Marcel Broodthaers: Thermoformed Texts, Written Objects, and Screen Alphabets (1924-1976). Lecture given in the context of the seminar 'Visual Literacy: Understanding Images across Europe - Past and Present,' Tutorial Class: Multiplied Images, Università degli Studi di Milano, May 5, 2022.

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, cinematic) at the core of his multimedia works creating 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 Jean de La Fontaine, René Magritte and Marcel Duchamp, and mistrustful of the Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique, Broodthaers painted a room of words ('La Salle Blanche', 1975), dedicated a film 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 multimediality 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 analyzed in the terms in which we analyze 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 analyzing the role of written and visual language in Broodthaers' multimedia works: starting from the collection of poems 'Pense-Bête' (1963-1964), through the book-film 'Le Corbeau et le Renard' (1967-1968), up to the analysis of the 'Poèmes industriels' (1968-1972).