5/7/2023 0 Comments Lend me your ears meme![]() I live my life without morality, says the cat, I’ve got Is it true that the jetty and the speckled trigger fish swim on the moon?Īnimals don’t think. Here are a couple of poems, anti-fables, to be sure, from Pense-Bête: A liar’s paradox? And lest I forget, what’s insincere about making visible the book’s sadly true lack of a readership?ĭare I quote Fernando Pessoa’s “Autopsychography”?īest to have Broodthaers’s poetry speak for itself. The very contents of Pense-Bête would prove the contrary, yet, small problem, the book has been rendered unreadable, so we have to believe the artist who has just admitted that he’s defected to the so-called realm of insincerity. That’s only one of the fictions that the claim produces, though. The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set out to work at once.”Īnyone reading this who is not familiar with Broodthaers’s writing would be justified in assuming that he had, until this epiphanic moment, been writing sincere, first-person, at least quasi-lyrical poetry. I had, for quite a little while, been good for nothing. The exhibition’s title came from Broodthaers’s explanation of the motives for his turn to art, included in the invitation to the show: “I, too, wondered whether I couldn’t sell something and succeed in life. It was titled “Moi aussi, je me suis demandé si je ne pouvais pas vendre quelque chose…” (I, too, wondered whether I couldn’t sell something…) and featured his first art object-fifty unsold copies of his poetry book/bestiary, Pense-Bête, affixed to a partially engulfing plaster explosion. The summer issue of frieze-on “Art & Poetry Now”-mentioned in my first post, features an article on sincerity and art, titled “In the Company of Flesh and Blood,” which springs precisely from an often-cited and famously unreliable claim that Broodthaers made in 1964 in the invitation to his debut art exhibition at Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels. It only took Broodthaers twenty-five years to figure out what to do with it!) (Fun fact: it was Magritte who first gave his young acolyte a copy of Un coup de dés, suggesting he give it a serious read. There is nothing tautological about his museum fictions and treatment of the filmic, through inscriptions on both paper and celluloid, or about his collapsing of the roles of art critic, poet, artist, set designer, and curator, and this, to me, is the key to the myriad possibilities his work opens up. His hold on those suffering from post-conceptual fatigue syndrome is not surprising if one considers the fluidity of his anti-disciplinarian imagination, which goes far beyond interventions such as the one he performed on Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés and comfortably traverses the interstices between language and the image in fiction, poetry, art, and cinema. It seems rare nowadays to engage in a conversation dealing with conceptual art and writing that doesn’t touch on Broodthaers. Is it me or is Marcel Broodthaers the new Vito Acconci in the poetry world, the de rigueur historical example of the poet/artist?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |