Tango 74

Notes

Two squares dance. Across 202 pages their eight vertices drift — left, right, and to a lesser degree up and down — until the squares shed what Molnár calls their old skins and molt into quadrilaterals; then the straight sides give way to curves, "segments of parabolas, hyperbolas or wild sinusoids." She describes the stretching as happening mostly in x and much less in y, which is what produces the tango. Her text is dated Le Home-sur-Mer, summer 1995, and ends with a postscript worth the whole book: this "not very serious" work, she writes, was made on the prehistoric computers of the Centre de Calcul Universitaire at Orsay in 1974, and she wants to thank the director of the day who let her run "Tango" — a piece at the antipodes of that institute's pure and hard science. Hence the 74 in the title: the work is 1974, the book is 1996. Published by Édition Présence de l'Art Contemporain, Angers, 1996; printed by Setig, bound by Jacques Palussière. Landscape format, 14.8 × 40.5 × 2 cm, 202 pages, orange linen boards with the title printed on a tracing-paper leaf. The trade describes the edition as unsigned and unnumbered; DAM's invoice called it a "limited edition book." Came with the collection's first DAM purchase — invoice 16-09-36, 27 September 2016, alongside the Molnár Squares, the Mark Wilson and the Casey Reas. Photographed in the collection August 2026.