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What is less well known is that one of the peculiarities of Büchner’s style is an emphasis on repetitious phrasing and circular wording that makes for a particularly disorienting experience. In Lenz, specific objects like trees and rocks, if 42 | Rodney Graham characterised as green and damp respectively, are first crisscrossed and then mixed and matched with the attributes of still other adjectives and further objects which make for a mise èn abyme, in which clouds, forests, snowy mountaintops, meadows and rocks are all described in turn as grey, damp, white, green, etc.

45 24 | Rodney Graham My point in emphasising the play between reference and invention is not only to mark each as founding tropes in Graham’s practice, but also to show how interdependent they are. If sufficiently pressed, all of Graham’s works, including Phonokinetoscope, will ultimately render permeable the fine line between originality and derivation. 46 Some traction into this difficult terrain can be gained by way of the profound degree to which a number of earlier pieces by Graham are acutely felt during the anxious moments of intervention when we put needle to record.

Phonokinetoscope | 41 ‘Pre-positional By-play’71 It has long been recognised that Reading Machine for Lenz, which incorporates the original version of Graham’s textual appropriation of Büchner’s Lenz in a stand with rotating display unit, is a precursor to the artist’s film loops, but the precise terms of identification have never ventured beyond the literal questions that turning the rotating display animates. 72 The book itself marks the beginning of a close working relationship with the book-maker and publisher, Yves Gevaert, and provides uniquely grammatical insights into the mortuary aesthetic of Paul Celan, who famously noted after reading Büchner’s Lenz that perhaps ‘every poem has its “twentieth of January”’73 … that we all write from our own twentieth of January.