

Links (in French)
Jérôme Game's French bibliography
Game's website

 



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