{"id":119281,"date":"2017-12-14T13:00:15","date_gmt":"2017-12-14T18:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119281"},"modified":"2017-12-14T13:08:35","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T18:08:35","slug":"stamp-this-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/14\/stamp-this-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Stamp This Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The rubber stamp is the official weapon of officialdom. Anyone who\u2019s used one knows why: it feels great to smash a carved piece of wood and rubber onto a piece of paper, leaving an imperious mark where once there was empty space. Properly applied, a stamp is almost onomatopoeic, and its satisfying thump is the bureaucrat\u2019s easiest pleasure. It\u2019s a tactile expression of power: with a few fluid motions, you make a neat, loud sound, and maybe, depending on what the stamp says, you\u2019ve just ruined the life of a total stranger.<\/p>\n

Vincent Sardon, a French artist with a small shop in Paris\u2019s 11th arrondissement, sees the rubber stamp as a kind of talisman of the bureaucratic West. A stamp, he argues, is never an impartial object:<\/p>\n

It packs a symbolic wallop because of the millions of judges, cops, customs officials\u2014agents of public authority\u2014who use them to validate passports, to turn people away at the border, to pass judgment, to pass laws, to sentence, to record proceedings, to excommunicate\u2014all sorts of evil documents that have the power of putting people in impossible situations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His practice is to reclaim the rubber stamp, and the act of stamping, as something playful, banal, even impolitic. In his shop, he designs and sells stamps in a range of sizes and subjects, many of them vulgar, all of them practically useless. There are insults in many languages: \u201cEat shit and die,\u201d \u201cGo piss glass,\u201d \u201cT\u2019\u00e9tais moins con quand tu buvais\u201d (\u201cYou were less insufferable when you were still drinking\u201d); remonstrations in commanding block capitals: \u201cSORRY, NOT INTERESTED<\/small>,\u201d \u201cSHUT THE FUCK UP<\/small>\u201d; and a parade of naked cowboys, porn starlets, and disfigured homunculi, any of which would make a great gift for someone you hate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A new book, The Stampographer<\/em><\/a>, collects Sardon\u2019s most volatile and pointless contributions to the art form. Its pages produce a kind of alternate bureaucracy, a profane portal dedicated not to renewing your driver\u2019s license but to spreading chaos and fatalism, one inky impression at a time. The book testifies to Sardon\u2019s misery as much as his ingenuity. In an edifying interview at the end, he says, \u201cMy work simply reflects the world, which seems to have been created by an absolute moron.\u201d<\/p>\n

That moron got his hooks in Sardon from a young age. As a student, he landed a summer job at an insurance company, where it was his job to void the tall stacks of cancellation letters from pissed-off clients. \u201cI had a big stamp that read TO BE DESTROYED<\/small>,\u201d he says. \u201cI stamped each page. My interest in stamps and in a certain kind of written violence that stamps convey and amplify might perhaps date from that time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The salient feature of that violence is that it can be replicated, with minimal effort, over and over again. The stamp reflects the ruthless quest for efficiency that warped office life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transforming a class of fumbling, snuffling clerks into a \u201cworkforce\u201d\u2014a word Sardon finds especially loathsome. In its clean, orderly layout, The Stampographer <\/em>reminds us at every turn that stamps were made to administrate, to regulate, to institutionalize. He arranges his creations in tidy grids, as if in a catalog; only the prices are missing. The effect can be genuinely disturbing. To encounter vile slogans (\u201cGo get a vasectomy,\u201d \u201cYour life is meaningless,\u201d \u201cNobody will notice when you\u2019re dead\u201d) all in a row, all carefully stamped, is to see the viciousness of the id through the prism of office life\u2014and to understand why the windows in skyscrapers are suicide-proofed.<\/p>\n

\"\"Sardon says that his stamps were inspired by \u201cthe hatred I would sometimes see on people\u2019s faces,\u201d but he can be whimsical in his animosity. For every expression of pure malice\u2014\u201cSTOP DREAMING<\/small>,\u201d \u201cYOU\u2019LL NEVER MAKE IT<\/small>\u201d\u2014there\u2019s a display of impudence or absurdity. One stamp reads \u201cStalinist cheese steak\u201d; another, \u201cpetty bourgeois anarchist.\u201d Others suggest that the reader is merely a \u201cpumpkin on a riverbank\u201d who should \u201cdie beating your head on tofu.\u201d And a stamp in German says simply, \u201cJEANSB\u00dcGLER<\/small>\u201d: \u201cyou iron your jeans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sardon doesn\u2019t always assail the reader this way. The Stampographer<\/em>\u2019s most inventive spreads are entirely imagistic, though no less severe for it. He delights in busy displays of dancing knaves, bug-eyed monsters, monster-eyed bugs, weeping lovers, and splaying skeletons. A trio of roller stamps have a military theme: bombers, tanks, and infantrymen stream uninterrupted across the page, forever committed to destruction. (One of the book\u2019s best touches is that it often depicts the tools themselves\u2014utilitarian slabs mottled with ink stains and fingerprints, and looking like they\u2019ve been through a war.)<\/p>\n

