Maria Elena Minuto - Marcel Broodthaers et la matérialité du langage poétique (FR)
“Not to Place the Message Completely on One Side Alone, Neither Image Nor Text.”
A lecture by Maria Elena Minuto (ULiège/KU Leuven) on ‘Marcel Broodthaers and the Materiality of Poetic Language (1924-1976)’.
WIELS Auditorium
€ 5
Marcel Broodthaers, Chez votre fournisseur (1968) © Succession Marcel Broodthaers, Sabam 2021
Key figure of the European 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 poignant and allegorical subversions creating a world of thermoformed texts, written objects and screen alphabets.
Without losing sight of the theories and movements of the international artistic neo-avant-garde, and in order to prompt a dynamic and interdisciplinary debate on the issues, the intervention aims at reconstructing and assessing the pivotal role of written, visual and spoken language in Broodthaers' interartistic practices (poems, artists' books, installations, films, open letters, objects): starting from the collection of poems Pense-Bête (1963-64), through the multimedia work Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967-68), up to the analysis of the Poèmes industriels (1968-72) entitled Chez votre fournisseur (Le Vinaigre des aigles) (1968) Téléphone (1968) and Multiplié illimité (1968).
Signed and certified by Piero Manzoni “oeuvre d'art authentique et véritable” at the Saint-Laurent gallery in Brussels (1962), Marcel Broodthaers wrote in 1975: “My alphabet is painted. All of this is quite obscure. The reader is invited to enter in this darkness”.
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Funds for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), Maria Elena Minuto is researcher at the University of Liège associated with the Service d'histoire de l'art de l'époque contemporaine (SHAÉC) and the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appliquée (CIPA). Excellence Grant Recipient at Wallonie-Bruxelles International (InWBI, 2020-2021), she holds a Ph.D. in Textual Analysis and Theory from the University of Bergame with the dissertation: Marcel Broodthaers. Perceptive Glance and Allegorical Practices in Contemporary Art. Research associate at the KU Leuven, her research focus on Concrete and Visual Poetry, neo-avant-garde artists' books and magazines, and Marcel Broodthaers' intermedia practices. Currently, she is working on the monography entitled Marcel Broodthaers. Il Bestiario, 1924-1976 (Quodlibet, 2022).