Figuring Marcel Broodthaers

Early in his poetic practice, Marcel Broodthaers altered and disrupted textual meaning, questioning our access to it and blurring the line between literal and visual—an obsession that would later characterize his work as an artist. The first hint of this practice occurred when Broodthaers inserted rectangles of monochrome paper over the poems in his book Pense-Bête, enough to scar the poem’s center without obliterating it entirely (Buchloh 79). Throughout his career Broodthaers would carry on blocking the reader or viewer’s access to resolute meaning and disturbing the balance between signifier and signified. What he said of his plaques could be extended to his entire practice: “They are intended to be read on a double level—each one involved in a negative attitude which seems to me specific to the stance of the artist: not to place the message completely on one side alone, neither image nor text. That is, the refusal to deliver a clear message…” (Broodthaers, 42). Broodthaers pits image and text against one another. His work often functions on several contradictory levels—apt for a man who loved to contradict himself. By examining the text and image in several works, the use of the “Fig,” and Broodthaers’s own writing about his work, we will attempt to find some stable ground amidst Broodthaers’s general dynamiting of meaning and trickiness.

Je Hais Le Mouvement...

After his initial experimentation with blocking access to his poems, Broodthaers’s continued to play with the books of his poetry as art objects. In 1964, he inserted the remaining volumes of his book Pense-Bête, still wrapped in their original paper, and a plastic ball into a base of plaster (Schwarz, 59). The work appears roughshod, an act of whim; the books begin tight and orderly and then droop by the end of the stack. By containing the books in a sculptural context, the viewer cannot access the text without destroying the sculpture. As Schwarz points out, the remaining object is not readymade since it is both serialized and constructed, nor is it surrealist “poetic object,” as the viewer cannot become a reader (Schwarz 60). It does not fit the given molds or mediums, refusing to submit itself or its hidden contents. Here the signifier, the book, triumphs wholeheartedly over the signified, the poems we cannot read. Broodthaers develops this theme of inaccessible meaning in his use of the Figs.

Pense Betes and Recto Reverso

The Figs. appear repeatedly, beginning in 1966 and continuing into Broodthaers’s final work. Media specificity is not a concern, as the Figs. appear in paintings, books, slide projections, films, and drawings—little goes unstamped, unplaqued, or unpainted with Fig. after 1966 (Cusse, 127). In the plaque Pipe et Formes Académiques, an early use of the figure, “Fig. 1” through “Fig. 6” mark geometric forms and a pipe resembling Magritte’s from The Treachery of Images. Broodthaers said that he was “haunted by a certain painting by Magritte, the one in which words figure” (Broodthaers, 39); he comes to terms with the Pipe only by appropriating it and labeling it within his own figurative system. This early work shows him experimenting, but not yet critiquing his own system. In Livre Tableau, Broodthaers expands on the earlier work by providing two frames—the first contains the same five geometric forms and the pipe, linearly numbered with Figs. 1-8. Yet in the second frame, the shapes are re-arranged and the Figs. are applied to them seemingly at random. For example, “Fig 2.” applied to a cube in the left frame, is now inscribed below a pyramid in the eighth position, while an identical pyramid in the second position is labeled “Fig. 8”. There is no logical explanation for the original system of Figs. and even less for the re-ordered system, instead it functions a critique of the attempt to freeze meaning in place, to place trust in a linguistic system that deconstructionism has debunked. The geometric symbols and Fig. inscriptions suggest an encyclopedia, a model in which the text reaches out to illustrations to define what it cannot, to extend beyond letters, text, and language. Snauwaert defines Broodthaers’ usage of figure as such: “it applies to the stage of observation when things are on the point of being named, when the object is about to be connected with a concept. Figure thus implies seeing, observing, but not yet explaining” (Snauwaert, 128). Snauwaert’s definition comes close, but the phrasing (“not yet explaining”) suggests that explanation is possible. Rather the absence of a referent text, the doubling of definitions, and the random, overlapping expansion of the figures preclude meaning. Rather than freezing the moment before meaning arrives, Broodthaers creates situations in which meaning is absent—a concept his Film Section puts additional pressure on.

Livre Tableau and Film Section

Film Stills

In the Film Section of his museum, Broodthaers tagged everything from clocks, pipes, and mirrors to the movie screen itself with “Fig. 0,” “Fig. 1,” “Fig. 2,” or “Fig. 12” (Krauss, 15). Slides and films also bore the distinctive Fig. image and classification. The resulting exhibit appeared scattershot with Figs., a de copia that threatens to overwhelm any attempt at meaning, yet the Figs. are not insincere. By bounding a visual space in a film and labeling it Fig. 1 or Fig. 2, the Figs. suggest that a word could exist for that [    ], a system of meaning could call on that moving image in order to define it. Here we brush up to Derrida’s idea of différance where unless we can distinguish something from something named we cannot name it. We have no ability to name the complex swirl of color in the given space, so Broodthaers makes us conscious of our linguistic and sensory constraints. When we consider the Figs. in the foreground of a slide, like those in Brüssel Teil, they perform a slightly different function. For example in the slide of a lamp-post where pieces of sky are defined as both “Fig. 1” and “Fig. 2.”; the Figs suggest a language that can differentiate between that which appears identical to us. The patches appear identical either because of our existing language programming (think of the many Eskimo words for snow) or from the insensitivity of our senses (the conceptual constraint of being human). It is no wonder that Broodthaers says he feels reassurance from the viewer “no longer feeling at ease” (Broodthaers, 43).

Broodthaers’s “Fig” practice developed until he settled on the variables 0, 1, 2, 12, 21, and the letters A and B (Snauwaert, 128). It is a systematized classification that at the same time resembles a non-system. Broodthaers only detailed explanation of the “Fig” is printed in the interview “Ten Thousand Francs Reward”:

You can see in the Mönchengladbach Museum, a cardboard box, a clock, a mirror, a pipe, also a mask and a smoke bomb, and one or two other objects I can’t recall at this point, accompanied by the expression Fig. 1 or Fig. 2 or Fig. 0 painted on the display surface beneath or to the side of each object. If we are to believe what the inscription says, then the object takes on an illustrative character referring to a kind of novel about society. These object, the mirror and the pipe, submitted to an identical numbering system (or the cardboard box or the clock or the chair) become interchangeable elements on the stage of a theater. Their destiny is ruined. Here I obtain the desired encounter between different functions. A double assignment and a readable texture—wood, glass, metal, fabric—articulate them morally and materially. I would never have obtained this kind of complexity with technological objects, whose singleness condemns the mind to monomania: minimal art, robot, computer.

The nos. 1, 2, 0 appear figurally. And the abbreviations Fig. poorly in their meaning (Broodthaers, 43)

Broodthaers’s “novel about society,” cannot be written, only understood obliquely, as one might understand an essay reading only the citations. Then any hope of meaning further dissolves when you factor in the repetition of Figs with the same classification number or letter. Yet even then Broodthaers insists upon the Figs. as differentiating his art practice from the computers and minimalists, which can only understand binaries. Instead we are left uncomfortable, following a system of classification that makes no real attempt at meaning. With a characteristic parting shot, Broodthaers scrambles his meaning further by calling the appearance of the numbers “figural” and using the abbreviation “Fig.” as the verb “to figure.” Thus, his signals, the numbers must be considered a part of the image even as it stands apart from it and the one concrete area, the “Fig.,” is invested with an uncomfortable degree of flexibility.

Broodthaers poetry, image, and figure converge in his book, Charles Baudelaire. Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes. The book begins with Baudelaire’s poem “la Beauté” with the line “Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes” (“I hate the movement which displaces the lines”) printed in red and “Fig. 1” written beneath the poem. The following pages feature eight regularly spaced Figs., defining the blank space (and displacing the lines), while at the bottom appears one of the words in the highlighted line. On the final page, “La beauté” is reprinted again with “les étoiles” printed in red, in place of “toutes les choses” in one of the lines. The modified poem is labeled “Fig. 2.” (Snauwert 132). In the book, Figs. function both as a means towards definition (as in the case of the two complete poems) and as something to be defined (as in the case of their placement on the blank space). In their second function they also consciously disturb the flow of meaning, suggesting their purpose of wrenching apart signifier and signified. The Figs. enact the dismantling of meaning and text promised by deconstruction.

