Lugano, MASI hosts Marcel Broodthaers' Industrial Poems

The main motifs of the famous series of plaques created by Marcel Broodthaers (Saint-Gilles, 1924 - Cologne, 1976) between 1968 and 1972 are the focus of Marcel Broodthaers - Industrial Poems, the exhibition curated by Francesca Benini, which the MASI - Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano dedicates to one of the most complex and multifaceted artistic personalities of the 20th century. Believed to be among the greatest representatives of conceptual art, with an artist’s eye, a poet’s mind and a sociologist’s gaze, Broodthaers critically explored not only the relationship between art, language and communication, but also the mechanisms, including economic ones, that revolve around museums and art. Indeed, between 1968 and 1972, inspired by the materials, aesthetics and production methods of street signs, the artist created a series of plastic signs with enigmatic combinations of words, letters, signs and shapes, called Industrial Poems. Despite their apparent resemblance to road signs, however, the plaques do not communicate a clear message, but play to disorient the viewer. With the production of the Industrial Poems and the way they are conceived and presented, Broodthaers also succeeds in underscoring the ambivalence between reproducible industrial object and original and unique work of art.

The exhibition, developed by the WIELS museum in Brussels and in close collaboration with the heirs of Marcel Broodthaers, includes 72 plaques, with several lesser-known versions and variations. The exhibition also features unique prototypes, as well as a large group of drawings or preparatory sketches for the plaques, three films, an audio work Interview with the Cat, all in connection with a selection of Open Letters by the artist.

The exhibition is articulated in a fluid itinerary, touching on the different themes, moments and obsessions of Marcel Broodthaers’ artistic universe: from the first Industrial Poems to the project of his personal Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, from cinema to references to Magritte and Mallarmé, to experiments on the borderline between the written word and the visual arts. The first plates created by Broodthaers were born in the spring of ’68 and fully reflected the socio-political climate of the time, marked by the protest movements. In this sense, Académie I and Académie II, the first subject of the series of 36 plaques, bears a deliberately incongruous and provocative title in relation to a period marked by anti-academism. Creating rebuses, contradictions and oxymora, playing with language and perception is a constant in Broodthaers’ works.

The two plates Multiple (Multipli é) illimité and Multiple (Multiplié) inimitable bring us back to the theme of the reproducibility of art through the multiple, creating conceptual vertigo even in the title. Unveiling the workings and dynamics of the museum without hardly ever exhibiting works of art also sounds like a contradictory game, which Broodthaers enacts in one of his best-known projects, the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, established in September ’68. It is a fictitious museum, located at Broodthaers’ home in Brussels, of which he proclaims himself director and curator. Several works in the exhibition are related to this project, including Museum, enfants non admis, in which the red warning “enfants non admis” is inspired by the language of road signs or rules and instructions addressed to users of public institutions. The plaque Musée d’Art Moderne, Les Aigles, Section XIXe siècle (Les Portes), the only subject made in this large format, has the proportions of a real door and instead presents the museum as a promise of refuge from a fictitious pouring rain.Chez votre fournisseur (Le Vinaigre des Aigles) brings back a poem by the artist and the figure of the eagle, a recurring subject in his visual work.

Many plaques and open letters are related to René Magritte, whom Broodthaers considered a role model. The antithesis between the real object and its “translation” into words or images, at the center of Magritte’s research, is also taken up by Broodthaers in La Pipe (Gestalt, Abbildung, Figur, Bild), in which objects appear and disappear behind a cloud of smoke, emphasizing how ambiguous and “smoky” the representation of an object through images is. The pipe also returns as the subject of the 1970 sound work Interview with the Cat, in which the artist questions the feline about contemporary art (which the public can listen to in the exhibition through on-site headphones or with their cell phones via QR code).

Bringing poetry, language and writing into the visual arts is another pivotal theme that runs through Broodthaers’ work. In this field, the poet Stephané Mallarmé is a constant reference for him, for opening poetry to musicality, space and rhythm and giving it “visual qualities.” Several works related to these researches focus on punctuation marks, such as L’Alphabet and Modèle: la virgule, in which the comma is the protagonist as the expression of a pause, the counterpart of silence. The words collected in the Société plate also draw on associative and symbolist poetry: though evocative and suggestive, they do not in fact form a clear meaning, but seem to be associated on the basis of their sonority and typographic effect. Instead, they aim to produce a certain disorientation in the arrows pointing in opposite directions in Museum - Musée, Section Cinéma, in reference to the eponymous section of his museum, which opened in January 1971 in Düsseldorf. The museum project, and with it the production of the Industrial Poems, would end in 1972, with official recognition at documenta 5 in Kassel.

Since then, the Industrial Poems have continued to bear witness to Broodthaers’ contribution to contemporary aesthetics: his playful and poetic manipulations of language with different levels of perception and reading still know how to go against the grain of the universal, standardized and trivially univocal signs of our age, marked by technology and information technology.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with WIELS, Brussels. Curated by Dirk Snauwaert and Charlotte Friling, presentation at MASI Lugano by Francesca Benini in collaboration with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers, Marie-Puck Broodthaers and Succession Marcel Broodthaers.

A catalog Marcel Broodthaers. Open Letters and Conversations, edited by Francesca Benini. The volume contains Italian translations of some of the open letters and conversations with Marcel Broodthaers, co-published by Casagrande and MASI Lugano. Finally, on Sunday, May 1, at 11 a.m., a conversation in French will take place inside the exhibition hall at LAC with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers and Charlotte Friling, curator of the exhibition at the WIELS museum, Brussels.

Lugano, MASI hosts Marcel Broodthaers' Industrial Poems

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