Marcel Broodthaers

The trajectory of Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924-1976) is to be seen in terms of borders and fringes, in the sense that his approach, at once inquiring and poetic, continually feels its way around the configurative limits that demarcate it at all times. In the work of Broodthaers, the nexus is, definitively, language and writing. “To write”, he said, “is to organize a relationship”, but his writing sets out to include the creation of a space based on the structures of language.

This is the leading thread of the publication Marcel Broodthaers. Collected Writings, with a structure that follows a loose chronological order within which it develops a network of ideas and interests taken from the artist’s texts, revealing the contribution that his body of work represented to the far-reaching transformation of the idea of art.

This complete collection of his writings, fully illustrated, presents his early poetry and a comprehensive selection of his articles and critical essays, some previously unpublished, others originally printed in newspapers and journals, and compiled here for the first time. All this, together with his open letters, interviews, preparatory notes and scripts, draws us into his well-founded opinions on politics, economy, nationalism, advertising, institutions and culture.

The two critical essays that form the introduction to this book, the work of Gloria Moure (editor of the collection) and Birgit Pelzer respectively, examine the artist’s view of the linguistic turn in the artistic practice of the 1960s and its contribution to contemporary art.

“I am the product of a (literary) experience, let us say of an undeniable taste for literature; that was my starting point. Yet I think that I am now in a position to express myself at the frontier of things, where the world of the visual arts and that of poetry, I wouldn’t say come together, but at the precise point where they move apart.”