Jérôme Game

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’.