"Boys Fight," a poem by Marina Tëmkina with images by Michel Gérard
/Dissolve is thrilled to announce our publication of Marina Tëmkina’s poem and Michel Gérard’s drawings. To view the project and read the full poem, click here.
Marina Tëmkina’s fifteen-stanza poem “Boys Fight” is a rush of language: short, brusque bursts of sentences collapsing into chagrin and exasperated exegesis, conversational asides and digressive laments indexing the traits, facts, and ways in which men, unceasingly, compete. One finds a taxonomy of masculinity in her inventory of big boys, old boys, mainstream boys, golden boys, and girls who look up to boys—all combative, doing intellectual battle, raging and sparring, driven, and treating the world, as she writes, as “a huge fighting ring / an enormous battlefield / an unlimited war zone.”
The short blocks of text, inspired by the framing devices and graphic format of the Soviet avant-garde’s VKHUTEMAS School, feature repetitious phrasing; anaphora becomes a conceptual device underscoring the cyclical nature of competition within hawkish nations. Boys fight, and they will go on fighting. On one hand, the poem is Tëmkina’s response to the emergence of violent factions and nationalist movements over the past decade; it was written in 2015, following the onset of the war in Ukraine (2014–) and during a U.S. presidential campaign in which bluster and hard-line rhetoric offered a glimpse into the coming nightmare of xenophobia and global conflict. On the other hand, Tëmkina positions the scale of these conflicts as limitless:
Boys fight
and get more energy from fighting
for more fighting.
They love cosmos and its universal energy.
They love other planets
and energy of other planets.
For them, Earth has limited land,
limited, you see, for fighting.
Big boys, they need more space
for fighting, including cosmos.
And cosmos is extending
and enlarging by itself,
and this is a good news for big boys.[1]
The poem is paired with mixed-media drawings by Michel Gérard, a sculptor whose large-scale works aim at demonumentalization and ask us to reconsider the “status of statues.”[2] The drawings included here were inspired by an illustration in the Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré (or the Petit Larousse), a popular and practical French-language encyclopedic dictionary first published in 1905.[3] Gérard, who was born in Paris and immigrated to the United States in 1990, discovered a 1942 edition of the Petit Larousse at a used book sale; it was the same edition his family had referenced during his childhood. The small dictionary became the source for numerous drawings and prints.
The Petit Larousse compiles commonly-used words and subject matter in concise yet characteristic definitions. Unlike traditional dictionaries that include Latin etymologies and historic usages, the Petit Larousse definitions are culled from the most frequent applications and examples associated with the word. Its editors consider it a reflection of the general public’s “current state of knowledge,” rather than a monitor of language and culture.[4]
Alongside the Petit Larousse’s text definitions, one will find thousands of illustrations throughout—drawn pictures, portraits, maps, graphs, charts, diagrams, and reproductions of artworks. The combined use of text and image gives the reader/viewer of the Petit Larousse an opportunity to comprehensively, conceptually, and practically grasp the entries’ meanings.
Gérard takes up the iconography in the illustration for “boxing,” one of the dictionary’s 140 full-page illustrations. It presents a series of numbered vignettes that each demonstrates a different boxing technique, rule, move, or practice. In pairs, the boxers demonstrate a ready stance, facing each other with elbows bent and fists up. Other scenes are captured mid-combat with the boxers punching or kicking their opponent. Below the images are the corresponding numbered textual descriptions, “hook,” “upper cut,” and “direct hit to the stomach,” so that the reader/viewer can go back and forth between image and text.
Gérard’s drawings enlarge these scenes, inserting the pairs into fiery spheres that float in a dark universe. The sketchy, loose lines and vivid orange and red colors animate the boxers and call attention to the inherently chaotic violence of the subject matter. Gérard questions the neutral presentation of the illustrations in the Petit Larousse that the editors describe as purely educational and documentary. In combination with Tëmkina’s poems, which are also critical of the ways that knowledge is produced by the dictionary, image and text provide us with a lexicon that contrasts the dictionary’s masculinist, patriarchal vernacular.
—Kathryn Barulich and Christopher Squier
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Tëmkina, Marina, "Boys Fight." Stanza 7. ↩
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Gérard, Michel, "Michel Gérard art," homepage. https://michelgerardart.com/home.html. Accessed 26 Sep. 2022. ↩
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Larousse, Pierre, 1817-1875, Paul Augé and Claude Auge. Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré: Dictionnaire Encyclopédique. Paris: Larousse, 1924. ↩
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Petit, Gérard. “Le Traitement des Variantes Graphiques dans les Dictionnaires Larousse, et spécifiquement dans le Petit Larousse Illustré.” Langue Française, no. 108, 1995, pp. 40–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41558747. Accessed 26 Sep. 2022. ↩