The poem as image becomes even more explicit in Broodthaers’s re-imagining of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés in which he transforms the thirty-two pages of poetry into black, linear bands, again denying any access to the language but maintaining Mallarmé’s sense of space (Rorimer, 113)—in another of his great lines, Broodthaers wrote: “Space can lead only to paradise” (Broodthaers, 45). Mallarmé’s space had profound implications. Derrida begins Writing and Difference with a quotation from Mallarmé: “All without innovation except for a certain spacing-out of reading.” The critic Barbara Johnson comments that adding “space” to reading means two things for Mallarmé (and, I would argue, Broodthaers): “It means giving a signifying function to the materiality – the blanks, the typefaces, the placement on  the page, the punctuation – of writing. And it also means tracking syntactic and semantic ambiguities in such a way as to generate multiple, often conflicting, meanings out of a single utterance.” (Johnson, 346). By maintaining the space, Broodthaers suggests poetry’s function as image and by crossing out the individual words, he suggests and even greater multiplicity of conceivable meanings. Un coup de dés collapses the boundary between image and text entirely by creating image out of text and an image that suggests text due to its context—medium specificity be damned.

In 1973-74, Broodthaers produced a two-sided piece named Untitled (recto/verso) with a 1 and a 0 cut out of cardboard, suggesting the binary. On the reverse side of the 0, Broodthaers wrote “Fig. 0,” “Fig. 1,” “Fig. 2,” and “Fig. A,” suggesting its universal significance, while on the front, he drew a smoking chimneystack in the 1. On the front of the 0 (traditionally the most significant of his figures), he wrote, “A theory of the figure would serve only to give an image of a theory. But the Fig. as a theory of the image?’ (Snauwert, 134). The Fig. opens up and disrupts language where theory is another step towards commoditization of art. We have a final sense of Broodthaers’s humor and irony when we realize he inscribed this on a commodity.

Works Cited

Buchloh, Benjamin, ed. Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1988. Print.

Broodthaers, “Ten Thousand Francs Reward.” Buchloh 39-48. Print.

Buchloh, Benjamin “Open Letter, Industrial Poems.” Buchloh 67-100. Print.

Johnson, Barbara. “Writing” in Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. Print.

Rorimer, Anne. “The Exhibition at the MTL Gallery in Brussels, March 13-April 10, 1970.” Buchloh 101-125. Print.

Schwarz, Dieter, “’Look! Books in plaster!’: On the First Phase of the Work of Marcel Broodthaers.” Buchloh 57-66. Print.

Snauwaert, Dirk “The Figures.” Translated by Kaatje Cusse. Buchloh 127-134. Print

Krauss, Rosalind. “’A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition.” New York, NY: Thames & Hudson. 1999. Print.

The Transcendent Line: Comparing Line in Jackson Pollock and Piero Manzoni

Jackson Pollock, "One", 1949

Piero Manzoni, "Line", 1959

A line. Simplistic and nude, the line bounds and sets loose, delimits and describes. It unites points of space into order, into oneness, allowing depth and physical transport into the canvas. With line, sun-flushed mountains crag up, bowls of fruit retain their freshness, reality is remade and reshaped. Yet what happens when the line makes no attempt at figuration—when it exists only for itself? Or when the artist stashes the line out of sight to be imagined and not seen? Pollock’s 1949 Number One and Manzoni’s Lines challenge the viewer to connect new meaning to line, to conceive of it in a rawer, elementary form

Pollock’s Number One [1949] is characteristic of his work during this period of magnificent productivity. It feels full, skyrocketed with energetic swoops, golden mustard splotches, and tangles of whiplashing white lines. The white lines are the most energetic, constantly swerving off course, asking questions, threatening to leap off in a fuse of white energy. Then there is a thumpy drizzle of grey and blue hints. If you examine the painting closely you are surprised by touches of maroon, fills of jellybean pink and chocolate. Color and line appear to merge. The eye leaps about the canvas seeking a point on which to rest but finds none. As Greenberg suggests, the piece has a definite “flatness”—the webs deny any ability to move in or through the canvas or inhabit its space. Then there is the scale of the piece: five feet three inches by eight feet six inches. The viewer must contend with it.

