Marcel Broodthaers À La Lettre : Thermoformed Texts, Written Objects, and Screen Alphabets (1924-1976)

Key figure of the neo-avant-garde counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) places language (poetic, visual, pictorial, cinematic) at the core of his intermedia artworks creating a world of thermoformed texts, written objects, and screen alphabets in which “eagles smoke, pipes float across letters and punctuation marks, and museums do not exhibit works of art.” Under the aegis of La Fontaine, René Magritte and Marcel Duchamp, and mistrustful of the Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique, Broodthaers painted rooms of words, dedicated films to Kurt Schwitters, and made the image of Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé (1897) redefining the critical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of art in association with innovative forms of intermediality including poetry, painting, photography, cinema, typographical impressions, and artists' publications.
In the same years in which neo-avant-garde experimental poets worked on the material and visual aspects of words by creating picture-poems, verbovisual writings, and photographic text-compositions, Broodthaers realizes cinematographic poems in honor of the MERZ Art, conceives industrial poems, and filmed written objects by performing a meta-art that was “enriched by the transference of linguistic figures into visual art and by the use of visual images in a way that suggested they could be analysed in the terms in which we analyse verbal systems” (Compton, 1982).
Inspired by nineteenth-century art (David – Ingres – Wiertz – Courbet) and with the aim to “grasp reality as well as that which reality conceals” (M.B., 1972), Broodthaers' work reflects the strong intersection between verbal and figurative arts in the 1960s and 1970s and the way they are exhibited, circulated, and perceived. Without losing sight of the theories and movements of the international artistic neo-avant-garde (from Fluxus to Conceptual Art, from Institutional Critique to Art & Language), the speech aims at reconstructing and analysing the role of written and visual language in Broodthaers' multimedia works: starting from the collection of poems Pense-Bête (1963-64), through the book-film Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967-68), up to the analysis of the Poèmes industriels (1968-1972).