Sardon\u2019s images are intricately rendered and weirdly enchanting\u2014but though these redeem the rubber stamp as an aesthetic object, they lack the punch of their verbal counterparts. I found that I preferred to linger on the page dedicated to honorifics\u2014\u201cInventor of Disco,\u201d \u201cDark Side Slut,\u201d \u201cMatador of Love.\u201d Tellingly, Sardon dedicates a whole page to his simplest stamp: \u201cI\u2019M RIGHT<\/small>.\u201d This is the Ur-stamp. Every stamp, in the end, is made to exude certitude. Remember the library scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade<\/em><\/a>? Harrison Ford needs to bust a big hole in the antique stone floor, as archaeologists so often do. Wielding a heavy stanchion, he times his blows to coincide with the brutal rhythm of the librarian\u2019s stamp, hoping to escape notice. It provides the perfect cover; three times, the old librarian brings his stamp down and puzzles over the formidable noise it makes. He stares at his stamp as if to say, Damn, what an awesome stamp! He suspects nothing. Why should he? The stamp gives him authority: \u201cI\u2019M RIGHT<\/small>.\u201d The Stampographer <\/em>invites us to destroy that authority. A page full of Sardon\u2019s ready-made rejections\u2014nothing rejects like a rubber stamp\u2014is floridly ridiculous. \u201cYOUR MANUSCRIPT IS SO BAD THAT WHILE CONSIDERING IT, OUR ENTIRE READING COMMITTEE GOT CANCER AND DIED<\/small>,\u201d one stamp says.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/a>If this sounds dumb to you, it is. It is very dumb, and it becomes even dumber when you realize that Sardon\u2019s customers are buying these stamps and going out into the world to do God knows what with them. \u201cI don\u2019t really know what people do with the stamps,\u201d he admits. \u201cIt escapes me \u2026 In truth, some things are so ugly I would gladly refrain from taking credit for them.\u201d At the same time, he claims that his work is for \u201cinnocent people,\u201d and it\u2019s hard to disagree. When you can buy a T-shirt that says \u201cYOU FUCKING SUCK\u201d on the boardwalk at any shitty beach town, a rubber stamp that says \u201cDICKWEED\u201d can\u2019t do much harm.<\/p>\n

The Stampographer<\/em> is at its best when it conjures piles of paperwork, but this yields another form of innocence in the stamps: for all their misanthropy, they\u2019re deeply nostalgic. They belong to the pre-digital bureaucracy, to the world of print and postage, and as such they can seem quaint. Today\u2019s technocrats operate through a concert of databases and fully automated transactions; they send us emails from addresses like digital-no-reply@amazon.com. \u201cPlease do not\u00a0reply\u00a0to this message,\u201d the fine print says, because there\u2019s no one on the other side to answer. The past month brought the news that U.S. immigration policy may soon be determined by algorithm<\/a>, and that China is opening an unmanned police station<\/a>. In the post-human economy, the rubber stamp, as rigid and indifferent as it is, appears almost friendly. At least there\u2019s a human hand behind it, a guiding force betrayed by some unevenness in the ink or a telltale smudge.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is\u00a0an advisory editor\u00a0of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The Paris Review<\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

All images excerpted from <\/em>Vincent Sardon: The Stampographer (Siglio Press, 2017). All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The rubber stamp is the official weapon of officialdom. Anyone who\u2019s used one knows why: it feels great to smash a carved piece of wood and rubber onto a piece of paper, leaving an imperious mark where once there was empty space. Properly applied, a stamp is almost onomatopoeic, and its satisfying thump is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[15904,16972,15227,11690,4194,8669,24368,12051,11038,32154],"class_list":["post-119281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-absurdism","tag-authority","tag-bureaucracy","tag-harrison-ford","tag-indiana-jones","tag-librarians","tag-office-culture","tag-slogans","tag-stamps","tag-vincent-sardon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStamp This Book<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"French artist Vincent Sardon upends everyday bureaucracy with rubber stamps that are wickedly funny\u2014and just plain wicked.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/14\/stamp-this-book\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stamp This Book by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 14, 2017 \u2013   The rubber stamp is the official weapon of officialdom. 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