If Pollock’s work is, in a sense, closed off then Manzoni’s Lines exists in solitary confinement. In Lines, Manzoni painted a straight ink line, varying from less than a meter up to seven kilometers, down a roll of paper, then rolled the paper up and placed it within a cylindrical container, always cardboard with the exception of two in chromed metal, and the longest one in a cylinder made of lead (Foster et al., 414). On the exterior of the case, Manzoni wrote the length of the line, the composition date, and signed it. Yet while the title describes only the rolled up sheaf of paper bearing the line, the tube itself functions as an art object: the contrast between the tan paper and black container, the sharp handwriting, and the mystery of the unopened. That Manzoni altered the materials of the cylinder also suggests the importance of the container as well as the contained. The piece echoes Manzoni’s earlier Artist’s Shit, which plays with the same elements of enclosure, shock-value, and a critical appraisal of the power of the artist’s signature or “aura.” Reinforcing the conceit of Lines, Manzoni specified that the tubes were to be exhibited closed. To see the lines, they must be imagined.

Pollock’s lines never say too much. A journalist, William Wright, once asked Jackson Pollock, “Would it be true to say that the artist is painting from the unconscious, and the—canvas must act as the unconscious of the person who views it?” Pollock’s answer appears at a tangent: “Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are used more as sticks rather than brushes—the brush doesn’t touch the surface of the canvas, it’s just above.” Pollock answers the question of intention, of how to read his work, with a description of process. In a way, he is describing what Kaprow describes in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”—the twin appreciation of the vital creation act and the work itself. In viewing the work there is an echo of Pollock’s primal creation act—the canvas on the floor, the mind and the stick hovering above it, Pollock utterly inside the work. How does this relate to Pollock’s lines? Pollock’s lines are not interested in explaining themselves, in speaking a figure, any more than Pollock himself. They suggest only themselves and their creation. As Pollock suggests, there is no ideal, artist-approved way of reading them.

I would contrast Pollock’s rather cagey quote with one from Piero Manzoni’s manifesto, where he proclaims, “… we search for the discovery of our first Images. Images, which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be” (Manzoni, 80). The essence of Manzoni’s art is the fundamental reduction of human mythology into an image. Lines attempts to approach the imagined space, the Platonic conception of the perfect line, by hiding it from vision, announcing it only on the surface of containers. It is curious to wonder whether Pollock or Manzoni’s lines are more “absolute”. Manzoni’s lines approach the absolute: they exist independently, they are total in themselves, but in the sense of absolute as having total power, I would incline towards Pollock.

Embedded within the two works is Greenberg’s influential essay on Modernist Painting, which declared that: “Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else” (Greenberg, 87). Pollock’s work forms a foundation for Greenberg’s criticism. Out of it arises the Greenberg’s vocabulary of “color-space,” “allover” uniformity, and the “haptic” versus the “optic” (Foster et al, 439). Pollock’s lines in Number One adhere to the plane, denying figuration. According to Greenberg, Pollock’s lines are so flat that the canvas lacks an optical center or focal point, line functions then to create “a kind of luminous atmosphere, formerly the province of color” (Foster et al, 357). Pollock’s line thus transcend the typical restraints of reality and achieve abstraction—as Fried argues, Pollock’s line delimits “nothing—except, in a sense, eyesight” (Fried quoted in Foster et al., 357). Manzoni, on the other hand, plays with this conception of flatness by rolling the line up, breaking the flat plane. He attempts, tongue-in-cheek, to achieve transcendence of a different order by challenging the viewer to imagine the perfect line. Manzoni’s line is delimited only by our mind’s ability to spool it out.

Both works draw lines, demarcating themselves from the ordinary, the everyday. The lines do what Pollock said the best modern painters do, “They work from within” (Pollock, 22). In weighing the two works against each other, one must appreciate the jester in Manzoni’s work, but I believe it is the “absolute,” the “all-over” subsumption of the eye by Pollock’s visible line that carries us past the everyday.

Works Cited
Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-alain Bois, and Benjamin h.d. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004. Print.
Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Print.
Kaprow, Alan. The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958) in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print.
Manzoni, Piero. For the Discovery of a Zone of Images (1957). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.
Pollock, Jackson. Interview with William Wright (1950). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.